Hello there! My name is Toasty Wooferson, the first community manager for Consumer Notebook. What does that mean? Well, it means my job is to make you, dear reader, interested to be here on the site as a happy user.

Let's go over a quick list of what I've got in the works to make your experience more engaging:

• Change the 'create comparison grid' permission to 20 points. Right now it is at 70 points and I think everyone wants to take advantage of that permission as soon as possible.
• Create leader boards for points, coins, and badges. I plan to have them based on weekly scores as well as total aggregate score.
• Getting Audrey and Danny to look into that facebook avatar issue that a few people have mentioned.
• Expand the FAQ and Help pages and add a terms of service to keep cats away.
• Help select featured comparison grids to get infographics.

Enough business, now it's about me!

I was born and bred here here in Los Angeles, California. My pedigree is quite sound and my ancestor, Bergère, came over to the North American continent in 1809. I first got involved with Consumer Notebook when they used me as a model on the front page and as the avatar place-holder. Audrey and Danny took a liking to me, and offered me a job. The conversation went kind of like this:

Audrey and Danny: Blah Toasty, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah? Blah blah good dog blah blah blah blah bones blah blah blah blah blah going to the dog park. Blah blah blah blah?

Me: Can you send it via email? I have trouble understanding you humans when you talk.

So they sent me an email and the offer was much more clear:

Audrey and Danny: Hey Toasty, would you be interested in a job as the Consumer Notebook community manager? We'll pay you 10 bones an hour plus benefits including tummy rubs and going to the park. What do you think??

Well, my course was clear. Consumer Notebook is a startup created by MIT/NASA alumni, so you know it's going to be incredible, not to mention the incredible pay (10 bones an hour!!!). I said 'wuff' and days later Consumer Notebook launched.

Follow me here on the blog, on my twitter account, and of course, follow me here!

I confess: I'm a Black Friday shopper. I'm one of those consumers who holds off on major purchases until Black Friday every year.

(I'm not a crazy shopper who'll pepper spray you or yank boxes out of your hands, don't worry.)

But I was reading about how some families postpone Christmas in order to be able to shop for presents during the Day-After-Christmas sales, and that made me think, "Why don't I do those sales, anyway?"

So I did some research. The following list of the differences combines my first-hand knowledge of Black Friday with all the things that I've been reading on various forums.

Black Friday

• Certain name-brand items are on sale at every store. This year, the hot Black Friday item was the Xbox 360. You could get an Xbox console plus one game for the price of what would normally be just for the console.
• Those same name-brand items are also available at the same discounts during Cyber Monday.
• The fact that these highly in-demand items are so deeply discounted means that you'll have to camp out and fight for them if you go for Black Friday rather than Cyber Monday.
• A lot of popular but lower-quality electronics go on sale. You have to be careful, because sometimes retailers are just clearing out stock of items like tablets with quality issues.
• If you're shopping for clothing, this is the time to score big. Many stores have 15-75% off sales. I personally like to shop for dresses at some of the nicer outlet stores during Black Friday, just for this reason. Go to specific clothing stores rather than big box all-in-one stores for clothes, though. The deals at the big box stores are for electronics, not clothing.
• Often, retailers jack up prices on non-sale items to make up for the loss leader costs. You could be saving $50 on that new camera but overspending by $100 on the necessary camera accessories.
• Lots of bait-and-switch ads. You could be waiting in line to get one of only 20 $29 microwaves, only to find that they're sold out. Many shoppers will give in and purchase a $49 microwave anyway, since they've spent so much time waiting in line.
• The best bargains are from midnight to 5am. Certain stores that open at 9pm on Thanksgiving will offer an extra 30% off from 9pm to midnight. The earlier you make it to the stores, the more you'll save. For many stores, it's hardly worth going on Friday after 12pm.

