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Charles E. Gillman Company
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Ben Popken is an unlikely consumer crusader.

He wanted to be a party promoter, running underground music events. In the meantime, he worked at what he described as a shady online firm. To make a little more money — emphasis on little — Popken started a Web site with a scatological name that critiqued advertising campaigns.

From that perch in early 2005, Popken, 24, mocked the editor of the Consumerist (www.consumerist.com), a consumer-affairs blog, who promptly hired him as his replacement.

He now turns his vituperation on companies that treat consumers unfairly. Popken's initial impulses were to go for the sensational report like the disgruntled auto buyer who torched the car dealership and committed suicide. But in recent months, he has found himself luring far more traffic to the site with postings on how to get out of cell-phone contracts and how to reach a company's "executive customer service," which Popken says is the "ninja attack squad that have superhuman powers to resolve a problem immediately."

He said, "We were a little more tabloidy when I started."

Consumer-help features have long been staples of newspapers and TV. The Internet, however, has allowed a variation of consumer advocacy to emerge, one that taps into what Popken calls the "distributed processing power of the readership."

By that he means that not only do the readers supply a lot of the tips about corporate shenanigans, but the links the blogs have established with other blogs creates an instant network of readers who quickly hold the company up to ridicule.

Consumers are finding these sites useful to pressure companies into fixing a problem in a way that calls made to the customer service center and letters to the chief executive can never accomplish.

Information is quickly exchanged, vetted and updated. Indeed, the Web consumerism rides another trend of the general public's finding ways to tweak products or services to get something free or to make life just a little more efficient.

So if some of the advice on Gina Trapani's Lifehacker .com site seems like "Hints From Heloise" for a digital age, well, that is exactly what she intends. The Lifehacker site has explained to its readers how to download and save MP3s off music streaming sites or how to use Pledge furniture polish to fix scratches on a DVD.

Trapani was a programmer for Gawker Media, the collection of blogs that also includes the Consumerist; Gawker, a celebrity gossip site; Wonk-ette, its counterpart in the nation's capital; and the equally high-minded Fleshbot, a blog about pornography.

Nick Denton, Gawker Media's owner, began talking to her over lunch one day about lifehacking, a term coined by Danny O'Brien, a British technology consultant, for the shortcuts people take to make their life easier. Denton had registered the name Lifehacker.com and he wanted her to write a blog about hacks.

The attitude of this blog would be different from the insulting tone that Denton's blogs are famous for.

"I wanted it to be helpful, to make readers just a little more efficient," Trapani said. Many of the entries are about how to tweak the Firefox browser or the Google search box to do more than they were originally intended to do. More than 70 percent of Lifehacker's readers use the Firefox browser rather than Microsoft's Internet Explorer, compared with about 10 percent for the general population.

"We live this stuff," said Trapani.

So apparently are a lot of other people. The site, which first appeared in January 2005, got 10 million page views last month, one of the biggest audiences in Denton's blog empire. It now exceed, Gawker.com with its 9 million page views, though Lifehacker falls far short of the 30 million page views recorded by the tech gadget site Gizmodo.com in January when it covered the new gadgets displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Frugality is a frequent theme among these sites, like GetRichSlowly.com. John David Roth, a 37-year-old office manager at a Portland, Ore., box manufacturer, was an avid reader of financial self-help books when he started a blog to summarize them.

His site, which receives about 300,000 page views a month and makes him about $1,500 a month from advertising, reminds people of the simple things in life. For instance, he tells them to borrow books from the library, instead of buying new ones.

He just started another site, MoneyHacks.org, with more common-sense advice as well as links to other sites that save money, like Priceprotectr .com, which tracks price drops.

The Consumerist has its share of helpful hints. But the key to its success is that companies are now reading the consumer complaints.

When a reader related how Sprint would not let him cancel the phone contract of his recently deceased brother, a Sprint public relations representative asked Popken to put her in touch with the reader so the problem could be quickly resolved.