This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

The Snipi Toolbar collects and displays the user’s online research.

To do all this, you use the Snipi Toolbar, a horizontal window that pops up within your browser so you never have to navigate away from the site where you’re shopping. If you see an item you like, simply drag and drop an image of it into the toolbar, where details about the item — including its title, price and image — are automatically filled in. If the item was previously snipped by another Snipi user, a description box will be filled with whatever that person wrote or pasted in from the product page; you can fill in the box yourself, too.

Snipi has a partnership with Shopzilla Inc., so the Snipi Toolbar also has comparison shopping built in: It displays links to Web sites where your snipped product, or products like it, can be found at lower prices.

One of the big drawbacks to Snipi is that it currently works only as a browser plug-in with Mozilla’s Firefox, not Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer or Apple’s (AAPL) Safari. Snipi says it plans to introduce versions of its toolbar — though less functional ones — for IE and Safari by early to mid-June. Even so, downloading and installing a browser plug-in isn’t yet a routine thing for most people. And often, people who use plug-ins forget to keep them up-to-date.

Another downside to Snipi is that its comparison-pricing feature failed with apparel. The feature only really worked when used with “hard goods” like electronics, which are sold at retailers that participate in price-comparison networks. Yet Snipi still makes pricing suggestions for clothing and shoes, however irrelevant. For example, when I snipped a $150 Banana Republic dress, a link to $16 eye shadow sold at Sephora.com appeared in the Price Compare column. To reduce confusion, Snipi shouldn’t make such suggestions for apparel.

A handy feature built into the Snipi Toolbar lets you immediately share items via email or post them on Facebook, Twitter or Wordpress blogs. This would have been useful while I was shopping online for boots because I could have more quickly shared my finds with friends, rather than copying and pasting URLs into emails.

While browsing on BestBuy.com (BBY), I found a Sony (SNE) Cybershot DSC-W220 with 12 megapixels and a 4x zoom lens for $199. Selecting a small icon in the Firefox browser’s bottom right corner, I opened the Snipi Toolbar and created a “Digicams” list, including the Sony. Snipi suggested alternative prices for this camera, including $159 for the same thing on Amazon.com (AMZN).

I got an early start on bathing-suit shopping by browsing Web sites for J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s. As expected, the price-comparison suggestions didn’t make sense. For one $58 Victoria’s Secret bathing suit, Snipi suggested a list of alternatives, including a $170 Kohler shower door, $203 Giorgio Armani glasses and an $82 corded telephone. I assure you that the bathing suit looked nothing like any of those items.

Confusing alternatives aside, I liked using the Snipi Toolbar as a place to gather my online research. It displayed images of items neatly lined up in a row, and when I selected an item, the description appeared. Someone like my sister, who is planning a wedding, might enjoy using the Snipi Toolbar for saving photos of various locations in a list she could call “Wedding Venues.” She could then share the entire list with me in one step. Or she could go visit some of the places and bring an iPhone with the Snipi app to see her list.

I tried the iPhone app, and it was a cinch to tap My Lists to see the online research I’d gathered. Here, as on the browser toolbar, visuals make it easy to glance through many products.

The toolbar can save various lists that you name and categorize into Shop, Photos or Videos, and these can be kept private, shared with friends or made public. Public lists are seen by all other users on Snipi.com, which is also a social-networking site. I wouldn’t use it as such, because I already rely on other social-networking outlets, but some people might.

Snipi, which uses a guessing algorithm to fill in details like a product’s price, says its toolbar will improve as more people use it. If you do a lot of research or online shopping or you simply want an online tool for saving images and videos from the Web, Snipi will work well for you. Its price-comparison suggestions need some improvement, but I felt more organized after using the Snipi Toolbar for a week’s worth of browsing.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

To clear things up, I’ve put together a basic Twitter guide that explains how to use it, Twitter lingo, privacy options, mobile applications that can be used with the service and problems that it has. Let’s get started.

Twitter limits social-networking updates to 140 characters or less. The service is surprisingly useful, but leaves room for improvement.

What is it? In short, Twitter is a free social-networking tool that keeps people connected with one another and with sources of information. Twitter users submit updates about whatever they’re currently doing, and these updates cannot exceed 140 text-based characters.

Lingo: Twitter is the name of the service. The term twittering describes the activity of updating a Twitter account. A tweet is an individual Twitter update. Twitterers are people who use the service.

Followers, not Friends: Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace use the term “friend” to refer to people who are connected with one another, but Twitterers can simply follow one another’s messages by finding a person’s username and selecting a “Follow” option. This alerts the person that you’re following them, and they can reciprocally choose to follow you, or not.

Why use it? While some people primarily use Twitter to post updates about their activities or comments on the news, I use the service more as a follower, allowing me to see quick snippets of news as it occurs. Most tweets are written by real people, while others, such as updates from news organizations that you’ve selected, are automatically generated. Many tweets include the addresses of Web sites with relevant articles that tell readers more on a topic.

Where is it? Twitter works on your Web browser at Twitter.com, where user updates appear in a simple list form as they are submitted. After you’ve signed up and started following other people, those people’s updates, or tweets, will appear when you log onto Twitter.com using a username and password.

Twitter also works on mobile phones, where the 140-character limit allows messages to be sent and received via SMS text messaging. Tweets can also be sent and received via email. Users with smartphones like BlackBerrys or iPhones can use one of the many popular mobile applications for accessing Twitter, which offer much richer options than simple SMS does; I’ll get into these later.

Privacy: Unlike other social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter isn’t focused on holding and sharing personal information about its members. Indeed, the service operates with a majority (80%, according to the company) of users opting to keep their updates public, that is, follow-able by anyone, without permission. This openness encourages people to follow one another or to see who others are already following, and then follow the same people.

