Published October 14th, 2008
in Shopping Bargains.
Tough economic times call for unusual financial solutions. 
The funny folks at HeadCandy - a Chicago Tribune blog, have come up with an excellent money saving idea for this Halloween season.
- Click on the candidate of your choice below
- Download the PDF file and print it out on a color printer
- Follow the instructions to make the mask
- Terrify the Republican/Democrat/Green Party/Swing Voting constituent of your choice
Check back with HeadCandy in a little while - there are two more masks to come. Can you guess who’s? 
Published October 11th, 2008
in Popular Sites Series.
This is September 2008 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to August results. The list has a total of 34 web sites which is the same number as last month. There are 17 more sites in my database that don’t meet Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement.
One website is probably going to be out of the list very soon, jellyfish.com (-50.87%) which is the worst performer this month and currently stand at the last position. After Microsoft integrated cash back part of the site into Live Search, JellyFish is technically no longer a price comparison site. Smack shopping is all that is left of it.
The best gainer this month is bottomdollar.com (54.74%) which had a terrific month according to Alexa. If anyone has an explanation to this phenomena - speak out!
(*) Note: traffic stats for these sites is an aggregate of all traffic to the top domain (e.g. Yahoo.com or Google.com) and thus cannot be used to judge how popular this particular price comparison service is.
(**) Note: the web site is a portal with price comparison engine being one of the offered web services. Alexa rank cannot be used to judge how popular this price comparison engine is.
Published October 6th, 2008
in Business: Strategy.
Microsoft moves further down the road of buying its way into the search dominance (check out Live Search Cashback they launched back in May) with October 1 launch of a new loyalty points program - Search Perks.
The idea is very simple: search the web with Live Search and get a point for each search (up to 25 a day) which you can exchange for prizes come April 15, 2009. You currently get 500 points just for signing up - enough for a few music downloads or a deck of play cards.
There are a few more things you need to know:
- The program is open to US residents only.
- You will need to install a small internet browser add-on.
- You can’t use it on any other browser but IE.
Encouraged by the free stuff, I initially considered giving Live Search a try, but the browser restriction killed it for me right there. IE is simply no match to Firefox and shuffling two browsers for different tasks is just too much.
Published October 6th, 2008
in Popular Sites Series.
This is September 2008 revision of the Popular Deal Sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to August results and includes all deal sites from my database that meet Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement. I am sticking with the original limit as moving to 50,000 seems to cut some interesting sites.
The top gainer this month is buxr.com with a gain of (16.84%). It was really a surprise to me. I knew our site would break 100,000 threshold but I didn't think it would come out at the top! The worst performer is the forum anandtech.com (-38.47%) which was also at the bottom last month.
This month Google had a Page Rank update and it affected many deal sites in a negative way. Interestingly though that anandtech.com was one of the few who gained PR even though they lost Alexa rank. By the way, read this old interview with the founder. The guy was just 15 when he started the site in 1997!
Published October 2nd, 2008
in Shopping Coupons.
Amazon has just released a new set of coupon codes for this month and as usual I post them in a list sorted by amount so it is more convenient to pick those with the best value. Most coupons below expire October 31, 2008.
If you like these Amazon coupons, I also recommend you to check out these Amazon discount codes. The best part is that these codes don’t have an expiration date!
Amazon coupon codes for October 2008
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