Welcome to our fourth Best of the Mac Web survey.
We're doing things a bit differently this time.
That last two times, we ran "Rest of the Mac Web" (RotMW) surveys following the "Best of the Mac Web" (BotMW) survey. We created the first "Rest" survey to cover 40-some sites not included on the "Best" survey. We learned that some deserved to be on the "Best" survey, while others didn't.
Last time we split the list down the middle - 50 sites on BotMW; 50 on RotMW. As results of the Rest of the Mac Web survey came in, we saw that there was a lot of overlap. Some sites definitely deserved to move up.
This was compounded by a big difference in the number of votes and range of votes in each survey. The first survey had roughly 4,000 voters with sites ranging from 2,963 (74%) to 373 (9%). The "Rest" had a total of 1,183 votes, and sites ranged from 573 (48%) to 67 (5.7%).
We've decided to address this great discrepancy by creating a single master list of sites and divide it into four groups alphabetically, not by popularity or score. Instead of voting in a single 100 question survey or two 50 question surveys, you can participate in one or more of the 25 question polls.
Once the survey is finished, we'll consolidate the results for all 100 sites into a big spreadsheet, do our analysis, and publish our results.
The following sites were in the last survey but are not included this time.
The following sites were added to this survey to bring the count to 100.
As always, we ask you to only rate sites you're familiar with and skip sites you're not familiar with. You may well discover some new and useful sites that you'll be visiting regularly.
This survey is far from exhaustive; there are hundreds of Mac-related sites out there. 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.) If you think we've missed an important one, email us. We may add it to the next survey, since it's quite likely 8-12 of the sites currently listed won't be active six months from now.
Although it should go without saying, we're only looking at English language sites. If the survey were looking at the best Mac websites in Spanish, Japanese,or German, the name of the survey would be enough to give it away.
We've provided links to each of the sites so you can visit them. However, we again 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 survey. Or if you think you've found a really great new site and want to vote on it, bookmark it, visit it several times, and come back to rate it toward the end of the survey. (Please don't try to stuff the ballot box. One user, one vote.)
We try to contact the publisher or webmaster of each site, giving them an opportunity to link to the survey and have the opinions of their visitors counted. We do this to minimize bias by giving every site a chance to link. However, we were unable to find contact information on several sites, so it's quite likely that we've only reached about 80% with news of the survey prior to lauch.
This is something of a popularity contest, but we're most interested in what you think of the sites you're familiar with. This is an opinion survey, and I believe that it will fairly reflect what a wide spectrum of Mac users think of the listed sites after several thousand votes have been counted.
We have made every effort to insure that these links work and that the sites are both accessible and recently updated. Each site was visited at least twice in the week prior to starting the survey.
Here are the sites for the fourth Best of the Mac Web survey (each link will open into a new window, making it easy to come back to this page or to look at a site while taking the survey).
Because we ask voters to only rate sites they 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 below to participate in one or more sub-surveys. Please skip sites you aren't familiar with.
If you want to, you can come back and take any survey a second time. Note that this will wipe out the results of your earlier vote in that group.
We'll be collecting your feedback through Tuesday, October 22, 2002. We'll spend some time analyzing the results and hope to publish our findings no later than Friday, October 25.