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Let eTour.com Show You The Sites

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Master The Web January 2001 • Vol.12 Issue 1	Add To My Personal Library
Let eTour.com Show You The Sites Sites Are Handpicked Just For You

eTour.com takes you on a virtual journey through the Web and shows you only pages tailored to your interests.

Let's face it. Finding quality Web sites tailored to your interests is a hit-and-miss game. Some sites you come across and bookmark may disappear tomorrow. Others may be poorly designed and difficult to navigate, while many more will remain forever hidden from you—lost among the hundreds of millions of other sites on the Web. You could easily spend hours or even days tediously trekking through the Web and its hodgepodge of keywords, subject matters, facts, and statistics in search of online content that appeals to your individual tastes.

Sure, a good search engine can help you narrow down your field of online choices, especially if you already have specific content in mind or know the name of the company whose site you're looking for. The trouble is that search tools typically rely on keywords to find related Web sites that may or may not fit within your topic of interest.

Directories work a little better at narrowing the field of available sites to a specific topic because these humans handpick Web sites and organize them into appropriate subject groups. Even so, clicking your way through headings and subheadings to find a variety of interesting, high-caliber sites that you can add to your bookmark list can get confusing and tedious.

That's where eTour.com comes in. Unlike search engines and traditional directories, eTour.com escorts you through the Web on a virtual expedition that includes the popular, the unknown, and the just plain weird—all of which are tailored to interests, hobbies, and tastes you choose when signing up for the free service. Once you log on to eTour.com's home page, sites begin to appear one at a time in your browser window: just click a button on eTour.com's navigation bar to advance to the next randomly chosen site. Imagine relaxing in your chair and clicking through Web sites like you surf through your favorite television stations, and you get the idea.

The eTour Package

eTour.com lets you select the topics that interest you. The corresponding sites and categories are then lumped together and presented randomly during your tour. This method of perusing Web sites is familiar to anyone who has sat in front of a television, remote in hand, for an evening. Like channel surfing, there's something undeniably entertaining and addictive about the prospect of not knowing what will appear next on the screen in front of you. Will it be a humorous site devoted to obsolete and outdated U.S. state laws, a technology-news site, or the strange CornCam site that features live shots of an Iowa farmer's cornfield?

Like a directory, eTour.com's database is full of handpicked Web sites. The company's editors regularly review their list of sites to remove old links and pages with outdated content. New sites are added daily to eTour.com's database, which contains tens of thousands of Web sites separated into various categories—enough so that eTour.com can guarantee you won't see the same Web site twice in 30 days of touring.

According to the company's Editorial Policy, editors choose sites based on usefulness, entertainment value, timeliness, and ease of navigation. They also add sites to various interest categories to coincide with current sporting events, news stories, and holidays. These sites are then discarded when the subject is no longer timely. In addition, some sites pay eTour.com to move up in the rotation of Web pages that users see for a given category, but the sites must still pass the editorial review to be included on an eTour.

Booking Your eTour

On its Web site, eTour.com states that its goal is to impress visitors from the get-go with interesting, unique sites devoted to their interests. We wanted to see for ourselves how well eTour.com lives up to this promise. So, we signed up for the service and embarked on a few tours.

Signing up for eTour.com takes only a few minutes. Click the Sign Up button on the home page and a second page will appear instructing you to select your interests and hobbies. This page is organized into nine categories—Hot Picks, Arts/Entertainment, Hobbies, Living, Miscellaneous, News/Information, Personal Finance, Shopping, and Sports. For our eTour.com sessions, we chose several interest topics including Humor, Crafts, Science Fiction, Video/Online Games/Trivia, Downloads/Shareware, Technology/Internet, and Gardening, from a variety of categories.

Check out timely articles, eTour.com staff and e-mail customers' favorite sites, and the latest live Web events on the eTour.com member's page.

After selecting your interest topics, you will need to complete a short online form with your name, e-mail address, ZIP code, your eTour.com password, and other personal information, some of which is optional. Once you have filled in the form, press the Submit button. (NOTE: On its Privacy Policy page, eTour.com states that it will not share your personal information with any third parties without your permission. However, anonymous information, such as surfing habits and demographic data, is used by eTour and may be shared with other Web sites.) Click the Submit button and you'll see a pop-up screen with options for making eTour.com you browser's start page, bookmarking eTour.com, or logging in and taking an eTour.

Touring The Sites

Once you begin your eTour, a site from one of your categories will randomly appear on the screen. The first stop on our initial eTour was a cool online-gaming site called Pogo.com. We could see from the information in the address field of the navigation bar (which eTour.com places at the bottom of your browser window) that this site belonged in our chosen Video/Online Games/Trivia interest topic. Next, we were off to The New York Times Technology page, then LocalBusiness.com for a little Technology/Internet news. From there, eTour.com introduced us to such sites as makestuff.com for our Crafts interest, Videogamereview.com for another dose of gaming information, and the Learn CPR site for our SelfImprovement interest. We finally disembarked from our tour at Body, Mind, & Modem, a Martial Arts interest site.

You can take tours of sites within interest topics you didn't choose when signing up through eTours Surf by Interest page.

