I hate shopping. For me, the worst part about shopping is having to make a choice. And in this modern consumer world in which we live, we are faced with an awful lot of choices. In order to meet my genealogy goals, I may want to buy a scanner, a digital camera, or an ink-jet printer. How am I going to decide what to get?

Think back to the last time you bought something major, like an automobile. Didn't you go around asking an awful lot of people what they thought? You probably asked your friends whether or not they liked the cars they owned. Maybe you even bought and read a few consumer-oriented magazines, with reports of customer-satisfaction surveys. At least new car models only come out once a year, so you're not constantly faced with yet another new model to look at.

But computer hardware doesn't seem to be released on the same schedule as automobiles. And although nearly all of my friends own cars, only a small percentage own scanners, digital cameras, or other computer hardware; those that do may have older models from one or two years ago, which doesn't help me a great deal. Where am I going to go for the latest trustworthy advice about what to buy?

In the 1980s, a system known as "Usenet" was developed to allow the exchange of messages around the world. Years before the development of the World Wide Web and its Web-based message boards, Usenet was already acting as an international bulletin board, with conversations on topics ranging from politics to movies to consumer goods. Suddenly, here was a way for ready purchasers to get informed opinions about which products to look for and which to avoid. No one in your local circle of friends might hvae owned a digital camera, but on Usenet, a lot of people did and were willing to share what they knew.

As we moved into the mid-1990s and the age of the Web, one Web site decided it would be useful to archive older Usenet messages (often referred to as "news") so that people could see if they had missed any important discussions. Thus, "Deja News" was born. More recently, www.dejanews.com has become the simpler Deja.com. It is no longer a place just for the archiving of Usenet messages; instead, it is now one of the foremost places to find out what other people are saying about a wide range of consumer products.

Let's imagine that I'm in the market for a digital camera. I visit Deja.com and choose "Consumer Electronics" from the left-hand menu. A pop-up menu includes a choice of cameras, and selecting that link takes me to a screen listing of "Top Picks" in categories such as 35mm lenses, film cameras, film, and digital cameras. I now select "Digital Cameras" and I'm presented with a ranked list of nearly two hundred models!

For each model, I'm told how many people have contributed to its rating (for some models, this is more than two hundred people). I can easily add my own ratings, or I can select a product to learn more about it and to read what other consumers have said about it. I can see a detailed list of features, look at a picture of the product, and best of all, comparison shop to see which online merchant has the best price! I can select two or more products from the ranked list and have them compared on my screen, side-by-side, as to their prices and features.

More than a thousand people have contributed their opinions about digital cameras, and I have no doubt that the same could be said about nearly all of the other products listed at Deja.com. If you want to be an informed shopper for computer hardware, maybe you should stop in and listen to what your "thousand friends" have to say!

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the "Cybrarian" column (formerly known as "Infobahn"). He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.