Top 3
The "Top 3" is where the top three products from a social responsibility standpoint for several categorical lists are presented. We resent the top three because humans all seem to enjoy having a choice, but at the same time long lists of similar items tend to get cumbersome and confusing. So, we picked "3" as the number of top items to show.
- Product Rating Criteria
- Link to the criteria used to rate products.
- Data Entry Form
- Enter product rating data.
Product Descriptions
The goal is to provide product descriptions that inform as to what the product would be used for, the cost of obtaining the product and where to go for more information. It's not a goal to provide an exhaustive discussion of the product and its inner workings, but to give a starting point idea for where it might work to fill needs.
An important aspect of the product description is the "Category." Some products will fit into multiple categories. In some cases there will be a single review that describes how socially responsible a product is as a whole. Other times a product will be more than once with a review for each individual category it supports. Either of these are useful. Since the provided single word made available is not the most informative descriptor for the category, we'll give you a few definitions here:
- The product provides a location to host email. What this means is that it provides a place for email be stored when it is sent to you until it is picked up. Most of these product will retain it afterward as well if you should choose.
- Cloud
- Without getting into the details of what exactly a cloud service is, for the purposes of "Top 3" category use let's just say that the product provides a way to centrally store your information and keep it consistent on all your devices.
- Domain
- Items in this category are domain registration services. These are services for use in establishing a personal presence on the Internet.
- Gallery
- This product is used to make photos available to others for viewing. There are a number of methods for doing this and they all offer different technical strengths and weaknesses. Keep in mind the reviews on "Top 3" are focussed mostly on how well they protect UGD from gossip.
- Hosting
- "Hosting" is a service provided by companies to create a personal space for running software used in sharing information, among other things. If sharing from a personally owned computer could be thought of as living in a house, then sharing from a hosting company could be considered living in an apartment. In corollary, "free" social services would then essentially be living in government housing.
- PDC
- A "Personal Data Center" is a device specifically designed to act a data center in the home. The services provided by the device can vary wildly, but generally one can expect to find at least a files server, cloud services, photo gallery, weBLog support, site hosting support, email support and usually much more. These devices, constructed with privacy in mind, are an optimal solution to getting off the centralized social repositories.
- Site
- Today web sites have advanced beyond simply being a few HTML pages put up on the net and instead run on sophisticated software categorized as a "framework." (This site runs on the Tiki framework.) The framework dynamlically creates display layouts so that only data content need be provided. Once installed photos (or other information) need only be uploaded to the software rather than needing to take a lot of time creating a web page for each photo or collection of photos. Twitter, facebook, Google+, Flickr and many others are site frameworks. Software providing similar functionality is available for personal installation.
- weBLog
- Otherwise known as a "Blog" (Steve has a real distaste for that particular word claiming it brings visions of people just vomitting unfettered words out onto the net), this is software gives an end user the ability to post stories, articles or just their general thoughts out to share.