Webware

A site that's slipped through the cracks of our coverage is Time Inc.'s upcoming service Maghound. It's best described as a cross between a beer-of-the-month club and Netflix.

For a relatively low monthly fee, you'll be able to pick out certain magazines you want to receive, and they'll show up on your doorstep for you to read and dispose of. If you like something, you can simply keep receiving it, while replacing less-liked titles with new ones at a much lower price than it would cost to go out and buy them at the newsstand. Each plan can also be scaled up to higher tiers, meaning that you can continue to expand on your read publications while experimenting with new titles.

According to Folio Maghound is opening up for business in September, also known as back-to-school time for high-school and college students. The site's reportedly been in development for four years, all the while the company's been tweaking the distribution and billing system.

It sounds like it's been worth the wait, if only for privacy. The service will act as a proxy for your billing information, meaning that even if you're subscribed to 30 magazines, only one company is going to have your information--Maghound. This could theoretically keep it from being sold to other companies, something nearly all publications have done to bring in an extra stream of revenue.

The company also has an inside track to your tastes and the tastes of others. It has the potential to build in a recommendation engine like what Netflix has to tell you magazines you would like or not like, based on what you've thought of your past orders.

Of course, the results won't be nearly as deep as Netflix, which currently has a library of more than 100,000 titles and a veritable arms race between teams of statisticians and software engineers to build better algorithms. Maghound is starting out with just less than 300 magazines (published by companies ranging from Time Inc. itself to rival Conde Nast) from which to choose. There will be "premium" titles, which cost a buck or two per month, something not found on Netflix.

I'm eager to give the service a look when it launches. I think there's a real potential to grab folks who want to save some money but not commit to certain titles. There's also a nice possibility for publications that tend to have better seasonal content, such as cooking and video game magazines, to get a few more subscribers at critical times.

A helpful search for my favorite hard-to-find brew.

(Credit: BeerMenus)

BeerMenus.com, I've been dreaming about you at night. And now you've jumped into my world. We're a match made in heaven.

Here's how it works. Much like a boozier version of Menupages, BeerMenus aggregates bars' beer lineups so that you can search for a particular establishment or for a particular beer to find out where it's on tap (or bottled) and for how much. For those of us who prefer their beer to be a bit more esoteric than Bud Lite or even Stella Artois, this is a godsend. I searched for my favorite variety, Allagash White (a delightful Belgian-style white ale brewed in Portland, Maine), and BeerMenus gave me a list of ten establishments where I could find it along with a Google Maps mashup.

For even more hops-and-barley fun, BeerMenus indexes special events at bars as well. That's something that Going, Upcoming, Yelp, and their socially prolific brethren already handle, but it's still a nice feature.

The nifty little site, which just launched Thursday, currently only extends to New York's prolific bar scene, and within that, it still only has about 150 Manhattan bars' menus available. And unfortunately, at the moment I'm across the country in San Francisco so I can't actually do a field test. I'm guessing it's generally accurate, but beer menus do tend to shift around more frequently than food menus do--that's an area where social-networking features like comments and reviews could help.

But really. Think about what could happen if this expanded: frequent travelers could learn where to find their favorite brews in unfamiliar cities, or learn where they can try out a nice pint of a regional favorite. The site also has plenty of room for recommendations, discovery features, and reviews--like a Snooth for beer.

You'd never have to drink a crappy beer again.

"Nerds!"
--Ogre, Revenge of the Nerds

Since the dawn of time (or at least the 1980s), avid computer users have been ridiculed for lacking social skills and an ability to party.

But anyone who has seen the documentary Real Genius or seen the schools featured on this list of top college pranks knows otherwise.

Nerds do party. They just party efficiently. That's why these drink-deal locators exist: to help us find cheap drinks between here and the nearest library.

Nationwide sites

UnThirsty: This is a Google Maps mashup that lets you search for happy hours, food specials, and drink specials in real time. It also tells you which places have outdoor seating and Wi-Fi hot spots.

MappyHour: Here is another Google Maps mashup, which lists drink specials and happy hour info for bars across the United States.

Regional sites

DrinkDeal.com: A bar-special finder for New York City and Brooklyn. I tried searching for local specials in San Francisco, but it didn't work out so well.

DrinkGuru: Has a lot of information for Washington D.C. bars, and it appears to be expanding to include other big cities as well.

CheaperDrinker.com: Helping Minnesota's Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, and St. Cloud areas stay warm through creative uses of Jagermeister specials.

Thrifty Hipster: Another fine resource for Minnesotans, especially in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

Canadian sites

The Ontario Beer Hunter: For our friends up north, a site that gives icon-based locations for all beer stores, wine retailers, and independent microbreweries throughout Ontario.

Swivel is a data visualization service that lets you add your own data sets or search from a large pool of public submissions. If this sounds boring, it shouldn't. It's actually kind of fun and very similar to browsing Flickr. Data is presented in several ways, from pie charts to bar graphs to scatter plots. You can also easily tab over in any graphical chart representation to get the raw chart numbers. Where was this when I was in college?

Charts come in a variety of colors on Swivel

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Most of the content on Swivel is fairly bland, such as the prime loan rates for banks, but there are also some fun charts there, such as the amount of money spent on lobbying and the percentage of alcohol in various brands of beer. Users can comment on any data set and rate it as well. Swivel also keeps track of chart views and viewer interest to promote popular charts to the front page.

It's free to host your data on the site if you want to make it public, but if you're using Swivel for business purposes, there's a fee. I'm not really sure who will want to use this service outside of stats junkies, but I can easily see the value of Swivel to students who want easy-to-understand, searchable charts and stats for term papers.