These are sites we thought were interesting or unusual in some way, and might prove useful and amusing to our readers.

  April 2008, Week 3

CoverPop.com  contains collages of hundreds of magazines, books, album covers, video cover art, YouTube videos, musical instruments, and on into the night. What you see is a screen that looks like a mess of stuff dropped on a floor. When you hover your mouse pointer over any of the tiny pictures, that picture expands. If you click on it you get more information and sometimes a link to where to buy it. We had fun with the collage of Sci-Fi magazine and MAD Magazine covers. This is a fascinating site. 

-- Coudal.com  is another fascinating site. Click on the “Museum of Online Museums” for a look at some really odd museums. We bet you haven’t seen the Museum of Old Soviet Radios, the Virtual Absinthe Museum, the Museum of Fred, the Big Things of Canada, the Gallery of Nurse Novels, or the Museum of Japanese Vending Machines. Of course you might have visited the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, but in case you missed it, you can take a look here.  

March 2008, Week 3

• Jdsupra.com is a free web service for downloading legal documents. You can read detailed lawyer and law-firm profiles, including their area of primary practice, education, awards and memberships, court filings, decisions and more. According to web research firm ComScore.com, more than 44 million people use the Internet to research legal cases and look for legal services. Many use Westlaw.com and LexisNexis.com, which charge hefty fees.
• MyPhotoPipe.com  was pointed out to us as a low-cost source for large photographic prints. A 20 x 30 inch color costs $23; 48 x 96 inches (that’s four by eight feet!) is $200. Comments from professional photographers have been good.

March 2008, Week 2

March 2008, Week 1

• SmithMag.net  publishes six-word summaries by people explaining their lives or key moments therein. Some examples: "Saved by women's magazines. How Bazaar." "My ex had a better lawyer." "Sixties hippy chick finally grows up." "Shook family tree; nuts fell out." "Down for maintenance; be back soon." You, of course, can log on and submit your own. The company has published a book of what it thinks are the 832 best summaries, but you don't have to buy it. Our own six-word summary: "Stop us before we write again."

• WYWH.mobi  stands for "Wish You Were Here," and what it does is mail postcards with the photos you just took on your vacation (or just hanging around home, if you prefer). You send in a photo straight from your cell phone and the address it should go to, and WYWH turns the photo into a postcard and mails it. Cost is $1.99 per card; cheaper in bulk.

February 2008, Week 3

January 2008, Week 2

•  iBakeSale.com  has made arrangements with more than 400 retail businesses to return a portion of an individual's purchase money to charity or community groups that register on the Web site. Most of the retailers are well-known, like Starbucks, Nordstrom, Macy's, Gap, Wal-Mart, Brooks Brothers, etc. As the shopper, you can list which organization you want the funds to go to, and then purchase things normally. You can elect to keep some of the cash-back reward for yourself. It takes 30 to 60 days for your cash-back to become available.

• The FranceRadio.net site we recently recommended for downloading free music seems to be "hors de combat," as the French might say. In other words: it's not up there and working anymore. Was it something we said? Could be. Because within a couple of days of our reporting that you could download music here for free, boom, they were gone. We'll keep checking to see if the site returns. In the meantime, you might try Skreemr.com, using Real Player, which lets you download music.

•  iBakeSale.com  has made arrangements with more than 400 retail businesses to return a portion of an individual's purchase money to charity or community groups that register on the Web site. Most of the retailers are well-known, like Starbucks, Nordstrom, Macy's, Gap, Wal-Mart, Brooks Brothers, etc. As the shopper, you can list which organization you want the funds to go to, and then purchase things normally. You can elect to keep some of the cash-back reward for yourself. It takes 30 to 60 days for your cash-back to become available.

• The FranceRadio.net site we recently recommended for downloading free music seems to be "hors de combat," as the French might say. In other words: it's not up there and working anymore. Was it something we said? Could be. Because within a couple of days of our reporting that you could download music here for free, boom, they were gone. We'll keep checking to see if the site returns. In the meantime, you might try Skreemr.com, using Real Player, which lets you download music.

• FormSpring.com  has a free, simple way to add a survey form to your Web site. It provides the templates and you fill in the fields and questions you want covered. Just click on the "Build" tab to build the form. You have to go to the FormSpring Web site to see the responses to your form in the free version. Paid versions have more form templates and send you results by e-mail.