Day After Christmas

• Very hard to find the high-demand items. This is true particularly for certain children's and teen items, such as game consoles and the season's most popular toys. Electronics too: if you're looking for an electronics deal that you missed during Black Friday, don't bother because it most likely will be out of stock.
• Retailers are desparate to clear out certain overstocked items.
• The deals at the big box stores are best for housewares and appliances. Some may have good bargains on clothing or toys, but only if they haven't been picked bare already.
• Holiday decor and candy are often 50% off. Check out Home Depot or Lowe's for lights, yard decor, artificial trees, lanterns, and poinsettias. Go to Walgreens, CVS, or your local grocery store for Christmas chocolates.
• Look out for stores that are liquidating. Check your local papers. A few years ago, K.B. Toys closed right after Christmas, and all toys were 40% off.
• Bookstores often have good sales, I hear.

I hope to hit those Boxing Day sales this year and see what happens!

Over the past couple of weeks, we've been brainstorming ideas about how to make the site more useful. The most interesting idea we came up with was to add infographics to comparison grids.

Why Infographics?

Large volumes of numbers in a space can make it hard to relate to data unless you are a subject matter expert, making it meaningless to most people. An Infographic however, allows the communication of complex information quickly and clearly. Good examples include sparklines in use by stock market analysts to display the range of value activity for a target corporation in a duration, giving traders the ability to scan larger amounts of information faster than before.

Infographics don't replace the need for spreadsheets and tables, but they do make the data they represent easier to comprehend and share.

The same goes for Consumer Notebook. We are very proud of our comparison grids, and giving users the ability to create their own comparison is a pleasure. Yet we recognize that Infographics are a more attractive way to display information then our beloved tool.

What Consumer Notebook is doing with Infographics

Our plan is to feature a new comparison grid each week, and create an Infographic for that grid. We'll build the Infographic based off the information you place in the grid, and then share it with the world. You can see what we plan to do by taking a look at Audrey's Demystifying the Tablet Offerings comparison grid:

Demystifying the Tablet Offerings

In this case, Audrey made this comparison grid and the associated infographic. As we stated earlier in this post; in the future, we plan to honor the best comparison grids our users make to create infographics. If your grid is selected for an Infographic we'll do the following:

• Create an infographic and put it at the top of your comparison grid.
• Give you the highly demanded Infographic badge.
• Feature it in our blog.

A lot of comparison or product sites make their money by including various ad-links. We don't want that kind of site, and we've got what we think are some very good reasons why:

Ads take up screen real estate.

You know how it is, a site seems useful but in reality all you get to read is a tiny column of text. The rest of the site is advertisements. Which means the site really doesn't have that much content. Consumer Notebook is all about useful content to help you make educated decisions about purchasing whatever you might want or need.

Ads can make you wonder if you can click on anything.

Ever been to a ad-filled site and clicked on a link to a potentially interesting page that redirected you to a site full of pop-ups that took forever to close? Odds are you never went back to that site, right? Well, our tack is by not having advertisements we can keep that sort of thing away from your research efforts.

Ads make you worry about the validity of content.

We aren't paid spokespeople for anyone. Neither is our target audience. We are real consumers, not individuals who are writing or saying things from a script. You don't have to worry about us being influenced by whoever might be paying us to advertise their product on consumernotebook.com, because that isn't going to happen.

Danny and I have been stealthily working on Consumer Notebook for the past month or so. The site is basically a cross between Yelp and Consumer Reports. We've always had a hard time comparison-shopping for products, and Consumer Notebook tries to fix that.

Here are Consumer Notebook's key features:

Product comparison grids

You can create a side-by-side comparison of several products and save it to your account. You can also view other people's comparisons.

Visual wishlists

Interactive but user-friendly lists of products that you want.

Inventory lists

Track what you own.

Amazon.com and Best Buy price comparison

Find the lowest price without having to wade through prices from shady merchants.

Well, we hope you like it!

It's going to be a good site, we think! If you have any ideas or suggestions about how to make it better, definitely let us know.

Hello! We're the team behind Consumer Notebook: http://consumernotebook.com.

Keep watching this blog for updates from Audrey and Danny! Or is that Danny and Audrey? I don't know, something like that.