Useful Websites

The web contains billions of websites, so finding a few that really prove useful in your day-to-day usage of a computer can be tough. Many of us are used to existing software packages that can perform various tasks for us, and we are set in our ways about how we get news, interact with others, or retrieve and store information. Thanks to the web, all that can change, for the better, as numerous online services compete for your attention. Here I showcase five of my favourite web sites that really act as a broad spectrum of what the web has to offer nowadays. It's by no means definitive, but the sites listed and outlined here provide functionality, information, storage, and social aspects beyond the normal for web sites. These are true online services, designed to increase productivity, and make the web more fun!

Writely

Writely (www.writely.com) is an online word processing tool. Performing all of its functionality within a browser, it allows the storing and updating of documents online. Creating an account is easy, and currently free (Writely is in beta at the minute). Writely provides a superb interface for editing documents in real-time, allowing formatting of document text, a spell-checker, and undo/redo functionality. You can upload existing documents in different formats, and it's also possible to save documents back into varying formats, such as a Word document, PDF files, RTF or Html, amongst others.

Collaboration is a big feature of Writely, and you can share the documents you write with other Writely users simply by specifying their e-mail address. Writely tracks the revisions of a document, allowing you to see the full history, compare versions etc. And it also lets you make any given document public, with a permanent URL that can be used to access a read-only version of it! It's the perfect document management tool, and with its superb editing interface, has replaced any word processing package I use. My documents are accessible anywhere, and there's no bulky software to install on my machine - it all works through a browser!

Backpack

Backpack (www.backpackit.com) is a hosted online service providing information storage and management - it lets you store lists, such as to-do lists you can check off. It lets you upload images (on the non-free accounts), store text and notes, create different Backpack pages, and make certain pages public. Recently, a calendar feature has also been added to Backpack (except for free accounts). The varying account levels range from free, allowing limited storage of to-do's and notes, up to $14 a month, allowing more storage, and as mentioned, the excellent calendar feature.

This is a relatively simple tool, but has many uses - ranging from single pages with all the notes, images and to-dos for a single event, or perhaps using your account to schedule appointments using the calendar. You could even use it to keep notes and to-do's on a project, and make the schedule and information public to other members of a team. Incidentally, the people behind this gem also wrote Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com), which is a detailed collaborative project management tool, and Campfire (www.campfirenow.com), a team-oriented instant messaging platform that runs in the browser.

YouTube

YouTube (www.youtube.com) allows users to upload and share videos, posting clips that YouTube then re-encode so that they can be watched in any browser that supports Flash or a Flash plug-in. The site allows users to tag a video so that it can be more easily searched for and found, and users can also leave comments against a video or rate it. YouTube has enjoyed massive success recently, with lots of high-profile exposure - and for good reason. They now store and index hundreds of thousands of videos, ranging from music clips, to humorous home movies, to advertisements and video blogs.

Signing up is easy and free, and the community aspect is a strong reason to get online and share videos you may have! They also provide Html snippets to allow you to embed your YouTube hosted videos in other pages, meaning it's also a versatile video hosting service. Video's load quickly on a decent broadband connection, and the site is a joy to use.

Newsvine

Newsvine (www.newsvine.com) is a news site built upon citizen journalism. It's a mix of the news that comes straight off the wire from the associated press, and articles written by its individual users. It's this mix that provides the best of both worlds. The news stories from the AP are usually without opinion or editorial, while articles written by users themselves tend to have a bias - and it's this bias that sometimes gives a much needed insight into a real-world breaking news story. On top of this, users can simply write articles about an interest or a pet-peeve, much the same way a newspaper columnist might take the time to look at a topic.

The site is grouped in to various categories, and within this there are further subcategories. Also, articles can be tagged with specific keywords to make them easier to find, and Newsvine can be "localised" as each article can be assigned to a specific region (if a user is writing perhaps about a local issue), and that article will then be found within the specific region category. Other Newsvine users can vote on stories to increase their ranking, which is how Newsvine decides which stories make the front page of a category, or indeed the main Newsvine front page - a well written article from a user is far more likely to make the front page than an ill-mannered rant. Another aspect to Newsvine is seeding, which is simply posting a link to another site, perhaps a useful tutorial, breaking news elsewhere, an interesting blog post - these seeds too can be voted on and are then shown dependent on rank.

Commenting on each article and seed is allowed, and "live chat", a kind of inline chat room for different news stories, allows users to communicate directly about stories and articles on the 'vine. Budding journalists can also earn advertising revenue for their articles, so the higher ranked they become, and the more they feature in the Newsvine spotlight, the more likely the author is to be rewarded with some well-earned payback (90% of the advertising revenue generated by an article goes to the article's author). Consider this the future of internet news.

Flickr

Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a photo uploading and sharing site. It's built around the community, and allows tagging and commenting against photos. It's an incredibly popular service, and really epitomises the "Web 2.0" renaissance that the web is currently undergoing. There are two options for accounts, a simple free account that caps monthly upload at 20MB, and only allows three sets of photos, or a pro account, costing $24.95 a year, and allowing a 2GB monthly upload limit and unlimited storage.

You can group photos into photo sets as you upload them, and then streams can be generated based on these groupings. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are provided for a users account, and for individual tags, allowing someone to subscribe to your latest photos, or perhaps all of the photo's that you have tagged with the word "holiday", for example. There are also plenty of other features for photo's, including rotating, viewing photos at different sizes, posting a photo straight to your blog, and a wealth of other tools. As well as what Flickr themselves provide, there are also a huge amount of 3rd party tools for interacting with Flickr, allowing easy bulk uploading, screensavers built straight upon Flickr photo streams, and other cool tools. It's a great way to store, manage, and view photos!

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