I want to

Collage making software (aka Don't use Fotojet)

I don't usually get particularly bothered about spam, but there are times when it's necessary to make a bit of a stand. I wrote about the Fotojet collage software in September last year. Since then I have had requests to review it on April 29th, 11th May, 11th May (yes, twice in one day) and on the 16th May. Each request was exactly the same, but apparently written by different people such as Angela and Sophia. I was polite and told them that I've reviewed their product (positively as well) and asked them to stop mailing me. However, that appeal fell on deaf ears. The last time they did it, I said that I'd blog, so this is it.

PearlMountain Technology clearly has no idea how to run a sensible, coherent or effective media marketing campaign. They seem to be under the impression that what works best is to simply throw out the same marketing email time and time again, in the hope that at some point it's going to stick. They are clearly too stupid to keep a note of who they send their spam emails to, thus resulting in repeated mailings or they simply don't care. 

I've deleted my positive review of the product. Instead, if you're looking for collage software, I would suggest that you try one of these excellent products instead, which are as good, if not better than Fotojet, and at the very least they don't continually spam reviewers.

Befunky

Fotor

Glogster

Mixbook

Photocollage

Photovisi

Photomontager

Photovideo Collage

PicMonkey

Postermywall

Ribbet!

There are of course plenty of others, but this is a nice quick roundup.

Crate for personalised news, not so much

I discovered a site called Crate which is supposed to bring you personalised news direct to your desktop. You simply tell it what keywords you are interested in, any specific websites, people from Twitter, that sort of stuff. It then goes away and brings you back material. Hopefully it's material that you'll find interesting, but don't hold your breath. 

I gave my Crate a bunch of useful keywords, such as internet search, search engines, the names of various different engines and so on. I gave it a couple of search engine related websites that I use, and 5 Twitter accounts. That's a reasonable amount to go on I think, so I was quite hopeful that I might get some useful information back. How did it work? Well, today I've had 3 results - one of which took me to a site that had nothing to do with the title of the article, and two posts on content marketing. Yesterday I had 17 links, mostly again about content marketing, a job advert, a news item that was nothing about my subjects of interest, '5 qualities of the best places to work' (why, I have no idea) and a similar set of results for the day before. In other words, a complete waste of my time. Once you find something useful, there's only a couple of ways of sharing it - via Twitter (but it doesn't realise that there's a character limit, so you have to do a lot of editing yourself) or Buffer, which to be honest isn't very high up on my radar. How about Facebook? Pinterest? LinkedIn? (Yes, I know you can do that via Buffer, but it's a paid product with a poor free version, so it doesn't count.)

What's really irritating is that there isn't even an option to go into the system and tell it that you don't like a particular result, so there's no way of training it on what to look for next, or how to improve its offerings. Very disappointing, and I'll be sticking with Mention, Scoop.it, Paper.li and so on.