One of my favorite Add-ons (though there is an IE version too), is WOT, which stands for Web of Trust. It’s quite suitably named, because sites on ‘Teh Intarwebz’ can either be trusted or not trusted. However, because of WOT, you don’t have to rely on sheer intuition anymore, since anyone who has WOT installed has the ability to rate and check the ratings of sites on four factors: Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Safety. You can rate each on a scale of 1 to 100, but there are 5 classifications, ranging from ‘Very Poor’ (1-20) to ‘Excellent’ (80-100). You can view these statistics based on a donut-shaped icon in your browser window (see pic). Because of the sheer number of people rating (it has over 1 million downloads), you can be confident that the rating is quite reliable. However, you’re free to disagree and vote against the crowd, and if enough people agree with you, you can substantially change a site’s rating.

Click for a ratings pic.

As explained, the community-driven mechanic is what makes WOT so interesting. However, that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Each site has its own scorecard, where people can leave comments about the site and give it a positive or negative category (’Useful and Informative’ or a ‘Bad Customer Experience’, to name two). Additionally, there’s user pages that every registered user of WOT has, as well as forums, where you can communicate with the fellow ‘Guardians of the Internet’ (hehe) about, well, anything. :)

Click for a userpages pic if you’re not a registered WOT member.

While I have focused my review on the social aspect of WOT, there’s loads of other cool features, like search engine/GMail integration, early warning messages, and color blindness accessibility, to name a few. However, I’m not going to have an in-depth lecture about them, because you can try WOT and check them out for yourself, and most are self-explanatory anyways. However, if you want to know about some more neat features, check out this guy’s nifty post for descriptions on some minor, but vital, features of WOT.

Click for a search engine integration pic.
Click for a ‘early warning message’ pic.

WOT, with the help of it’s users (and its crazy-awesome developers), is doing the Internet a big favor: making it safer for its people. Since certain aspects of life as we know it are making the transition from reality to virtual reality, wouldn’t you want it as safe as possible?

~djsonik

-The WOT website (MyWOT)
-The Firefox Add-ons entry, with more pics
-Neat video of how it works
-Download WOT

(I’m having a little problem with my comments system, but if you comment and you get some weird error like “Warning: mail() [function.mail”, the comment will still go through.)

I paid for mIRC with a nifty site called Trialpay, as recommended by Kitashi over at Hard Game Drive. It basically pays for mIRC for you if you sign up for one of their sponsors. I signed up for Jamster (a stupid phoneshit site), and I think they charged me 10 bucks on my phone bill. I guess I’ll have some explaining to do to my mom once the Verizon bill comes. Still beats paying 20 bucks with my nonexistent credit card however. If you’re not an idiot like myself, there’s other offers that don’t require your phone number/credit card that you can do. I don’t know the specifics, but apparently Kitashi got the credits by simply doing a survey (Lucky bastard). I think the offers change all the time, but I recommend that you choose one that instantly credits you, or at least doesn’t make you pay. I’ll keep you guys posted if I buy anything else via Trialpay, which I probably will.

Additionally, there’s a free script for mIRC called NoNameScript (creative, I know) that allows mIRC to do even more neato things. I personally use NNScript, but there’s thousands of other scripts that change how mIRC runs, via big GUI overhauls to simple tweaks and features.

In other news, I pulled some muscle in my back jumping a fence and now my back hurts like hell. If you have any sympathy for me I’d like you to send me some Bengay, email me for details.

Now I just gotta get working on that Pidgin review for Kricket’s site and I’m all set.

Until next post,
djsonik