Updates Blog

More progress on the Virtual Stocking project to report:  You can get and/or give something really special this holiday season. You can receive a gift appropriate for your age group — and give up to eight gifts to the people you cherish.

Plus, you’ll unlock a special bonus we like to call the “Gift of Giving.” You can give everybody two gifts in one this year, without putting something extra in the box!

What exactly are these gifts? Pesky lawyers tell us we shouldn’t make promises just yet… but we expect it could be as spectacular as the Seven Treasures.

We’re putting together a fun site called 10Christmas.com to make an entertaining presentation of it all. Hopefully it will be ready within a week. It will round up all the usual suspects for the holiday season (seniors, parents, teens, kids of both genders, and pets too.) Wanna read their minds? You can mouse-over their heads to see a “G-rated” thought-bubble… then click to dig deeper and see what they’re really thinking!

Kiplinger recently came out with its annual Best Cities List. You can actually Take a Virtual Walking Tour complete with videos to get a good feel for eight of them. Their priority was to find cities with strong economies and abundant jobs, plus reasonable living costs and plenty of fun things to do. You can take a look at their full criteria and see if they match yours. You can search the rankings to see how well your hometown ranks, ordering 359 metropolitan areas by Population, Cost-of-Living Index, Percentage of Workforce in Creative Class, Median Household Income, or Salary Growth. And for those concerned about real estate prices, it has plenty of research on that too.

Probaly their easiest-to-use tool is Which City Is Best For You?, which asks you eight questions about your priorities and picks the best cities for your lifestyle. Here are this years top eight cities, linked to Kiplinger’s video pages:

Houston, Texas: The Comeback Kid
Raleigh, North Carolina: Work In Progress
Omaha, Nebraska: Paradise on the Plains
Boise, Idaho: Rocky Mountain High Tech
Colorado Springs: Laid-Back Energy
Austin, Texas: Rockers, Tacos and Chips
Fayetteville, North Carolina: Funky Green Valley
Provo, Utah: Pristine Tech Mecca

Kiplinger isn’t the only magazine that does this list: You can also visit Best Places to Live 2008 from Money Magazine.

According to a SmartMoney.com article 5 Best Coupon-Clipping Web Sites, the best coupon sites are Coupons.com (wide variety & simple layout), CouponCabin.com (few expired coupons and good advice for best ongoing promotions), CouponMom.com (large selection and reliable deals), RetailMeNot.com (dedicated community of shoppers), and SmartSource.com (very wide selection of online deals and local store sales.)

Hmm, I didn’t pick any of these for the three coupon sites in “Coco”, the Consumer Control Center. Am I all wet, or are they? I’ll check SmartMoney’s recommendations and also re-check the sites I picked for Coco (which by the way is getting a really good makeover later this month… )

I mentioned The “Magic Mirror” Of Great Quotes in a recent blog post. I’ve been thinking that Miguel Cervantes, Spanish author of Don Quixote, would be a good addition. I’ve been wanting to add another Spanish-language luminary, and it turns out that Cervantes has been dubbed “el Príncipe de los Ingenios” - the Prince of Wits.

Wikpedia remarks “His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel by some, is considered a founding classic of Western literature, and regularly figures among the best novels ever written. His work is considered among the most important in all of literature.” The U.N.’s cultural organization UNESCO established April 23 as the International Day of the Book, in commemoration of the day Cervantes and William Shakespeare both died in 1616.

Another good one is Shinichi Suzuki (1898 - 1998), a Japanese music teacher who created the international Suzuki Method of music education. He was a very influential and controversial teacher who often spoke about the ability of all children to learn things well, given the right environment. I’d like to make a special version of the Magic Mirror for educators that has his quotes.

As for the “Virtual Stocking” that you can have sent to you or to any of your friends next December… a lot of work is being done on that! There will be special gifts for:

• Girls 3-12
• Boys 3-12
• Male adults and teens
• Female adults and teens
• Seniors
• Even dogs and cats!

Not only that, everyone will be getting an extremely novel type of free gift-wrapping. It’s so special, many people will really like it better than the gift that comes in it — and that’s no exaggeration.

I can hear you wondering “How can this be, Dave?” Okay, I’ll give you the straight dope: We’re harnessing the power of Elves Playing Hooky. Many of them are so tired of all the materialism of modern-day Christmases, they’ve defected from the North Pole to help the Consumer Freedom Alliance.

I’d say more… but spies are everywhere.  In Internet businesses, the Golden Rule is “just shut up!” That’s because people can steal and copy other people’s ideas so easily on the Web.