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I used to read the New York Times quite a lot — this was several years ago. Eventually I just trailed off. It seemed like I was spending more time logging in than actually getting anything read. Now NYTimes.com is making My Times available, which is a portal (AAAAH! NOT THE P-WORD!) for Times content. I might have to do some more reading. You can check it out at http://my.nytimes.com/ .

I dusted off my ancient account and logged in. And actually it’s quite a bit more than NY Times content — as you can add RSS feeds and other content modules from all over the Web. When you first log in you’ll actually have a pre-populated page with all the usual portal favorites (weather, stock quotes, etc.) Choose Add Content to start making the page yours.

The front part add content page has three columns: one of Times content, one of stuff from around the Web (BBC, Yahoo, etc.) and one of widgets (photo browser, movie showtimes (?!), etc.) (You can also add RSS feeds of content that the NYT doesn’t list. Do that from the home page.) Be sure when browsing available content to explore the tabs on the left, which will give you access to more in-depth NYT items. These tabs are divided into topics and show the New York Times’ offerings and then suggestions for other content from around the Web. The eager recommendation of other stories in addition to the Times’ own makes the NYT look generous, confident, and smart. Good on you New York Times.

Anyway, moving the content around the page is as simple as click and drag. A nice feature is that you can add additional tabs to the main page; so you could have several sections divided out by category. (Gee, just like a newspaper.) As a matter of fact, if you didn’t have TOO many to read, My Times would make a very nice RSS feed reader. I’m going to have to try that for stuff I don’t want to check every day.

The only oddness I found about this site was the search for sources. I did a search for sources relating to Google and while I got Google News from the NYT as a search option, I also got pointers to NYT’s China news section. Since Google/China have recently been in the news, I can sort of see it, but I would rather see search blogs, official blogs from other engines, etc. in my search results. A search for Yahoo brought more expected results.

Lots of content, very responsive, easy to use, might be a useful feeder for low-moderate numbers of RSS feeds. I think My Times might be a portal I actually like.

Questia Media has released a library of over 5,000 books for free access on its Web site. You can get started browsing at http://www.questia.com/publicdomainindex .

You can look at the top ten books (which include Tarzan, Freud, and Huckleberry Finn) or browse the collection alphabetically (by title or author.) Listings include title, author, publisher, and publication date (I guess these are all public domain books.) Click on a book and you’ll get a screen that looks something like Google Reader (make sure you have JavaScript enabled.)

You can page through, read the text, and search, but if you want to do things like highlight pages, you’ll need a Questia account. Despite the fact that access to these books is free, Questia itself is not. (There is a free trial available but it’s a trial.)

Since school is starting, this would be a quick place to find and search the classics if you’ve got a paper to do. Of course you’ve also got Project Gutenberg…

19 million reviews on two million products. That’s the claim of Summize, a search engine devoted to finding reviews. It’s available at http://www.summize.com/ .

I like review search engines because I like to hear about other user experiences before I shell out a couple hundred bucks for a new camera or monitor or whatever. It works like you think it would: enter the name of a product, model number, etc. I did a search for Diet Dr Pepper — because, well, it’s sitting here on my desk — and got one result, from Amazon, but unfortunately no reviews.

Time to expand a bit. I did another search, this one for acer notebook and got 128 reviews on 54 products. I love the results layout. A bar icon shows, at a glance, how well the product is doing with good, so-so, and bad reviews. The name of the product is shown with a snippet of the review copy (not so useful), source, and sometimes a price.

For getting additional information, you have two choices. You can go straight to the offsite page for product information, you can choose to get a “Summized” page. The Summized page, like this review for an Acer Travelmate, shows the reviews from best to worst, and includes the date of the review and the source. If the review is over a certain size it won’t be shown in its entirety — you’ll have to click a little “more” link to unfold it on the page.

You may do a search where you get an overwhelming number of results, and you find yourself wanting to just get the best products (so you know what to shop for) or the worst products (so you know what to avoid). If you do a search for Toshiba, for example, you’ll get several thousand results. Use the nav on the right to pick only products people mostly loved and you’ll get one set of results (mostly CDs.) Pick products people mostly hated and you’ll get another set of results (mostly electronics.) Sometimes you’ll find that a particular brand gets much love and little hate (Altoids).

You can also do head-to-head comparisons using a vs syntax. For example, you could query coke vs pepsi and get two bar icons summarizing user reviews. (Or try the ever-popular stuffing vs potatoes.) You can also stack additional search terms if you want to compare many things at once.

Lots of information here, very usefully summarized. Don’t forget to check out the blog for new features and data mining results. Now if only there was an RSS feed to get the latest product reviews.

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