However, users can opt to protect their updates, meaning they must grant permission for others to follow them. If you’d like to sign up for Twitter, but aren’t comfortable putting your first and/or last name on the site, you don’t have to; instead, just tell others your username.

Twitter Page Personalization: Each user has a Twitter page showing all of his or her updates, or tweets. (Mine is twitter.com/kabster728, and you can follow me.) This page also shows the number of people a user follows, how many people follow her and how many total updates she has posted.

Twitterers can customize their Twitter page by uploading a photo to be used as the background. The icon representing each user can also be personalized, and this is important because it appears beside that person’s tweets on Twitter.com, where followers recognize and appreciate its familiarity. Some people, including me, use pictures of themselves as their icons, while others use random shots.

Apps/Clients: Twitter works on any browser, and will also work on a mobile browser. If you have a mobile device like the BlackBerry or iPhone, you can jazz up the experience by downloading a third-party app like TwitterFon, TwitterBerry, Tweetie or Twitteriffic. Twittervision, another mobile app, plots points on maps to show where tweets originated. Desktop clients also abound, including Twhirl and TweetDeck. Twitterfeed will set your blog to automatically post content to Twitter.

@Replies, Direct Messages: Each tweet that appears in your Twitter feed can be replied to using a shortcut arrow that appears beside the tweet, and these responses to tweets are called @Replies. So if JoeSchmo tweets to say he saw the new James Bond movie and hated it, you can reply to this with a tweet of your own that says, “@JoeSchmo I still adore Daniel Craig.” These @Replies appear for everyone to see, and must start with @ plus the username of whomever you’re responding to.

Direct Messages differ from @Replies because they can be sent only between people who are following one another. These messages aren’t posted publicly. They appear on your Twitter.com page in a right-side section labeled Direct Messages and will also be sent to your mobile device if you have one registered with Twitter.

Favorites: If you read a tweet that you really like, you can save it as a favorite by selecting a small star beside the tweet, thus adding it to a Favorites section on your homepage. Anyone can see anyone else’s Favorites, regardless of whether or not they’re following one another.

Problems: Twitter’s bare-bones approach gets to the point quickly, displaying tweets in a simple, quick-read format. But the site is lacking in many areas. It used to enable searching for people on Twitter, but that capability is currently down. Now, to search for friends on Twitter, you must upload your email contacts from a Web-based mail service. The company says it plans to have people-search working again by the end of the year. Meanwhile, search.twitter.com enables keyword or location searches.

Twitter lacks the ability to sort tweets according to what the user wants. If I just want to see tweets from real people and not those that are automatically generated, I’m out of luck. Same goes if I want to keep certain friends’ tweets in a prominent place on my homepage; Twitter has no way of doing this.

Twitter users aren’t notified when someone responds to their tweet with an @Reply. I recently happened to look at @Replies on my Twitter homepage and found three from people who follow me (I don’t follow them).

If you’re adding a Web address to a tweet and the characters in the URL take up too much space, Twitter will automatically use TinyURL behind the scenes to shrink your long link into a shorter one when you post your tweet. But this works only if you have enough remaining characters in your tweet to fit the long version of your link. A built-in TinyURL converter on the page would help immensely.

Twitter says it’s working to make @Replies more effective. It also says it plans to do more with filtering and sorting, so that the Twitter interface is more useful. In the meantime, Twitter does a good job of giving people simplified news about others and the world around them. If you’re often in a rush, Twitter can be a great resource for fast information.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

One way to find the information you want is by setting up computer-generated alerts. These electronic notifications are relatively simple to use and offer a range of helpful services, from a virtual heads-up when your name is mentioned online to messages about a product’s price suddenly dropping.

For years, I’ve used Google Alerts as a way of keeping track of myself online. If my name is mentioned in a blog or if this column appears on the Web, such as on the site of a newspaper that syndicates it, a Google Alert sends me an email about it. Google Alerts can work for you to find a variety of things, such as telling you if a video of a favorite band popped up online or that a blogger posted something about last night’s episode of “Mad Men.”

In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails. Google (GOOG) certainly isn’t alone in the alerts arena, as Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) and AOL (TWX) are also players. This week I tried two small companies that recently joined the mission to help users find the Web content using alerts.

Pinpointing Searches

I tried Alerts.com and Yotify.com, and found worthwhile features in both. While Google Alerts does a good job of finding search terms in news, blogs and videos, Alerts.com and Yotify use forms that are a cinch to fill out and let you pinpoint your searches.

Alerts.com offers to notify users via email, SMS text messages or even voice calls to a cellphone or landline. The site organizes your alerts on a personalized Web page and uses a desktop application called Elertz to tell you when an alert has generated results. I liked this site’s flexibility: It not only gave me different ways to receive notifications, but also enabled a variety of options for time-specific deliveries of alerts.

But Yotify has advantages of its own, including the ability to integrate with FriendFeed and Facebook so friends can offer their recommendations or opinions. It also lets users search for event tickets or items auctioned on eBay (EBAY). And a smart preview panel gives you an idea of the type of results your search will return before you submit the request for an alert.

Viewing Results

For now, Google Alerts and Yotify will send alert notifications only via email, though all three services will let you view your alert results online. All three are free, but SMS alerts sent to a cellphone via Alerts.com may not be, depending on your plan.

All in all, I found there were certain things each service was good at doing. For example, Alerts.com lets me know college football scores when I want them: only after the final score; at the end of each quarter and after the final score; or at the end of each quarter, after the final score and after each time a team scores points. Yotify gave me detailed options in a Craigslist search for furniture, including showing only listings with photos or just those that included the word “sofa” in a title; it will even hunt for a specific price range.

For the person who wants to spend minimal time creating basic alerts, Google Alerts will do the trick. These can be narrowed down to show results that fall into the News, Web, Blogs, Video or Groups categories, or you can perform more-blanketed searches using a Comprehensive category.

