Just took a quick look at the new Zrecs Guide. Very impressive! Love the look and how easy it is to use. I’ll be sending the link to all my mommy friends. Thanks for doing the research!

Wow, this is an amazing guide!  Is there a place to ask questions?  I’m annoyed that there are pthalated in my Burts Bees stuff!  I’m guessing its in the fragrance?  How can you tell its there, is it just by asking the company?  Will you still have a section talking about the company’s practices and reliability like on the other guide?

We decided to exclude the company profiles for this site in favor of the product-by-product confidence ratings. We do report on what companies are up to in posts, and maybe we need to do more of that kind of content - we certainly enjoy writing about companies and our assessments of where they stand on issues that matter to us. But for the ZRecs Guide we decided that what mattered the most was making sure parents had the best information we could get for each individual product.

As for your question about Burt’s Bees, yes, we just ask - and ask, and ask, and ask. Our focus now is on specialists within companies who develop products or are professional PR managers who have detailed information at their fingertips or the power to get it, and understand the potential consequences of failing to live up to consumers’ expectations for transparency on these issues. We avoid relying on information from sales divisions, and if we can’t get any further than customer service departments (which is the case with a few companies) that fact is reflected in a lower confidence rating for many of their products.

RE; browsing the guide:

In Interner Explorer, I can’t get the scroll bar to function properly on the custom drop-down box.  It only works in Firefox for me.

I’d like to suggest that you cover children’s vaccines.

Yeah, I know that’s a potential minefield.

But vaccines are children’s products that are injected directly in our little ones’ bloodstreams, often against the parents’ wishes.

I am not “anti-vaccine”, BTW, just against the current schedule and the current lack of information and choice.

My own experience was that I was given a sheet of paper to sign, listing only MILD reactions as possibilities--and then my child had a SEVERE reaction (that the pediatrician eventually had to report to the CDC), but the nurse initially told me that nobody had severe reactions to the shots.

I was also told that the current schedule mandated 2 MMR shots, when the manufacturer of the MMR claims that 1 confers lifetime immunity.  We asked for a bloodtest for our child before the second shot, which showed that he did indeed have 4 times the number of antibodies required to show immunity.

I found http://www.nvic.org a good place to start with research--and it’s very interesting what a different picture they show (with lots of research quoted) than the picture the pharmaceutical industry paints.

I just wanted to add that I do apologize if this is the sort of thing you just can’t get into, and feel free to delete my suggestion if you fear it will get you into trouble.

I’m running Mac OS 10.5.5.  The drop down boxes don’t scroll for me in Safari 3.1.2.  They appear, but clicking the scroll bar or arrows closes them.  They do work in Firefox 2.0.0.13.

Wendy and TJ, thanks for letting us know - we’re looking into these issues. TJ, can you tell me what operating system and what version of IE you’re using?

Alison, no apology needed. I do think it’s a bit too far outside of our area of expertise, although we do take an interest in the issue.

This listing is fantastic!  Thanks so much for doing all this work.  I’ve gone through the whole list and gotten many ideas for my 4 month old and feel confident in the choices I’ve made for my 3.5 year old. 

My initial expectation was to see one complete listing of all brands per category (one giant scrolling page).  It took me a bit to realize that only the first brand in each category was being displayed.  Could you add a View All link to the list of brands at the top of each category?

When you add new products or make updates, will I have to go back through the entire database again to find them?  Or will additions and updates be highlighted in some way to make them easier to find/notice?

Glad you like what you see, Wendy! We have fiddled with the listing format to try to make it clear that you are only seeing one brand at a time (or one product area at a time, when you’re browsing by brand). Our concern with making a “show all” a default setting or a feature was with load times… in some cases (bottles) that would mean 75 listings on one page, and that’s just at launch - we expect to be building out this database even more in the weeks and months to come.

Your question about updates is a great one. We had planned on posting on Z Recommends when we had added new brands or categories, and will probably batch updates in that way, but I hadn’t thought about a way to show if we had added individual items or tweaked a rating. We’ll look into that for a version 2.0 of this database (we have some other pretty fun features in mind), which we hope to get to in the spring.

Hi there, Anxious to take a look at the new guide!!  ZRecs has been a lifesaver for us with our 15m old.

BUT...I am also having trouble with the drop down boxes - can’t scroll past what is initially displayed.  Not sure what technical info you need - we’re running Windows Vista (I know, our own issue ;) and internte explorer.

Thanks!!

This is so cool and helpful! I also have to say that I really appreciate you guys always being cool-headed when it comes to these issues that affect our kids.

Hi,
Thanks for this guide, I’ve found it invaluable since my baby was born. I just finished a little video story about my frustration with my baby’s toys, check it out at http://www.mediamamas.net/blog.html/2008/09/arsenic-and-crab.html

Sorry, put in wrong link, it’s at
http://www.mediamamas.net/blog.html
or permalink
http://blip.tv/file/1285141/