Free People Search let’s you find a photo of anyone by using name and location search. It may not be 100% accurate, depending on the number of potential matches, but it’s better than going into a meeting blindly.

Related Reviews:

• Customize Windows’ Background Image
• TagCow Makes Flickr Tagging a Snap

Craigslist doesn’t make it super easy or very obvious, but it is quite simple.

At the bottom of every search page is a small “RSS” button. For Google Reader and other RSS junkies, simply click this to subscribe. But for most people who might not know what RSS actually is, have no fear: you can subscribe via email with the same button simply by using FeedMyInbox.com or other “RSS-to-Email” service. They are free and literally as easy as copy & paste. Check out the video above for a quick how-to.

Related Reviews:

• Wize is Most Comprehensive Review Site

If you ever thought BestBuy or other retailers never had coupons, think again! Buying these discounted gift cards is just like getting a coupon. I’ve purchased a few myself and the cards work like any other gift card, except they are cheaper.

Perfect time of year too…squeeze in a last minute gift purchase or sell cards you get as a gift but don’t want. You can even sell some gift cards without mailing the card…it’s all electronic! Get cash back, Amazon credits or Facebook credits.

Related Reviews:

• Easily Digitize Stacks of Business Cards

Take for instance, Epinions. What started as a community of “raters” who score one another, has become pretty useless since the acquisition by Shopping.com (eBay). I don’t know why, but it just doesn’t seem very useful anymore.

Then there are the “user review”, like those on Amazon – the “5-star rating”. These are pretty useful, but aren’t all that comprehensive for a given product. In other words, users at other shopping sites might think differently.
Of course, the best reviews are typically the expert reviews. You can find these just about anywhere.

Until recently, no one has mashed all of these flavors together – into one review score. That is exactly what Wize has done. I can’t imagine a better way of determining how good something really is – put everyone’s scores together in such a way that you create one, objective value.

Wize looks at expert reviews and product rankings from thousands of sites across the web. Plus they account for “buzz” – the latest trend in measuring word of mouth.

The only drawback to Wize right now – limited inventory. They are a startup and in beta, so they don’t cover everything. But they do cover some major categories and tens of thousands of products. So not too shabby.

Related Reviews:

• Great RV Review Site

Finally, a few services have popped up that allow you to maintain your exhaustive RSS feeds, but filters them for you based on relevancy. Net result – less crap and more of the good stuff.

AideRSS and FeedHub both take very different approaches to managing RSS overload. AideRSS looks to the community for inspiration, filtering posts by popularity. FeedHub starts with classifications or “memes” to group and filter your posts, allowing you to weight the value of each meme, learning your preferences over time.

While both allow some degree of personalization, FeedHub is clearly more “personal”. With AideRSS, you can weight each feed based on its overall importance to you. With FeedHub you weight each meme the feed belongs in, but also vote on the value of each post – thumbs up or thumbs down.

I suspect in the short term AideRSS probably drives the best relevancy, being able to start immediately relevancy scoring based on the community of readers. But I think FeedHub will be more relevant to me in the long term, as I score each post and system learns from me. FeedHub’s analysis is more granular, at the post level, whereas AideRSS is looking at the feed.

Both are quite easy to setup – you import your RSS feed list. Then a new RSS feed URL is generated which you add to your favorite reader, simply managing the filtered feeds like any other feed.

I’ve been using these for a few weeks now, and its simply too early to tell which is better. I may be missing some golden nuggets along the way, but paring thousands of posts down to a few hundred makes the task of reading that much more enjoyable.

Related Reviews:

• No Related Posts