Alerts.com offers plenty of simple alerts that require only a bit of scheduling to set up. Each alert appears as a widget that can be expanded, edited or deleted with a simple click, and this page has a clean look with attractive, cohesive graphics.

I didn’t care much for Elertz, the desktop component of Alerts.com, because once installed, it notified me of new Alerts data using an irksome star that glowed red until I checked my notifications. Elertz didn’t work properly on my Windows XP machine until Alerts.com fixed a bug.

But Alerts.com’s price watch and price protection alerts are incredibly useful. Price watch looks to see if an item’s price drops into a lower price range, at which point users are notified. Price protection watches to see if products you bought are now on sale so you can get a refund. I tried both, and I’m hoping I’ll hear soon that a specific pair of Anthropologie boots is on sale.

Yotify uses the idea of virtual scouts that scour the Web for specific information. Scout findings can be condensed or expanded in one click, and results can be filtered for more specific findings or shared with friends via Facebook or FriendFeed.

Scout Work

But some scouts took too much work to set up. When I tried to set up a scout for college football scores, I didn’t see a sports category (Alerts.com had a colorful NCAA icon right on its home page). Instead, I had to choose News, then select ESPN, then NCAAF and finally enter “Penn State” in a key word box for my scout. And after all that, the scout offered results only daily or hourly via email.

I would also prefer if I could better organize my scout lists. As it was, all of my results appeared in one list: The NCAA scout was right above the scout that found Obama mentions on Huffington Post, and below that were results for YouTube’s most-watched videos. Yotify says it will add ways to more neatly arrange data in the next month or so.

On average, Yotify returned more results instantly, such as 10 instant Craigslist sofa results compared with Alerts.com’s two in the first few hours.

Overall, these sites are worth trying so you can find which alert system works best for you and stop wasting time searching the Web the old-fashioned way.

– Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

I headed online to start researching (I was looking for a used car) but was overwhelmed by an avalanche of information. Everyone seemed to have something to say about cars, whether in blogs, community forums, editorial reviews, Kelley Blue Book values, Carfax reports or local dealer sites. As I discussed my findings with friends and family, more people than not were surprised to hear about the variety of research and price comparisons available online.

This week’s column is an overview of sites that may help you or someone you know browse for a new or used car on the Web. I used sites ranging from trusted resources like ConsumerReports.org to search engine tools like Yahoo Autos. This column can’t possibly mention every car-searching resource on the Web; rather, it’s just a taste of what’s available.

Edmunds.com and ConsumerReports.org both feature informative data on a number of new and used vehicles. Edmunds is a free site specifically geared toward cars, including an online magazine for enthusiasts called Inside Line and a Web forum for discussions about automobiles called CarSpace. I used various tools on Edmunds.com, including one that estimates the true cost to own a specific car over time. I especially enjoyed reading an article titled “Confessions of a Car Salesman,” which proved uncanny in predicting a range of tricks and techniques the salespeople used when I first visited a car dealership.

Edmunds offers a four-step pricing system, which includes getting quotes from dealers, and a payment calculator, which estimates monthly payments. Edmunds teams up with AutoTrader.com to help perform searches for certified pre-owned or used cars online.

Consumer Reports covers products as well as cars but keeps much of its most useful data behind a Web-site subscription, which costs $26 annually or $5.95 monthly (magazine subscribers can pay a discounted price of $19 a year). You need this subscription to access CR’s respected ratings and certain sections of its Web forums. These ratings were helpful to me, as they assessed numerous aspects of specific car models, including trouble spots by year, performance, safety and fuel economy.

CR also offers valuable lists such as “All Recommended Cars,” “Best and Worst Used Cars” and “Reliable Used Cars by Price.” A car-buying calculator is an asset to this site that helps you decide whether it would be smarter to buy or lease a vehicle.

Google, Yahoo and AOL all present special search-results pages when you search for a specific car for sale, using drop-down menus and various ways to sort results. Google Base for automobiles, found by selecting “Vehicles” from www.google.com/base, is a list of data submitted to Google. Drop-down menus help broaden or narrow results by sorting the data according to certain attributes, such as make or price. Vehicle-search results can be viewed in one of three formats: List View, Table View or Map View — an illustration of each car’s location in relationship to a Zip Code. I found Table View most useful because it organized data in smart, spreadsheet-like displays so I could quickly skim through columns listing price, color, amenities and mileage.

But not all car searches within Google Base returned the same drop-down-menu options for sorting. In a few instances, I couldn’t sort my search results by model year. Google Base does show the date on which each car was listed.

Yahoo Autos, found at www.autos.yahoo.com, teamed up with Cars.com to offer richer content, including a Car Finder feature that helps people narrow down what type of new car they might like according to price, driving style and fuel (type and economy). Yahoo even tries to answer car questions with its Yahoo Answers Q&A tool, which lets people submit questions. I found user reviews on this site, as well as expert reviews provided by NewCarTestDrive.com, an auto-review site.

The used-car section in Yahoo Autos reminded me of Google with its drop-down menus and results that displayed in list or map views. List view shows plenty of information in one glance, including an image of the car for sale and the number of additional available photos. From this list, users can link directly to view or order Carfax reports or email the dealer, saving time wasted on excess mouse clicks and browsing.

AOL Autos, found at http://autos.aol.com, does a nice job of integrating Web 2.0 features such as pop-up menus that appear within a page rather than in an entirely new Web page. Vehicle-search results are found by entering a few criteria for a new or used car, and used-car results can be further narrowed by adding or subtracting desired specifics listed on the far left of the screen. Some specs include model type, engine, year or extras like heated seats or a sunroof.

This site can also condense numerous used-car listings into one graph that illustrates car prices in relationship to mileage or year. Selecting any point on the graph reveals a short description of a vehicle’s location, price and mileage. For new cars, AOL Autos offers lengthy expert reviews from NewCarTestDrive.com, as well as user reviews.

