Dan Knight - 2002.03.05
The breadth of the Mac Web is astounding, including hundreds of sites ranging from a few hobbyist pages to fully staffed online publishing operations. It's like finding a newsstand with hundreds of magazines you've never even heard of before.
Welcome to the third Best of the Mac Web (BotMW) survey. This twice-a-year survey gives you the opportunity to rate the Mac sites you're familiar with and possibly learn about some you weren't already familiar with.
We've given a lot of thought to the survey since November, and we've decided to limit the Best of the Mac Web survey to 50 sites. We will follow the BotMW survey with a Rest of the Mac Web (RotMW) survey covering another 50 sites a week after this survey.
We began the current list with the 40 best rated and best known sites from the Fall 2001 survey. Then we added some sites that did very well in the RotMW survey and also added one new site: Your Mac Life.
Note that this survey is far from exhaustive; there are hundreds of Mac-related sites out there. Even adding the Rest of the Mac Web survey to the mix means we're covering less than half of the Mac-related sites out there, but we are trying to cover the better known ones. (For more, see Methodology: Best of the Mac Web Survey.)
We've provided links to each of the sites so you can visit them. However, we ask that you only rate sites you were familiar with before coming to the survey. If any of the "new to you" sites become personal favorites, you'll have the opportunity to rate them in the next BotMW survey. (Please don't try to stuff the ballot box. One user, one vote.)
We have tried to contact the publisher or webmaster of each site in the survey, giving them the opportunity to add a link to the BotMW survey and have the opinions of their visitors counted. We do this to minimize bias by giving every site a chance to link.
This can't help but be a bit of a popularity contest, but mostly we want to know what you think. This is an opinion survey, and I believe that it will fairly reflect what Mac users think of the listed sites once several thousand votes have been tallied.
Here are the sites for the third Best of the Mac Web survey (the link will open into a new window, making it easy to come back here or to look at the site while taking the survey).
Because we ask voters to only rate sites you are familiar with, the Best of the Mac Web survey measures how well known a site is and what those who know the site think of it. Click here to participate in the survey.
If you want to, you can go back and take the survey a second time; this will wipe out the results of your earlier vote.
We'll be collecting your feedback through Tuesday, March 19, 2002. I'll spend some time analyzing the results and hope to publish our findings by Friday, March 22.
We'll launch the Rest of the Mac Web survey the following week.