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Career: Anonymous Salary and Career Gossip – Glassdoor

http://www.glassdoor.com

If you are nosy about what others are making and want to get the real scoop on a company, Glassdoor provides that see-through peek to satisfy your curiosity.  Its in the beginning stages, there are quite a few salary postings and working stiff commentary on the work environment for Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.  For example, in the Microsoft section, there are hundreds of reviews of the company along with the rating of the employee satisfaction, satisfaction with the CEO, and a full salary breakdown based on title. You can get a preview to see some of the salaries and part of the comments but in order to get full access to the content, you will need to register.  The posts you write are anonymous; supposedly you get to hide behind a cloak and dagger and say what’s on your mind.  Its another site to put in your career tool bag as it gives you the inside scoop without a whole lot of digging around.

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Personal Finance: A million dollars for you to play with – UpDown

http://www.theupdown.com

That got your attention didn’t it? You were probably fantasizing about all that bling and bong you could buy with a million bucks. Unfortunately, its virtual money (kinda like Linden dollars) you are given to play the market with. Its similar to Motley Fool Caps where you create a portfolio and you are competing with other registered users to see who brings in the most moola, greenbacks, dough, or whatever you want to call it. HOWEVER, here’s the BIG difference, you have a chance to earn real money. Yes, real money. Yeah, now we’re talking. According to their site, here are three ways you can earn some real money:

• Beat the market to a bloody pulp: The money is determined by the spread by how much you whoop the market’s booty and the consistency of your track record.
• Become a stock analyst: Well sort of…its similar to mystery shopper except you wear the mystery stock analyst hat. You write up a well received stock analysis which in turn may generate some more cash for you.
• Become a mouthpiece for them: Refer people to the site and you get a bonus. Also, when your referrals earn some real money, you get a cut of that too.

Hey, maybe your chance of getting a million dollars might happen although if you are that good, you might as well play the market with some real money.

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Books: Free Audiobooks – LibriVox

http://librivox.org

I don’t know about you but the best things in life are free.  LibriVox provides free mp3/ogg audio books that are managed and maintained by volunteers.  If you are one of those books on cd geeks, this is your site.  They have a fairly large collection of audio books, there’s about 1029 listings.  This is pretty impressive considering its a volunteer effort.  They also have multiple podcasts; Books, Community, and New Releases.  In the books podcast, they select a book from a collection and podcast it three times a week until the book is finished.  The community podcast are shows run by volunteers which cover a variety of topics related to the site.  The new releases podcast is used to communicate any new audio book releases.

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Career: Tired Working with Jerks? – JerkFreeJobs

http://www.jerkfreejobs.com

If you are tired of working with manipulative, discriminatory, controlling, passive-aggressive, slave-driving, credit taking, emotionally and physically abusive bosses or coworkers, this site could help in locating a more pleasant workplace environment and perhaps a few more bucks.  It looks like its still a fledging site but the idea and concept is refreshing and needed.  According to the site, over 45% of American workers have experienced bullying or some kind of abuse in the workplace.  You can do a search for a potential boss to see if he/she is on the list of bosses that are jerks, enter a jerk boss to help out other potential victims, and find jerk-free jobs.

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Internet & Business: Name Generator – Web 2.0 Name Generator

http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html

If you ever have trouble coming up with a cutesy wutesy Web 2.0 name for your startup, this is your site. I had a good laugh with some of the names, I must admit the names do have a Web 2.0 ring to it. Just click on the Generate Name button and viola! the name shows up. Here’s a sample of some of the names I got from the generator and my immediate thoughts on each one:

• Yonoodle – Let’s play with yo’ noodle.
• Babblebridge – The girlfriend or boyfriend that just won’t shut up.
• Gigabird – One big obese bird who lays a good size crap on an unsuspecting passerby.
• Voombee – The generic China brand of Roomba.
• Flipjam – I don’t think this one needs a comment…just think index finger, toe jam, and the curse phrase.

If you are serious about a name like Flipjam, the site also let’s you check on the availability of the name.