Both Yahoo Autos and AOL Autos walk users through steps to get price quotes from dealers for new cars.

Carfax.com provides car-history reports using vehicle-identification numbers, or VINs. For a $30 fee, used-car buyers can use Carfax.com for 30 days. This report shows a vehicle’s history such as if it was a rental or not, how many different owners it had, how long each owner possessed the vehicle and where it came from. Tips pop up within these reports, including one that warned me about “curbstoning,” a term that describes an individual without a dealer’s license looking to sell a number of cars by posing as a private seller.

As can be expected, many newspaper Web sites offer automobile sections that display digitized classified ads, so be sure to check your local paper’s Web site.

At the end of the day, test-driving a car will be a true test as to whether or not you like it — no matter how much research you’ve done online. But knowing your stuff before you visit a dealership can save money and time.

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

But the vastness of the Internet can leave many people wondering where to begin, especially when asking sensitive questions about education. And, even in a sea of discussions and forums on education, parents are often hungry for one piece of information above all else: data that helps them select a school for their children.

Education.com’s SchoolFinder (top right) enhances an already rich Web site (top left), while GreatSchools.net (above) works education-related content into school search results.

So this week I tried three education-related Web sites that dedicate some or all of their resources toward providing free school comparisons, including demographics, test results, teacher-to-student ratios and percentages of students eating free and reduced-price lunches.

I performed various school queries using Education.com Inc., GreatSchools Inc.’s GreatSchools.net and SchoolMatters.com by typing in a ZIP Code, city, district or school name. Overall, GreatSchools and Education.com offered the most content-packed environments, loading their sites with related articles and offering community feedback on education-related issues by way of blog posts or surveys. And though GreatSchools is 10 years older than Education.com, which made its debut in June, the latter has a broader variety of content and considers its SchoolFinder feature — newly available as of today — just a small part of the site.

Both Education.com and GreatSchools.net base a good portion of their data on information gathered by the Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, the government entity that collects and analyzes data related to education.

SchoolMatters.com, a service of Standard & Poor’s, is more bare-bones, containing quick statistical comparisons of schools. (S&P is a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos. [MHP]) This site gets its content from various sources, including state departments of education, private research firms, the Census and National Public Education Finance Survey. This is evidenced by lists, charts and pie graphs that would make Ross Perot proud. I learned about where my alma mater high school got its district revenue in 2005: 83% was local, 15% was state and 2% was federal. But I couldn’t find district financial information for more recent years on the site.

All three sites base at least some school-evaluation results on test scores, a point that some of their users critique. Parents and teachers, alike, point out that testing doesn’t always paint an accurate picture of a school and can be skewed by various unacknowledged factors, such as the number of students with disabilities.

Education.com’s SchoolFinder feature is starting with roughly 47,000 schools in 10 states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey and Georgia. In about two months, the site hopes to have data for all states, totaling about 60,000 public and charter schools. I was granted early access to SchoolFinder, but only Michigan was totally finished during my testing.

SchoolFinder lets you narrow your results by type (public or charter), student-to-teacher ratio, school size or Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), a measurement used to determine each school’s annual progress. Search results showed specific details on teachers that I didn’t see on the other sites, such as how many teachers were fully credentialed in a particular school and the average years of experience held by a school’s teachers.

The rest of the Education.com site contains over 4,000 articles written by well-known education sources like the New York University Child Study Center, Reading is Fundamental and the Autism Society of America. It also contains a Web magazine and a rather involved discussion-board community where members can ask questions of like-minded parents and the site’s experts, who respond with advice and suggestions of articles that might be helpful.

Private schools aren’t required to release test scores, student or teacher statistics, so none of the sites had as much data on private schools. However, GreatSchools.net at least offered basic results for most private-school queries that I performed, such as a search for Salesianum School in Delaware (where a friend of mine attended) that returned the school’s address, a list of the Advanced Placement exams it offered from 2006 to 2007 and six rave reviews from parents and former students.

GreatSchools.net makes it easy to compare schools, even without knowing specific names. After finding a school, I was able to easily compare that school with others in the geographic area or school district — using a chart with numerous results on one screen. After entering my email address, I saved schools to My School List for later reference.

I couldn’t find each school’s AYP listed on GreatSchools.net, though these data were on Education.com and SchoolMatters.com.

SchoolMatters.com doesn’t provide articles, online magazines or community forums. Instead, it spits out data — and lots of it. A search for “Philadelphia” returned 324 schools in a neat comparison chart that could, with one click, be sorted by grade level, reading test scores, math test scores or students per teacher. (The Julia R. Masterman Secondary School had the best reading and math test scores in Philadelphia, according to the site.)

SchoolMatters.com didn’t have nearly as much user feedback as Education.com or GreatSchools.net. But stats like a school’s student demographics, household income distribution and the district’s population age distribution were accessible thanks to colorful pie charts.

These three sites provide a good overall idea of what certain schools can offer, though GreatSchools.net seems to have the richest content in its school comparison section. Education.com excels as a general education site and will be a comfort to parents in search of reliable advice. Its newly added SchoolFinder, while it’s in early stages now, will only improve this resource for parents and students.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

This week, I dived into the music blogging world of MOG.com, a Web site where enthusiasts can read, blog and network with one another. Starting today, this site will integrate with Rhapsody, the subscription-based music service, so that MOG users, or MOGGERS, can simultaneously blog about and listen to millions of songs that fuel their online discussions.

Rhapsody is now integrated into MOG’s site for music aficionados.

MOG Inc. prides itself on working as a destination for people who hope to discuss music tastes and opinions, like TripAdvisor.com works for travelers. MOG’s first public beta, or test version, came out about a year and a half ago.

