Rate your professors

The user-generated model continues to proliferate. We have sites that rank doctors, lawyers and Realtors.

Ratemyprofessors.com lets people rate college professors. It’s an interesting idea, but like many such sites, it seems more intriguing to compare your own impressions with others’ comments rather than obtain accurate appraisals. For one thing, it allows anyone to game the ratings; you can log on several times and totally smear some professor who gave you a D last semester.

The Washington state rankings include all of Spokane’s higher education institutions.

Inflation Calculator

When someone mentioned that his folks bought a home for $10,000 in 1951, we wanted to know what it would cost today, adjusted for inflation.

Solution: The Inflation Calculator at http://www.westegg.com/ inflation.

That site pops this answer: What cost $10,000 in 1954 would cost $80,920.34 in 2006 (the last year official data is available).

PoliticalBase

Another pre-2008 political site has hit the Web. This is the brainchild of Shelby Bonnie, who was one of the founders of CNET.

PoliticalBase.com focuses on local, state and national elections and general U.S. political topics.

It’s been designed in typical Web 2.0 fashion, meaning readers are allowed to comment and debate and add topics.

One cool feature: It finds relevant YouTube videos related to a topic or candidate. (Side note: When videos poke fun at a candidate, is that humor or political speech?)

PoliticalBase also collects state and federal contribution information, showing a running total on donations to candidates or key races. It allows users to click on a county and find out how much was contributed there. It shows, for instance, that Netscape guru Marc Andreessen gave $2,300 to the Barack Obama campaign.