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Internet & Business: I hear you loud and clear – BuzzShout

http://www.buzzshout.com

BuzzShout is a beta site which profiles the latest Web 2.0 companies and technologies. Its largely driven by users and visitors with reviews and ratings. This is a place to go to for interesting finds and first dibs since there’s always some niche that someone is trying to tap into. For example, I didn’t know there was a site where you can make a passport photo that would pass the stringent rules of the state department. I’m not sure how well it works but its a novel concept nonetheless, its a shame it can’t photoshop my picture so that I look like Brad Pitt too. As you browse through the list which goes into infinity, there isn’t any mashup, social networking, office productivity, video/image sharing/hosting, wiki-like, life hack/productivity, music and entertainment startup that has not been done. It seems that everyone and their grandma has a Web 2.0 startup.

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Travel: All I want to do is have some fun – World’s Best Bars

http://www.worldsbestbars.com

If you are into bar hopping on an international level or even at a local level in your city, the World’s Best Bars is your site.  Of course you have to be over 21 (at least in United States) to legally drink and you have to be over 18 to enter the site.  It has a top 100 list of the world’s best bars as rated by visitors or registered users.  You can view their 100 list of the world’s best bars, each bar listed has a profile along with pictures.  There are comments and ratings from other users who have visited the bar.  I’m not surprised that a bar in New York City has made the top 100 since the city also has the best night clubs (at least in the U.S.)  The list does not include any Tokyo bars which is surprising since its another hot spot for sophisticated international playboys and playgirls.

They also have lists of top rated bars sorted by city and a profile of each one.  Each city has a “bar of the moment” since being trendy is a time dependent phenomenon determined by a group whose as fickle as the weather.

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Tech: Fun Science/Tech Projects – MakeZine

http://www.makezine.com

MakeZine is a companion site to Make Magazine.  Its a resource to find out how to make fun science, tech, and other kinds of do it yourself projects that allow our minds to wander outside of the drudgery of day to day tasks. If you ever have to deal with kids, this site has plenty of activities to keep them entertained.  They profile projects that are shared by other make groups and you can also purchase kits if you are interested in building one of their featured projects such as a blubber bot. The blubber bot is an inflatable helium bot which responds to cell phone signals by singing and dancing.  When you are searching through projects, you will be directed to the Instructables site.  The projects are sorted by category, popularity, and most recent.

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Tech: Too much time on your hands? – Hack A Day

http://www.hackaday.com

Hack A Day is a blog zine which provides coverage of various unconventional tips and instructions on putting together a cool device, software, or retrofitting various mainstream equipment to serve your purposes.  So if you want to build a fembot or manbot to cater to your every need, they might have something for you.  Its an entertaining site especially with some of the crazy hacks like converting a Roomba into a poster printer or a wii remote firefighting bot.  The wii remote firefighting bot uses the bluetooth transceiver to communicate back and forth with the host computer which controls it.    If you successfully build one of the hacks, you can brag to your buddies and up your IQ points by a few thousand. There’s quite a bit of postings on building robots, some can be quite sophisicated but don’t expect to build a robot like ASIMO.  There’s also plenty of coverage on retrofitting and hacking your wii, IPOD, playstations, gameboys, cameras, and other common electronic equipment.

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Personal Finance: Blogging Stocks

http://www.bloggingstocks.com

Blogging Stocks is an investment weblog owned by AOL/Time Warner. Its reports on the latest financial/business news, financial book reviews, profiles Web 2.0 companies, and as the title suggests, it discusses stocks. They are very prolific in their postings so if you find you like the site, be sure to subscribe to a feed. Its been compared to Seeking Alpha a website focused on investing coverage. My personal opinion is Seeking Alpha is more of a pure investment site which can be more geared for you finance geeks. Blogging Stocks is more diverse and lighter in its coverage to cater to a wider audience.  It also has less of the investment goo to keep you finance marathon runners happy. You can filter the business and investment news by selecting groups of companies categorized by the alphabet. At the bottom of the page it also provides a snapshot of the latest postings of various companies such as GE, Microsoft, Walmart, Google, Ebay, and Apple.
An interesting and differentiating area for Blogging Stocks is their Money Faceoff section where they compare famous individuals or organizations each other from a financial and business standpoint to see who comes out ahead. They also have a poll to allow visitors to vote for their pick. The latest one I read was on the Oprah versus Martha Stewart face off. If they were in a fight, I would have to put my money on Oprah even though Martha might have honed her combat skills during her time behind bars.