Its use of a subscription model comes at a time when CD profits are lagging and larger social-networking sites are negotiating with record labels to incorporate music streaming. Plenty of people still prefer purchasing music a la Apple Inc.’s iTunes Store, where there aren’t restrictions due to streaming or subscriptions.

Along with built-in Rhapsody, this newly enhanced version of MOG includes other improvements, such as a better search engine and a speedy tool that generates personal profiles for each MOG user according to his or her musical tastes.

I was granted early access to MOG’s revamped site and was most impressed by its fast search tool, which works just like the Spotlight search in Apple’s operating system. Results are narrowed with each typed letter and returned in neatly divided categories. Best of all, music results came back as fast as if they were on my hard drive instead of various MOG pages and Rhapsody’s database.

MOG also does a good job of marrying its contents with Rhapsody in a way that isn’t overly obvious; tiny Play icons beside song titles can be selected to start hearing a tune through the Rhapsody player, which hums along in the background, and similar icons add songs to playlists in one step.

But for a site that prides itself on appealing to music enthusiasts, I found certain genres much more represented than others. The rock music category, for example, had plenty of related posts and coinciding Rhapsody music, but the classical music section was almost nonexistent and country tunes were poorly represented. I typed “Bach” into the search box, expecting to be flooded with results, but saw no music and only one post by a MOG user about why she thought Bach was a great composer. The company says it will fix this in the next couple of months.

Unlimited Rhapsody access costs $13 monthly and is offered free for the first 14 days. But, like all subscription models, it blocks access to music if you don’t pay this monthly fee. MOGGERS who don’t want to pay or don’t plan on using Rhapsody as much can choose from two free options: one that allows users to listen to 25 songs a month and another that only allows free 30-second clips of song.

MOGGERS can upload their own MP3s within blog posts on the site. But linking to Rhapsody songs was easier and faster.

I got started by clicking a giant “Magic Button” icon on the MOG site. This installed MOG-O-MATIC, a tool that automatically searched my computer’s hard drive for all of my music files, then indexed them and created a profile of my music taste on a personalized My MOG page. This tool was also available in the first version of MOG but is 10 times as fast now, indexing 10,000 songs an hour compared with 1,000 songs previously.

I liked that MOG-O-MATIC did some page-creation work for me, making a list of the songs I listened to most recently — regardless of what program I used to listen to the song (iTunes, Windows Media Player or Rhapsody). Another list that was automatically generated from my music showed which artist was best represented in my collection. If you don’t want the world to know about your Barry Manilow obsession, this list can be altered to fudge the truth.

Because MOG-O-MATIC scans your entire music collection, it knows what music you like. A Recommendations page shows you what other MOGGERS with similar tastes are listening to, helping you discover new tunes. I found these suggestions to be pretty accurate, and even discovered a great song on another MOGGER’s recommended playlist called “Summer Teeth” by Wilco. I checked out the page belonging to the MOGGER who created this playlist, and found other tunes that were in line with my musical taste.

Using Rhapsody, I played entire Web pages of recommended songs with one click. Likewise, entire music collections belonging to other people can be played the same way, as long as you have the right Rhapsody account to play that many songs.

I wrote a blog post on MOG about the newest album from “Fountains of Wayne,” and it automatically included a Play button icon, enabling the song I wrote about to play along with my post. This auto-linking is done with fill-in-the-blank boxes that tag each post with music.

MOG isn’t trying to be a social-networking site that enables all things. Instead, it focuses on one thing, music, and successfully improves the way people discuss, share and discover music online.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

For a demonstration go to www.myfamily.com/demo

This week, I tested one of the many Web sites created specifically to target families: myfamily.com. Myfamily is a free site that serves as a place where invited members can upload photos, videos, news, recipes, family-tree entries and other data in a few steps. Naturally, this idea of helping families stay in touch through a Web site is one which many companies are anxious to monopolize. Sites vying for the spotlight include the likes of Famster, The Family Post and MyGreatBigFamily.com. Some of these charge monthly or annual fees and offer features like online chatting within the site or ritzy background music while the site is being viewed, neither of which are currently included in myfamily.

Myfamily’s ace in the hole is its popular relative, Ancestry.com. Both sites are owned by parent company, Generations Network Inc., which means that Ancestry’s wealth of digitally scanned data and genealogy research can be linked to myfamily.com, enriching the site. Another big plus for myfamily is that it gives users the chance to add voice recordings to photos. These can be used to narrate a slide show (called SnapGenies) or when commenting on a shared image. Voice comments are added by following on-screen instructions and calling a 1-800 number.

I enlisted help from seven of my family members to test our own myfamily.com site. With a little coaching, my 82-year-old grandfather added a digital photo and an accompanying audio comment to our site. My Mom supplied images, voice comments and text comments. And my Dad needed only a little time during a busy week to add his voice comments to photos I posted of last year’s Thanksgiving.

But myfamily.com isn’t without its flaws. The site has been around by name for 10 years; however, I tested the newest version of this site, myfamily.com 2.0, which is still in its beta, or test, stages and is definitely still working out some of its bugs.

For example, a “What’s New” list on the home page should display recent site changes yet unseen by the user, but a video that I posted didn’t show up here, nor did new comments about photos. Also, two of my relatives received error messages when first trying to access the site with my invitation. And when a friend of mine added a 96-person family tree to her own site, the tree disappeared upon her next visit. (Luckily, she found it via an emailed link from the company.)

Myfamily cleverly starts new users on a page where they can create a site, rather than first asking for a username and password, as is done by many sites. It works on Macs and PCs, and on all three major browsers, though Apple’s Safari browser has a few hiccups.

For now, myfamily.com doesn’t offer unique URLs like www.boehretfamily.com; instead, users go to myfamily.com and sign in with a username and password. The site automatically remembers you when you return, so regularly accessing it from the same computer is a cinch.

