50 Coolest Websites of 2006 or 5 Really Cool Sites

Times has compiled a list of 50 coolest websites for 2006 with some ridiculous entries like human clock, which shows a different photo for each minute of the day, being categorized under News & Information, instead of Time Wasters. The only information it provides is photos with specific time of the day. Not just the mis-categorization, I don’t think it should even figure in this list. The more interesting part is that Human Clock’s link appears to be a referral link - https://www.humanclock.com/?s=1, unlike other links on the same page. There are other questionable entries too which makes me wonder whether their criteria for coolness was merely a random selection made in drunken frenzy or something more sinister, but I digress. Of their 50, I think 5 of them are really cool. Read on more about them and why I think they are cool.

Digg - A popular technology news site which uses humans (readers) to filter out better news stories. It overtook SlashDot in 2005 according to Alexa stats. However I think these days the overall quality has declined and a virtual newsroom mentality has set in with the top 50 or so contributers getting to contribute most of the front page stories. Digg may have diluted the original intent in their mad rush to expand into all categories, but it first tried a beautiful concept of democratization of newsroom.

TailRank is a news filter which filters stories frm blog and news sites. It also allows customized filters. It is what I consider better ones of the first generation of news filters, others being Google News or Topix. The key challenge is relevancy.

Google Spreadsheets is a high quality spreadsheet program for the web. I had good experience using it. It may actually turn out to be an Excel killer.

YouTube is a popular video sharing site which news scribes hound when news are slow to come by. The recent licensing makes them somewhat unattaractive to video submitters as YouTube gets lots of rights on your video. Overall YouTube is nice if you are hosting your baby videos, but not for professionals. I still don’t get their business model, but apprently Maryanne M. Buechner of Time does.

McAfee Site Advisor is a free Firefox extension which warns you of spyware, spam, viruses and online scams. I think it is a good product. Unfortunately Internet Explorer needs it much more than Firefox.

Now that you have read it you can safely skip their laundry list.