A Tale of Two Kitties
If you like to display or even flaunt your love of cats, and you can tolerate
intense cuteness, A Tale of Two Kitties could be for you. It's a well-organized,
easy-to-view catalog of stuff for feline fans - tote bags, T shirts, caps,
and of course, computer accessories (you need a cat mouse pad, don't you?).
Heavy on the pastels and cutesy copy, the products are clearly described
and priced, and ordering is easy (fax, e-mail, mail, and phone). Not only
can you outfit your entire house and body in cat-related goods, there are
even a couple of products for your own tabby (more to come, no doubt).-KW
B-
EMusic
Here's a music site that offers some reasonably smart searching (by song,
title, year, artist, genre, label) for a 100,000-item catalog. As with a
number of other music sites, though, EMusic has only a thin veneer atop
an ugly text database, and within moments you'll be peering at small type
to decipher your finds. There are some nice features including links to
new titles and concert dates (under construction at this writing), top 40
charts, top sellers by year, and a way to review both your current and previous
orders. Eventually, with some of its links smoothed out and a more readable
storehouse of titles, EMusic could be a good stop for music lovers, instead
of just an adequate one.-KW
B-
Long Grove Confectionery
Company
Forget Mom's birthday? Want to send that special someone from the chat room
a chocolate computer? Never fear, Long Grove is ready to meet your needs
24 hours a day, and with a wide and quirky variety of mouthwatering chocolates
to chose from, you should be able to find the perfect gift to bring a smile
to any chocoholics face. You can order all their delicacies from a form,
have them gift wrapped and delivered, and get a free box of chocolates for
yourself. Despite all this, since the only payment option Long Grove gives
you is plastic, and it's forms are insecure, I probably won't be ordering
any luscious chocolate tackle boxes.-BB
B+
Sound Spectrum
If you don't need instant gratification, music is an easy shopping goal
on the Net. You can often search your chosen site by title or artist, sometimes
by genre, and order up a storm. Sound Spectrum claims 120,000 titles (30,000
of them classical), orders filled within 24 hours, online or fax ordering,
and US orders to you within 3-7 days. These are good things. What's not
so good is the less-than-smart search mechanism that doesn't tell you it
needs last-name-first to deliver the titles you seek, and the plain-text
database that doesn't provide release dates, labels, or genre clues. It's
ok, but there's better.-KW
C+
The
Great Fax Cover Sheet Co.
Hankering for a remote control holder? How about fax cover sheet cartoons
or funny fax post-its for your outgoing communiques? Or can we interest
you in a pair of rolling scissors for ease of cutting? If you want any of
these things, stop on by and order them here. You can e-mail your order,
call the office, or send your request to a BBS. (Naturally, you can also
fax.) The items are adequately described, but this would be a more useful
site if it offered more products. As it is, it's not bookmark quality -
nor is there a compelling reason to visit.-KW
C-
X-Large Inte(r)network
For today's young suburban fashion plate, X-large brings it's entire clothing
catalog to the web. Unfortunately, it just scanned in the catalog, viewable
one bandwidth-eating page at a time. The site is much more than a catalog,
though, developing an image of the company as a propagator of irreverent,
angst-ridden, youth culture. From video game manuals to an essay praising
the merits of liquor, X-Large runs down what's hip in sound bite sized chunks.
It has a small archive of sounds and video, and a very active open forum
which is mostly a discussion of Hip-Hop. The site is very cool, definitely
worth a visit even if you are not interested in their catalog.-BB
A-