All told, we visited 27 sites during our first tour and viewed interesting, easy-to-navigate pages appropriate for almost all of our chosen interest topics. Subsequent tours contained other interesting sites, all of which were also targeted to our chosen interests. Some sites were devoted entirely to the particular interest category, while others opened to specific Web pages within the larger site, such as eBay's craft-related auctions and mySimon's Home & Garden page. However, all the sites eTour.com showed us were right on the mark for the corresponding interest category.

Expedition Extras

The TourBar, a one-inch-thick navigation bar that appears at the bottom of your screen after you log in, can be a minor distraction from the content in your browser window. However, we liked the fact the company chose not to increase that distraction by including those annoying, flashing ads found on many navigation bars for browsing services, and this made overlooking eTour.com's rather big navigation bar easier.

eTour.com makes good use of the space at the bottom of the browser window, though, and includes all the buttons you'll need for using the service's interface. Just choose Email This Site to send a site's Web address to a friend or click the News & More option to display bookmarked pages, news, local weather, and sports information. You can select the Shopping button for lists of eTour.com shopping sites organized into various categories, click the Edit My Interests button to change your list of chosen interest topics, or choose the Surf by Interest button to surf sites in any of eTour.com's specific interest topics. In addition, you can vote for or against sites that appear in your eTour by clicking one of the Rate It! buttons on the navigation bar. When you do, a pop-up window will appear showing you the cumulative results of all the votes that site has collected from eTour members.

For a break in your eTour session, check out the member's page by clicking the Home button on the TourBar. Here, you can check out how other eTour.com members rated sites in the Site Seeing page and stop by The Water Cooler, a weekly eTour.com section featuring links, articles, and other information about timely topics, sporting events, holidays, and other subjects.

From the member's page, you can also access and view your current TourPoint total, which you can redeem for merchandise from CompUSA, CDNow, Borders.com, and other eTour.com partners. You need to earn at least 3,000 TourPoints before you can order merchandise. The company helps you out a bit by giving you 300 TourPoints just for signing up and 20 points for each of the first four new sites you visit every day. You can also get extra points for referring the service to your friends.

If you ever forget to bookmark an interesting page, eTour.com will let you review your past tours using the TourBar's Site History button. Want to find that cool site you visited the other day in an eTour.com session about b-movie monsters or classic Atari games? Maybe you would just like to review the sites you toured last week. In the Sites History section, you can easily get a complete rundown of the Web site addresses and names of all the sites you've eToured during the past 21 days—an especially nice feature for revisiting some of your favorite sites.

eTour Wrap-up

eTour.com is not the first or the only online resource trying to match up Web surfers with appropriate, interesting sites. Smart Computing's online Directory Of Web Sites, Dotcomreviews.com, and Netsurfer Digest, an e-mailed e-zine, for example, post reviews of and recommendations for a variety of Web sites in different subject categories to help online viewers find good sites with good content.

What makes eTour.com different, though, is the undeniable entertainment value that comes from anticipating the unknown. If you want specific online content, search engines and directories are still the best way to go. But if you're looking for a little old-fashioned channel surfing fun through Web content tailored to topics you care about, give eTour.com a try.

by Lori Robison

Tips For Using eTour.com

Check out special travel offers, your daily horoscope, and your personal stock portfolio performance or get a list of members-only deals matched to your chosen interests. Just click the Home button on eTour.com's navigation bar and choose the Travel Deals, Member Deals, Horoscope, or Stocks icon to make your selection and view the content.

Changing your subscription status for eTour.com's various e-mailed lists is simple. Just click the Home button on the navigation bar to access the member's home page and press the Your Account tab. Click the GO! button next to Change Email Subscription Preferences and select your subscription choices. Click the Submit button when you're done.

If you click a link to an outside site while navigating one of your tour pages, the eTour navigation button will disappear. To return to your eTour session, click the Back button on your browser until the navigation bar reappears or select a favorite site that you've added to your Web browser's bookmark list from previous eTours. To exit an eTour, just enter the Web address of an outside page in your browser's address field.

You can conduct a search of the Web while staying within your eTour. Select the News & More button on the eTour bar and click the Search button in the pop-up window. Enter your search term and press the Search button. eTour.com will direct you to the Looksmart search engine and directory service, which will display your search results. You can access any page or explore directory categories in your search results while keeping your eTour navigation bar visible at the bottom of your browser window.

eTour.com Fact Sheet

While surfing the Web one day, Roger Barnette, president and CEO of eTour Inc., came up with the idea of a service that would introduce people to Web sites containing content tailored to chosen topics and interests. As a result of that idea and with the help of co-founders Richard Carrano, Jennifer Bonnett, and Jim Lanzone, Barnette created eTour.com in 1998.

It didn't take long for word of the service to spread and attract large groups of subscribers. With the help of advertising, branding, and partnerships, eTour.com now boasts more than 3 million subscribers and signs up 15,000 new subscribers each day. The service is also listed as one of Media Metrix's top 500 Web sites.

eTour.com operates through the combined efforts of 150 employees working in offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, and New York. The company's board of directors includes Jeff Arnold, founder and CEO of WebMD, and Taylor Glover, senior vice president of the Private Client Group with Merrill Lynch. Since its inception, eTour.com has raised more than $37 million through site-placement fees, partnership agreements, and third-party investments. In addition, the company's service is featured in products and services from WebTV, NBCi, and eMachines.

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