• Economist.com/charts  is a section of the famous news magazine's Web site that presents extremely interesting charts that do not appear in the magazine. For instance, we learned that most Europeans hold a job for 10 years, while most Americans hold one for four years. We also learned that despite new cars being more fuel efficient, gas consumption in the United States is as high as it was in the 1980s. A large part of the reason is the increase in sales of heavier vehicles like SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles), vans and trucks, which get poor gas mileage.

October 2007, Week 2

·     DigitalBhoomi.com  is a classified ad site similar to CraigsList.com, but restricted to cities in India. Choose a city and select a topic, like jobs, things for sale, marriage proposals, etc. Marriage proposal ads may seem like an odd category but it’s quite common in Indian publications.

·     Amazon.com has entered the MP3 music download field with more than two million listings for 99 cents each or less. This all started with Apple but it is open season now and we can expect more listing services.

October 2007, Week 1

• Podanza.com  is a free audio and video search engine with links to programs from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fidelity Investments, The Economist magazine, etc. You can watch and listen through your Web browser or download the programs to portable media devices like the Apple iPod, Sanyo Sansa and others.

• Video.AOL.com has a tab that offers you a choice of a number of full episodes of popular TV shows. Examples include "Desperate Housewives," "Ugly Betty," "Dancing With the Stars," and many new shows making debuts in October. The service is free.

September 2007, Week 4

• WhereIveBeen.com  is a web site that lets you click on places in a world map and add that graphic to your FaceBook  or MySpace profile as well as to blogs and other web sites. It’s sort of a picture of where you’ve been in the world. About three million Facebook users have chronicled their travels this way.

• AudisseyGuides.com  offers walking tours with a jazz beat. You can download  tours for some major American cities  and  hear turn-by-turn directions on your iPod or MP3 player as you stroll. The narrative is delivered by hip locals who seem to have been instructed to act really cool. There’s a jazz background and we found the whole thing rather too precious for words. Ah well, anything to be different.

September 2007, Week 3

• Accuweather.com/astronomy  is a new feature with star charts and a sky photo of the day. Enter a U.S. location, and it gives you information on the night sky from there. You can also get free hour-by-hour weather forecasts for any U.S. location.

• Body.AOL.com has tips on nutrition and fitness. Includes celebrity diets, memory exercises, a calorie burn calculator, etc.

• MyPhotoAlbum.com  offers a free Web site with templates for making photo albums. There are many sites like this, but since it's free, there's no harm in taking a look.

August 2007, Week 1

  Video.AOL.com is a new AOL service that delivers videos. In fact, it has 20 million of them, and the e-mail giant has already started drawing 8 million visitors a month. Check out the video of 1,500 prisoners in the Philippines doing a take on Michael Jackson's "Thriller" dance routine. We guess you could call it "The Thrilla From Manila."

   Lumosity.com  has three online games designed to improve your memory and reasoning powers. If you've had enough crossword puzzles and Sudoku puzzles for the moment, you can have some fun with these new games. The bad news is the site wants you to sign up for $80 a year. But there is a free trial.  

·  ConfidentialityWizard.com  creates nondisclosure agreements that match the specifications you outline by answering its questionnaire. Cost is $99 for as many as you want. (Our favorite nondisclosure agreement goes like this: If you don't tell us about it, we can't disclose it.)

   HeathPricer.com has lists of drug prices, supplements, contact lenses and other health products and where to get them cheaper from Canada. No trip abroad is required, since you can order them online. We liked the fact that the site gave you the price per package and per pill. All the prices we checked were cheaper than ordering the same things from Drugstore.com, a major U.S. online drugstore service.

  PriceGrabber.com nlhas a new "green" category that steers you to environmentally friendly products. Joy ordered a skirt made from hemp. Hemp fabric has been made since at least 8,000 B.C. There's also recycled office furniture.

June 2007, Week 4

SciAm.com/podcast  is a site run by Scientific American magazine. Along with a lot of other information they carry audio podcasts describing recent developments in various fields of science. Depending on your Internet connection, the podcasts may take a minute or two to come in, so it’s best to minimize the site and do something else on the computer while they’re loading.

SeinfeldScripts.com  has all the scripts for eight years of the Seinfeld comedy show.  Our favorite is “The Marine Biologist.” 