The family member who creates the site (in this case, me) is designated the administrator and can invite anyone to become a site member. Invitees are labeled as either members or guests; the former can add content to the Web site while the latter can only view and comment on the site’s contents.

Administrators can choose from four themes with different colors and patterns, and each site is laid out in the same way: members listed on the left, three advertisements, a centered photo and lists of What’s New and Upcoming Events. Myfamily will introduce themes with more variety in the next few weeks.

Simple tabs running across the top ridge of the page organize the site’s content into Photos, Videos, Discussions, SnapGenies, Trees (as in family trees), Events, Files and People. I got started by dragging and dropping batches of digital photos from my hard drive onto the site using a fast uploading tool. Photos can be listed alone or in virtual albums, which organize them a bit better. I also added videos to the site, and though these took a little longer to load, they were as easy to post as my digital photos.

Myfamily.com’s integration with voice comments is a huge plus for the site. I smiled listening to my Mom’s emotional tone in a heartfelt comment that she left with a photo of my cousin’s 21st birthday. On another photo of two relatives asleep in chairs after Thanksgiving dinner, my Dad left a voice comment in which he joked about how exciting the dinner must have been. These comments could easily have been left in text form, but by following on-screen instructions to call a number, enter a PIN and leave a message, my own family site suddenly became much more personal.

I also used the phone to create narrated slide shows called SnapGenies. I spoke into the phone to describe each photo and then skipped to the next image on my computer screen before talking about the next shot. When finished, I hung up the phone, and the result was a simple slide show that anyone in my family could play back with ease. The instructions for ending these SnapGenies could stand to be a bit clearer, but myfamily says it is working on this.

Family trees can be created on the site or uploaded from existing family-tree files. Photos, audio and video can be uploaded from your computer to the tree, and these trees are shared with family members who can also contribute to them. With an Ancestry.com subscription (annual U.S. searching cost is $13 a month), users can attach historical census, immigration and military records to their trees, as well as hints about other people. Before the end of the year, myfamily.com users will be able to upload content from a family site directly to the tree.

My sister posted a couple of items under the Discussions tab: a recipe for Skillet Tamale Pie in Recipes, and Web sites related to our next family vacation in the News section. She asked our whole family to take a look at a list of midvacation excursions to decide which ones we wanted to go on, evoking a few responses from the younger members.

In its current state, myfamily doesn’t limit the amount of data uploaded to a site, though individual file sizes are technically limited (videos can’t exceed 100 megabytes each and photos can’t exceed around 10 megabytes each). Myfamily plans to offer an ad-free subscription model at the start of 2008 that will offer more storage; the company estimates that this paid model will cost about $30 annually.

Email updates are sent to site members daily or weekly to inform them about the site’s latest developments. Improvements are on the horizon for myfamily.com, including person-to-person chatting through the site, simple photo editing and the ability to create hyperlinks in posts.

The myfamily.com name has 10 years behind it — staying power that resonates with families who worry about their tediously entered data disappearing should a Web site go belly-up. To placate old and new site members, this 2.0 version of the site needs to make sure it’s dependably usable at all times. The new version of myfamily.com is off to a good start, and family members of all ages will feel comfortable here whether browsing the site or adding content of their own.

-Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

This week I tested Jaman.com, a Web site that gives users the chance to download independent and international movies from the Web directly to their computers. It also serves as a social networking forum where movie watchers can read one another’s reviews, write their own comments that run alongside the film, and join groups with people who have similar tastes in movies. Jaman (pronounced jah-mahn), has 1,800 titles. It charges $1.99 for rentals, which can be watched for up to seven days, and $4.99 to buy a movie outright.

Jaman.com’s home page (above) suggests movies for downloading, such as ‘Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories,’ and comments can be seen in a side panel while the film is being watched (below).

Jaman isn’t alone in the online movie downloading business, and its competitors boast bigger selections. Just this year Netflix Inc., known for popularizing DVD rentals through the mail, started offering its own movie downloads. So as to encourage this new method, Netflix builds movie-watching hours into its monthly plans, which range from $5 to $24 and include a certain number of hours during which downloaded movies can be watched. Of the 85,000 DVD titles available on Netflix.com, 4,000 titles can be downloaded.

Blockbuster Inc., which followed Netflix into the DVD mailing business, showed an interest in the online downloading method last month when it acquired Movielink LLC, a movie downloading service previously owned by Hollywood’s major studios.

And Apple Inc., which began selling films for $10 to $15 a year ago on its iTunes Store, offers over 500 movies. Amazon is in the game, too, as is Microsoft.

But Jaman hopes its niche films and viewer-comments system will set it apart.

I took a close look at Jaman, downloading movies from various countries, posting comments about them on the Jaman.com site and reading what others thought of the films. I used a Mac and two Windows computers running Microsoft’s Vista and XP operating systems, and tried Jaman on all three major Web browsers. The site itself can feel a bit overwhelming, jumbling a lot of text together on pages that lack a clean central place where every element comes together. More than once, films blacked out in midplay, and Jaman’s community aspect didn’t seem as well-organized or integrated as I had hoped.

Jaman has another major downside: It forces every user to designate some of his or her bandwidth to distribute movies for the company, using a peer-to-peer program. Community network setups like this aren’t unheard of; Skype and many others use such setups. But these other companies are often free, while Jaman is charging users for movies while simultaneously using their bandwidth to reduce strain on its own servers. Participation in the peer-to-peer network is required while downloading a movie but can be stopped at all other times. Even so, this is a real chink in Jaman’s armor.

Jaman.com drops users into a site where five movies are showcased, showing their trailers one after another. Other titles can be searched according to region, categories and genres, top movies or films made and submitted by users. I skimmed through flicks from Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, North America, Europe and Latin America. A useful feature displayed details about a movie when I held my cursor over its title including a description, the movie’s Jaman rating (out of five stars), duration and genre. Jaman doesn’t sort movies by duration, which would have saved me time while I was looking for a short film to download for a cross-country flight.

