Despite repeated attempts to compromise its integrity,
Wikipedia
remains the most popular online encyclopedia on the Web. Since anyone
can create or edit a Wikipedia page, both companies and individuals
have been caught airbrushing and embellishing their own entries. The
Wiki community usually intervenes, however — egregious edits get
reported on
WikiScanner
and Wiki trolls are given the heave ho — or at least a Wiki
humiliation. Now you can even enjoy Wikipedia's wisdom without ever
clicking on it. The Microsoft Live search engine automatically pulls up
the first paragraph of any relevant Wikipedia entry in its search
results. And a new print-it-yourself travel guide called
Offbeat Guides
(still in beta as of June 2008) culls information from the site to
create custom travel guides tailored to the exact dates of your trip.
Now that's neat.
A haven for armchair investors and money junkies,
Yahoo! Finance
has everything you need to keep up with business — news, stock-specific
research, charts, even press releases. In late May, Yahoo! Finance
resumed free real-time quotes instead of the standard 20-minute delays
on rivals like
Google Finance.
(The service had been suspended a couple years ago in a dispute with
the major stock exchanges.) Power brokers can shell out $10.95 a month
for real-time stock charting. For all the criticism about Yahoo!'s
failure to innovate, its finance site showcases the best of what the
company has to offer.
Its elementary page design has barely changed in 13 years, even as
newer, flashier competitors vie for a chunk of the $15 billion online
classified market. But so what?
Craigslist
is a Web pioneer that will never go stale, and remains the essential
site for want ads ranging from real estate and used furniture to jobs,
romance and one-night stands. Craigslist launched in 100 additional
cities this spring, making the site's services available in over 500
cities in 50 countries. To stay ahead of other newcomers with a strong
international presence — including
Kijiji,
Oodle and
OLX
— the venerable Craigslist now makes its listings available in Spanish,
French, Italian and German in some cities. This way, you can't blame
the language barrier for fumbling your "missed connection."
ESPN is synonymous with sports. Die-hard fans
come straight to this megasite for scores, schedules and analysis, then hang
around for the video highlights, games and podcasts. Over the past year,
ESPN has beefed up its fantasy sports league offerings and high school
football coverage, and it's now pulling in news from college fan sites too.
If you can't bear to leave your sports news at home, sign up for "ESPN Alerts" by text message and download small-screen videos.
If it's a restaurant, shop or business, it's probably been reviewed on
Yelp — an independent site with millions of user-submitted evaluations. Yelp's got a gaggle of rivals — most notably
Yahoo! Local
— but it's the only one that lets reviewees talk back. After businesses
complained about their reputation getting trashed by careless reviews,
this spring the site began allowing
proprietors to e-mail reviewers directly, make instant changes to their
company details on the site and see how many people have visited their
Yelp listing. For you, that means more rounded and accurate reviews.
If
MySpace is a PC, then
Facebook is a Mac. The former may have more
users, but the latter is classier and cleaner in design. Facebook also makes
it super easy to find people you know, and it has won more fans among
professionals and the thirtysomething crowd. The site has more than 30,000
add-on applications — among them, games, interactive maps and quizzes
— to bling out your personal page (or spam your friends), and a redesign
planned for later this year will restore the tidy Facebook look that the
add-on apps have begun to clutter up. If you're on the hunt for new social
networks to ply, check out upstarts
Bebo and
hi5.
Digg
Say you stumble across a news story you like. You "Digg" it, by
clicking a link at the end of the story. The more people who Digg the
same story, the higher it rises in the popularity ranking on
Digg.com,
where other Diggers can read and comment on it. While comments often
read more like rants, they serve as an excellent barometer of the
issues Web surfers are most interested in. In May, Digg announced plans
to collaborate with Facebook, to let users see which of their Facebook
friends also have accounts on Digg — as well as which stories they
Digg. Next up: a planned recommendation engine that will suggest
stories you might like based on your past Diggs. Handy upgrades like
these should help keep Digg from getting buried by competitors such as
Mixx and
Reddit.
Much more than a search site, Google has become the Microsoft of the tech
world.
Google Docs offers free
spreadsheets, word processing and presentations. Photo-based
Google Earth
now operates inside a browser plug-in, no longer requiring a lengthy
download to your desktop. You can even run Google on your mobile phone,
including the iPhone. Next Google wants to help you get more out of
your online social networks: its
Friend Connect
system, due out later this year, will make it easier to interact with
your network contacts, even on remote sites. So, for example, Friend
Connect might show you which of your Facebook friends also use the
community music site
last.fm — with your permission, of course — allowing you to share your favorite music with them more easily.
There's no better way to spread gossip than to put it online. Sure, it's tacky, rude and unreliable, but
TMZ
is the most popular gossip site on the Web because it is chock-full of
juicy celebrity
tidbits, photos and videos. Check it out — it can help your otherwise
dreary workday go a little faster. TMZ also breaks more stories on
Britney, Lindsay and the rest of the Hollywood gang than any other
gossip site. If you're still thirsting for more, you can watch TMZ on
TV (find local listings
here. Or read on at
E! Online,
Perez Hilton and
The Superficial.
Digital photo–sharing sites have come and gone, but
Flickr
has remained. It offers some of the smartest
tools for managing your ever expanding picture collection — from
Photostream, which lets you scan your pics quickly, to a newly added
video tool for pro users (who pay $25 per year). We also dig Flickr's
photo-editing capabilities provided by
Picnik.
Our quibbles: users who do not pay the annual subscription fee can
upload only 100 MB of content per month, and Flickr's Photostream
doesn't arrange newly added pics by the date the photo was taken.
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