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Travel: Travel Search Engine – Mobissimo

http://www.mobissimo.com

Mobissimo is another travel website search engine that searches through various sites (157) to get the lowest price on airfare, lodging, car rentals, and activities. At first I confused it with Mossimo which is an apparel brand. Its similar to Kayak, Sidestep, and any other travel search engine. I haven’t really used Mobissimo that much compared to Sidestep and Kayak but it seems to be similar in what it does. The activities feature does not look like its fully functional. They also have a one box search which means you don’t have to deal with selecting items on the search form. Its just perfect for some us when we feel a little lazy or pressed for time. You just enter it in this format:

las vegas to seattle jan 10-20

Its another source to compare prices for various travel needs so that you can get the best price.

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Travel: BudgetTravel

http://www.budgettravel.com

BudgetTravel is a website that gives advice on traveling on a budget.  Its the companion site to the Budget Travel magazine, its a slick and professional looking site.  Its a good site to get advice and to find out about places that are not well known.  Since there’s some corporate backing *ahem, money too* behind this site, it should be reputable reference for your travel questions and interests.  The site is a wealth of information covering many areas such as little known hotels/restaurants that are real finds.  My favorite article is on hotel chains in other countries that are not well known to Americans. This can save some money in your wallet since you have a wider selection of hotels that are decent without having to always stick with Marriott and the other US Brand name places.  For example, there’s a budget hotel chain called Etap Hotel that is based in France which gives fairly reasonable rates.  The article gives an example of a sample rate of $59 to stay in Paris at one of the Etap Hotel chains.

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Travel: Put on your shoes and grab your backpack – Let’s Go

http://www.letsgo.com

Let’s Go is a website targeted for young traveler’s on a budget. It gives travel advice, podtours, travel booking for airfare and hostels, and a community to share your travel experiences. The podtours is an interesting concept, its a guided audio tour of selected destinations that you can download and listen to. They also sell travel guides since they probably need to make some money like everyone else. However, the site has a lot of free information so its a good resource in itself. I also really like their suggested travel itineraries for various travel destinations. There can be multiple itineraries for a travel destination.  You just need to pick the one that fits how long you plan to travel.  Each itinerary provides a high level map, a breakdown of what to do at each location on the map, and the estimated days to spend on each activity/location.

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Tech: Your own Personal OS – YouOS

https://www.youos.com

I had to profile this one because I had too much fun playing around with the demo Operating System on its site. YouOS is a personalized “Operating System” on the web. It made it on PCWorld’s list of top 20 most innovative sites and its a well deserved award. Its not quite a full fledged Operating System but the concept of having an OS on the web  gets me all warm and fuzzy. So here’s a running list of the features:

• UNIX like shell which recognizes some commands
• Chat application
• A Flickr RSS plugin
• A web file manager for your folders and files
• Office Apps – There’s a wordpad like editor called YouEditor and YouSticky for your sticky notes.
• Customizable Panel – You can customize your home OS panel.
• Web Browsers – There are some lightweight browsers and RSS Feed manager for your RSS feeds.
• A list of 732 of pluggable Applications that you can include in your OS such as YouPhotoshop, pluggable games such as MarioWorld (I succumbed and played it for a few minutes), YouProxy, NES simulator, and a whole lot more.

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Environment: Eco-friendly Products – Sustainable Is Good

http://www.sustainableisgood.com

Alright for all you tree huggers or kissers out there, Sustainable Is Good is a blog covering the latest news on eco-friendly products and packaging. They profiled Recycline which makes personal household items such as toothbrushes and razors from recycled plastic.  They are a little expensive since $17 for 6 toothbrushes works out to be around $2.83 per brush but if you want to reduce waste, its worth it.  They discuss eco-friendly packaging and it looks like some of the popular brands are taking steps to reduce the amount of plastic used to package their products.
The blog also has a detailed guide on recyclable plastics, so here’s my trivial question for you:

What the heck is High Density Polyethylene used for?

Okay smart alec, if you can answer that question correctly then what is the chemical structure of it?

