The Gist

Now that you can surf the Web on TV and watch TV on your computer, a service like The Gist couldn't be timelier. The new site features a smattering of daily TV picks, product reviews, and program listings, but its main selling point is software that lets users enter their preferences according to time, channel, and category (sports, movies, etc.) to get a personalized viewing schedule. In its current incarnation, however, The Gist is not especially helpful: The parameters are too broad, the editorial content eyewash, and the search mechanism primitive (you can't get anywhere, for example, by punching in a name like Heather Locklear). For now, this particular marriage of TV and the Net works better in theory than in practice. C