I was surprised to notice that none of the movies prominently displayed Motion Picture Association of America ratings. Jaman explained that these data are buried within a sub-menu of details about a movie, but many films didn’t list ratings — even those with MPAA ratings.

Three rentals come included with each Jaman membership, which was free and quickly obtained in my experience, though a friend of mine had trouble when he didn’t receive Jaman’s email verification with two different addresses. I downloaded and watched movies from Mexico, the United Kingdom and North America, and watched a 21-minute Japanese short film that streamed directly from the site and didn’t require downloading. Community comments and reviews helped me pick movies, especially Jaman’s own one-line summary that it calls “Our Take.”

To download and watch movies from Jaman, users must first download the Jaman player. But this player doesn’t work with the Web site as smoothly as it should. For example, after reading various reviews of movies, I found a comedy from the U.K. called “Nobody The Great,” and opted to rent it. I downloaded the Jaman player but it didn’t recognize that I already signed in and chose the movie to rent on the Web site. I started over by signing in, finding the film and choosing the rental option, this time using the player.

“Nobody The Great” turned out to be an amusing story about two English guys who find supposed terrorists in their home but are more concerned about not ruining an evening planned with two women. The film is only 47 minutes long and 753 megabytes, but it took about two hours to download using a broadband connection. The most maddening thing about downloading the movie using Jaman was that the estimated time until completion kept changing dramatically — one moment it read 224 minutes, the next 69 minutes, then 22, 40 and 17. Other downloads followed this same wacky pattern, some worse than others.

After watching a movie, I was prompted by Jaman to rate the movie or to write a review about it. Jaman uses email messages with links to join discussions with others who saw the same movie. These discussions groups are more like blogs, with each person’s comment listed as a different post. Some of the movies that I watched hadn’t been reviewed in a while, so I wasn’t as inspired to add my comments as I might have been if there was a live discussion taking place.

This staleness was experienced again in one of my favorite Jaman features: comments that run on-screen during a film if you’re online. These can be hidden so as not to distract the viewer, but I found some of the comments really interesting. For example, while watching a subtitled Mexican movie from 1995 called “El Callejon De Los Milagros” starring Salma Hayek, comments appeared roughly every 10 minutes from a user named Cinequest. I later learned that Cinequest represented the Northern California motion picture institute of the same name and that the comments left weren’t live but were stuck to the movie so that anyone watching it could see them. I was free to leave my own comments, but I didn’t have quite as much to say about camera angles as Cinequest. The film director’s comments can also be seen here.

Jaman says that its road map includes plans for live comments, which would encourage more interaction with others as if watching a movie with friends.

Though I didn’t spend a majority of my time there, Jaman’s Community section seemed a little weak. Groups like “Bollywood 101″ and “Cult Movies” had members and comments left by these members, but still seemed somewhat disconnected from films. For example, preview clips of certain movies were posted to share with the group, but most of the comments made by the group weren’t related to the clips.

Jaman introduced me to new films that I wouldn’t otherwise have found. But its peer-to-peer system and its overall lack of real-time comments were frustrating. I’d also like to see Jaman reorganize the look of its site so it doesn’t feel so cluttered.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

• Kodak Gallery
  (www.kodakgallery.com)

This is a solid site for sharing albums with friends in a few straightforward steps. Though its options for editing photos tend to feel a bit clumsy, they’re probably the best out of the five sites. Most sites expect users to edit images before sharing them. Earlier this year, Kodak introduced a new version of its EasyShare desktop software program with richer editing features, such as images that expand to almost the entire screen.

In addition to its $25 a year Gallery Premier account, you can opt to pay twice as much for the account and a discount on Kodak prints — 10 cents each rather than 15 cents. Paid accounts let you download high-resolution versions of each photo and give you a unique Web address for sharing photos that can be password protected. But the other four sites offer personal Web sites as free features, rather than just with paid accounts.

• Shutterfly
  (www.shutterfly.com)

Shutterfly seemed to be the simplest site, though it isn’t the most attractive or user friendly. All of its features are free. Shutterfly does away with two conditions that Kodak Gallery and Snapfish have: It doesn’t require any purchases in order to keep your account from being deleted nor does it ever require your friends to sign in before viewing a shared album.

But Shutterfly’s simplicity can also be a hindrance. It doesn’t let you upload videos to share, nor can you download high-resolution versions of each photo or send photos to the site via email or mobile device; the other sites do these things either for free or with a paid account.

• Snapfish
  (www.snapfish.com)

Snapfish is Hewlett-Packard Co.’s photo-sharing site, and it stands out because it has the most restrictions. Along with its requirement that you purchase something at least once a year to keep your account, guests who view your albums must always sign in; you can’t change this setting like on the other sites. To skirt this issue, Snapfish emphasizes its Group Rooms, or personalized sharing Web sites that users view with a specific URL and a password (if you choose to have one).

Snapfish and Shutterfly both have Web sites on which photos appear too small for my taste, though Snapfish does offer generously sized images in photo slideshows — a plus. I’d prefer the site itself showed larger images in other instances. High-resolution version of photos can be downloaded for a fee of 25 cents for one and five cents for more than one.

• Flickr
  (www.flickr.com)
• Photobucket.com
  (www.photobucket.com)

Of the two community sharing sites, I preferred Flickr over Photobucket. The site felt cleaner, with fewer distractions and one less advertisement than Photobucket. For people who aren’t used to these more progressive sites, Photobucket and Flickr may seem extreme. They offer things like tagging and use terms that can be confusing. Flickr uses “sets” in place of “albums,” and photos are organized within “batches.” Photobucket organizes albums, but then lets you create sub albums within an album.

