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Updating the annotated bookmark lists

You want me to modify one of my lists? Please read this page!

I offer several bookmark lists on this site (e.g. Java image I/O libraries, virtual machines or PDF libraries). In such a list, a bookmark entry consists of a link to some product (mostly software libraries and applications) and some comments written by myself.

I create such a bookmark entry as follows:

1. I either find the link myself or someone sends it to me.
2. I visit the page and try to find the information that will be included in the list (I always visit the page, no matter what you send me):
   • The name of the product.
   • What exactly is supported in the product (file format, operating systems, ...)?
   • If it's a commercial product — is there a trial version available?
   • If it's a free / open source product, under what license — if any — has it been put?
   • I try to avoid including product version information because I'll have to update the pages too often to stay up-to-date.
3. I update the page on the Web server.

If you are a marketing person and contact me to add or update information in one of my lists, please note that I will not use any texts sent to me for inclusion. Most of the time they claim that a product is "the best", "the fastest" or just "superior". I am not able to test these claims, and I don't want to do any benchmarking or similar comparisons. I've received mails in the past with texts from competitors who were both claiming to have the leading product — what am I supposed to do?

So please help me by sending only product information as described above. Maybe you can at the same time improve your product's web pages by checking how easy it is for a potential customer to find the information that I am trying to collect. Sometimes that is surprisingly hard, on pages that look like it cost a lot of money to have them designed.

Your average software developer can become quite annoyed when (s)he's unable to find out the basics about your product because

• the pages consist of images only and take forever to load,
• a page was deep-linked to from a search engine result page and it's impossible to navigate because frames were used and the navigation frame is missing,
• information is buried in marketing lingo or
• JavaScript / Flash / etc. are required for no particular reason.

I recently added a short text on the importance of bookmark lists.