Catalogchoice takes aim at useless mail
The people behind Catalog choice.org are a bunch of do-gooders who really want to eliminate waste and save trees.
Supported by the Ecology Council and the National Wildlife Federation, the site serves as a coordinating/processing service to halt unwanted catalogs from arriving in your (paper) mailbox.
There’s a history of debate about Catalogchoice. The Direct Marketing Association offers an opt-out choice at dmachoice.org and claims its site is the better way to go. We think Catalogchoice is the simpler, more straightforward option. All it asks is your name, postal address and e-mail. Then you manage your account online and remove catalogs from the list of about 200 that work in tandem with Catalogchoice.
To prevent people from messing with other people’s catalog lists, most merchants will then send a request or e-mail asking for confirmation of the removal.
•CongressPedia: The real name is the Sourcewatch.org CongressPedia Portal. Sourcewatch is a nonpartisan information site funded by the Center for Media and Democracy. Its CongressPedia project — http://sourcewatch.org/index.php? title=Congresspedia —is a user-edited site filled with comments and summaries of key issues and the positions and votes of members of Congress.
The Larry Craig page is well-done. All the assorted allegations and denials stemming from the notorious 2007 “wide stance” episode in a Minneapolis airport are listed, along with exact footnotes and original sources.
Again, as with any “wiki,” the information is user-created; use caution before citing anything.
Clippings
Wal-Mart Stores has added free classified ads from startup Oodle.com to its Web site, looking in part to take away business from free-ad kingpin Craigslist.com.
Drawing on the already established Oodle listings, the new Wal-Mart site — walmart.oodle.com — offers consumers more than 30 million classified ads from around the country.
A quick survey of classifieds there for the Spokane area showed more than half were for vehicles or real estate.
Launched in 2005, San Mateo, Calif.-based Oodle Inc. attracts more than four million unique visitors each month and aggregates listings from more than 80,000 sites across the country.
“We recently launched Walmart.com Classifieds beta to provide additional opportunities for our customers to save money and live better,” said Walmart.com spokesman Ravi Jariwala in an e-mail. “This free, community-based resource allows customers to buy and sell items locally, find local jobs and learn about events in their area.”
Jariwala said the new classified site offers customers products and services not typically available at Walmart.com, such as job listings, automobile sales, rentals and real estate.
TECH TOOLBOX
Adobe, the people behind Photoshop and Flash, now has its own online documents and collaboration suite. It’s Acrobat.com and it’s meant to challenge the two other main services in online word processing — Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace, and Google Docs.
The beta version of Acrobat.com is slick and impressive. It collects the Buzzword service Adobe acquired two years ago as its word processor feature. The collaboration service, ConnectNow, will appeal to Web workers who share ideas and conduct video conferences. It offers a simple online PDF creator.
•Instapaper: This is a plain vanilla alternative for people who try to use Del.icio.us or other sites that bookmark stories and clips.
Its advantage is ease of use and simple design. One signs up for a free account, you quickly drag a browser bookmarklet onto your browser menu bar, and you’re off and running.
Clicking the bookmarklet saves any page you’re viewing for later review.