Neither site requires annual purchases, and both allow free high-resolution downloads of photos. Instead of one-time sharing, the sites use photostreams, or constantly updated photo blogs that friends can check.

Flickr and Photobucket make it easy to post photos to blogs in one step, including Blogger and Typepad. Photobucket also lets you post to MySpace and Facebook in one step.

In Flickr, you can meet people who have interests similar to yours by searching through Groups. I joined a group that shared photos of tennis courts around the world. Digital photos suddenly offered ways to socialize online without chatting or leaving overused messages for strangers.

Among other things, Photobucket lets you create a Remix — a presentation made of your photos and/or videos after they’re dragged into a storyline and mixed in with music, transitions and graphics. The result was entertaining and professional, though it took just seconds to make.

Ideally, I’d like to combine a favorite feature from each of these sites to make one great photo-sharing Web site. I found something wrong with each one, but Kodak Gallery and its EasyShare software program offer a good combination of editing and sharing. Flickr was my preferred community photo site, though it and Photobucket both offer fresh ways to share digital photos.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Blogs have a place in many of our everyday lives, even if we aren’t bloggers ourselves. The word blog, short for Web log, is used to describe personal Web sites that are frequently updated with entries for sharing with others. They can range from your son’s personal blog about baseball statistics to a well-read and more polished political blog that gets tens of thousands of hits each day.

A big problem with blogs is privacy. While some people — especially MySpace fans — don’t mind posting personal news, photos and videos for anyone to read, many of us hesitate to leave details about our personal lives online.

This week, we tested a new, free blogging service called Vox, www.vox.com, from Six Apart Ltd., a blogging software company. One of Vox’s best attributes is its ability to label each individual post, or entry, with a different privacy filter, so that instead of setting your blog to be entirely private or entirely public, you can pick and choose what you want to share.

Vox also excels at making it easy to add photos, audio, videos and book links to your blog without any prior expertise. It lets you incorporate content from Web sites like YouTube, Amazon and photo-sharing site Flickr in only a couple of steps. Viewing of each multimedia element can also be restricted to people you choose. Vox is supported by ads that aren’t intrusive or distracting.

We each made a blog in Vox, and updated them several times. We found the process to be quick and simple, and the results to be attractive. We liked the privacy features. But while its intentions are good, Vox has a few downsides. Its idea of making each blog post visible to different groups is useful. But everyone who views your privacy-protected entries must also be registered with Vox, a quick process, but one that will discourage many potential users.

One example of a Vox blog.

Also puzzling are Vox’s categories for labeling those who view your blog. Everyone must be labeled as friends, family or neighbors, but the filters that determine who can view your posts don’t include neighbors at all.

Vox also doesn’t do a great job of implementing many features that are standard in blog services. These features include interactive elements on a page such as drag-and-drop organizing.

We got started by signing up for Vox — a process that involved entering our email address, creating a password and URL, and entering personal information. A Design section walked us through choosing a layout and theme from numerous choices. Katie chose the Cityscape Washington, D.C., theme, which includes the Capitol and Washington Monument. Walt chose Firefly Night, which includes the moon and stars and a silhouette of a tree.

To prompt you to blog, the Vox homepage always offers a Question of the Day, or QOTD. With one click, you can optionally answer the QOTD in your own blog. When you post your answer, or enter any post, a drop-down menu lets you choose who can view it: The World (Public), Your Friends and Family, Your Friends, Your Family or Just You. If, for example, you choose to allow only your friends to see a post, other groups won’t know that they’re not seeing the friends-only post.

If you see another person’s Vox blog and would like to bookmark it so that his or her latest entries are constantly updated on a special page just for you, you can add that blogger to your neighborhood. Friends and family are automatically part of your neighborhood, but when choosing who can see your content, neighborhood isn’t an option. Vox plans to make the neighborhood concept more understandable in an updated version due out by December.

Each individual post can be made viewable by certain people to provide privacy.

We first posted some simple text entries. Then in the Compose section, we chose from five colorful icons labeled Photos, Audio, Videos, Books and Collections. Selecting each icon let us load content from our computer or from a Web site with that type of content.

In Videos Katie selected a YouTube tab, entered a search word and found a favorite scene from the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy.” She selected a thumbnail image of the scene, hit OK, and the scene loaded onto her blog moments later. No formatting or HTML code is necessary, a requirement that used to plague many blogging services.

As we became comfortable using Vox and its privacy options, we started posting lots of things: vacation photos, a country music audio file to play along with a post about two-stepping and even Amazon links to our favorite books. And unless your post or profile is public, nothing can be retrieved using the Vox search feature.

We found a few hiccups, but mostly forgot about the geeky side of blogging and enjoyed sharing our digital media. And the idea that no one else would randomly browse across our content was a comfort. But that poses another problem: Not everyone will want to register with Vox just to see your protected content. Vox hopes to offer a way to register others so that your grandmother will be able to see your family photos online just by entering a username and password.

Back on the home page of Vox, a section called VoxWatch let us quickly see any recent activity from our neighbors or ourselves. Recently posted digital photos, recent comments and recent posts from everyone in our neighborhood were grouped here.

A helpful Organize section divvies all of your content up into its proper section: Photos, Books, Audio, Videos, Posts and Comments. This section let us quickly find a comment that we wanted to reread but didn’t feel like finding on our blog, and it helped us get a better idea of everything that existed on our blog — a boon as you add more and more content. This section also displays the names of those in your Neighborhood, as well as Friends and Family.

Vox does a nice job of jazzing up the world of blogging. Its designs are attractive, but it really shines when loading media onto your posts, making your blog richer in content and more sophisticated in looks. Updates will continue to be released, improving Vox’s weaknesses, the most important of which is clarifying its group labels. Vox also plans to offer to import your content from other blogging sites, encouraging experienced users to bring their last blog along with them instead of leaving it with the old service.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com