5.3.09

How Internet Cookies Work

I was interested in how sites store information in their databases to remember users and allow them to store preferences. Here's what I found.

This Next

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This Next is a site devoted to consumerism. It's main functions are, according to the site, "to explore great product recommendations, get personalized shopping suggestions, and rave about the products you like." Users can see "what's hot" in other major cities, see who is recommending what, and what kind of trends are happening in their own back yards. It also employs a question of the day. For instance today users are asked, "What is your favorite kind of hot chocolate?" This site is very intriguing to me, and I think I'll be exploring it more. The downturn of the economy could put it in a very interesting position, to encourage thrift instead of its perceived devotion to luxury.

3.3.09

Criticker



Criticker is a movie recommendation site based on each user's taste. It employs tags, some simple genre tags like horror, comedy and action, while others are significantly more in-depth: b-movie, robots and sequel being just a fraction of the pages upon pages of ways to define, categorize and describe films. The concept of tagging allows for organization based on likeness. If twenty people tag Coffee & Cigarettes with the word "art," then another film tagged twenty or so times with that same word would be deemed a similar film. This, of course, is simplifying the process and more than one tag would have to match up for films to be recommended, but that is basically how the tagging system allows Criticker users to discover new films.