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Personal Finance: Consumerism Commentary

http://www.consumerismcommentary.com

Consumerism Commentary is a popular personal finance blog covering a wide range of personal finance topics. If you look at the topics/tags on the left side of the page, you’ll see what I mean. One day they may talk about credit cards (guide to the different AMEX cards) and the next day its about getting free fortune magazine online subscription. I also found out there is a Tupperware product designed just for salads with a dressing chamber and utensils. Since I’m a meat and potatoes kind of person, I’ll pass on this. Now, I don’t know that many personal finance blogs that meander into that territory but its still related to personal finance since its about bringing food to work. There’s also tips on how to have romantic outdoor dates for under $30, one of them is canoing on a river.  Just be sure you map out the territory so that you don’t hit some class 6 rapids, if you do you can forget about going on that second date.

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Travel: Becoming a smarter traveler – SmarterTravel

http://www.smartertravel.com

So what’s your travel IQ?  If you want to raise it a few points, this site is the place to go to hone your travel planning and budgeting skills.  It contains advice, travel tools, highlights on travel deals, and travel guides.  I personally like the deal detective feature and the advice columns where there are useful and not necessarily widely known travel tidbits.  An interesting one I read today involves a reader whose a graduate student asking where could she go with only $1200 for her travel budget (total for food, airfare, lodging, and meals).  She wanted to travel internationally to Europe, South America or Asia.  At that point, I thought well if she wants to do that, she probably could go for a few days and there’s not a whole lot of places in Europe that she could go to.  Well, I was wrong, it turns out there’s multiple vacation options available to her.  My favorite one was a 6 night stay in Paris for $975 which includes airfare, lodging, continental breakfast, and taxes.

It covers travel interests for a wide range of travelers such as traveling with kids/family, adventure seekers, hidden travel gems, travelers with frequent flyer miles/points, and many more.

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Shopping: Finding the cheapest book – Bookfinder4u

http://www.bookfinder4u.com

BookFinder4u is a shopping search engine dedicated to one mission; to find you the cheapest book.  Its a good resource for book worms, techies, and students.  They crawl through about 130 book stores and 60,000 book resellers to find the best price for you.  Its a pretty big list so you should get something reasonably priced.  You enter the search criteria and it will return the results matching the book of interest.  You click on the compare prices button and it will generate a results table of the book price, reseller, shipping cost, book condition, and possible coupon for the book.  The lowest price is at the top along with the seller’s rating.

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Travel: Sleeping on stranger’s coaches – CoachSurfing

http://www.couchsurfing.com

CoachSurfing provides people who are traveling on the cheap or people who like a more “local” flavor of the place they are traveling to, a way to get lodging for cheap. Its a network to connect travelers with people who are willing to host them in their house for a fee. I heard about this months ago on some news program which profiled the site. There were two female travelers who used CoachSurfing to find someone who was willing to let them crash on their couch. The female travelers did not know the person and only exchanged some emails to know a little more about each other before they stayed at the person’s place.  I thought it was an unusual idea but then again, I don’t get out much.

I have not personally used the services offered by this site so I can’t comment on how well it works. If you are adventurous, looking to save some money, and willing to take some risks, CoachSurfing could work out. Just make sure you bring your surfboard when you surf those coaches.

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Travel: Personal Travel Consultant – Tripbase

http://www.tripbase.com

Tripbase provides suggestions for possible travel destinations based on criteria you pick. Its currently in the alpha stage meaning it does not have all the features in place. Although it does not have all the features, its still worth checking out as its a pretty interesting concept. You pick your travel requirements and criteria based on several predefined areas. They have several sliding scales like nightlife, nature, shopping, dining, and attractions where you select how important it is to you on the scale. If you have more travel criteria such as it has to fall within a budget, date, weather, and various other categories, you can enter that in. Once you have all your travel criteria set, you submit it and it generates a list of destinations which fit your personal travel preferences. When you select one of the recommended destinations, it gives you the following details:

• Cost per day to vacation here
• Population
• Detailed description
• Graphical table of the weather conditions throughout the year on a monthly basis
• Things to do
• Articles on traveling to the destination
• Photos
• Links to getting airfare, car rental, or lodging

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