June 2007, Week 2

·  Eons.com describes itself as a web site for those "on the flip side of 50." We especially like the travel section, which featured the new cantilevered glass walkway stretching out over the Grand Canyon. The Fun section has games like Sudoku, crossword puzzles, Scrabble, trivia questions, etc. The Groups category is where you can join special interest groups, meet new people, create a blog and so forth.

·  Whfoods.com  discusses the World's Healthiest foods and provides recipes using them.

May 2007, Week 2

 Wize.com  has a search routine that hunts for user comments for thousands of products. It searches more than 6,500 Web sites and ranks more than 30,000 products by user satisfaction and media buzz.

   This is pretty much the way we all shop: We ask someone we know what they use and like, or we look up published opinions. But we've mentioned the problems with this before. Some songs of praise may be coming from people connected with the manufacturer or people who know a friend who works there. Some critical opinions may come from people at competing companies or someone bearing a grudge. It's always a judgment call, and common sense should be applied.  

April 2007, Week 4 

 Marketocracy.com  lets you create a portfolio of stocks and trade and track them. Joy has read the two books Bob wrote on investment software and advice but didn’t really get into it until she bought some virtual stocks through this web site. (She’s up 5 percent in the first week.) You can invest up to $1 million of virtual money. If you create a dud portfolio, dump it and start over. (Some brokerage firms also allow you to create test portfolios and track them, by the way.)  

 ·  81Nassau.com/apnews  brings up a map of the United States showing the locations for recent news stories from the Associated Press. Click on a city or town and you can read the story.

·  DuctTapeGuys.com  will take care of any free time you might have by telling you about dozens of things you can do with duct tape. You'll learn how to make a wallet or a tie or pants or a dress out of duct tape. Duct tape gowns and tuxedos were all the rage for high school proms a couple of years ago. You can make a munchies bowl in your car by taping a plastic bowl to your cup holder. Tape the box to the back of your "page a day" calendar and you have a place to put the torn-off sheets you want to save. Ah, the myriad uses of duct tape. Comes in colors too.

 ·  Classes.Cnet.com offers free classes on using Vista, the basics of wireless, digital cameras and many other subjects.

 February 2007, Week 3

1.) FastFoodMaps.com  provides maps showing outlets for the 10 largest fast food chains in the United States. For example, El Paso has 106 of them, while Chicago, which is roughly five times the size of El Paso, has only 266. The map provides addresses and phone numbers. This kind of information is critically important if you have a sudden Big Mac attack or are traveling with children.

2.) SkiBonk.com  provides maps of ski resort locations in the United States and Europe. Click on a site and you'll see the current snow conditions, lift waits, temperatures, etc. It also has comments on whether the natives are friendly and photos for some places.

February 2007, Week 2

   At Stardoll.com  you can move clothes around on models. This is the Web site equivalent of playing with paper dolls, but the dolls you play with are pictures of celebrities like Cameron Diaz, David Hasselhoff and Beyonce. You drag and drop clothes onto the models from closets on the side of the screen. The site is aimed at children aged 7 to 17 and has visitors from many countries, about a third of them from the United States.

February 2007, Week 1

   For $10 a month, HappyNeuron.com promises to train your brain for high performance. Each time you log on, your digital trainer suggests games that help you improve logic, concentration, language and spatial skills. We tried some of them and felt a little smarter afterward. Of course, we couldn't go anywhere but up.

    YSN.com  stands for "Your Success Network." Once you've got your brain power up, you can read some career advice and self-assessment tests. The site was founded by Jennifer Kushnell, best-selling author of "Secrets of the Young and Successful -- How to Get Everything You Want Without Waiting a Lifetime." There are lots of career areas to inquire about, and when you go to them, you can read advice from people who actually work in that field. Many of these felt their college education had little value and experience was what mattered most.

 January 2007, Week 5

 1. We found several Web sites that let you send out nice-looking party invitations and decided we liked Evite.com best. Second choice was MyPunchbowl.com. The main difference was that Evite has hundreds of finished e-invitations you can customize with your photos or theirs, and MyPunchbowl has the same basic template into which you drop clip-art or photos.

   Both services are free and allow you to send out decorative invitations by e-mail and collect responses. Invited guests can leave comments when they reply. With Evite, they can also see who else has replied and who will be there. With MyPunchbowl, a map and driving directions are included with the invitation.

2. BabelFish.Altavista.com is one of the oldest multi-lingual translation sites. We tried new ones like Fox Lingo, a plug-in for Firefox, and found BabelFish was still the best. It will translate Web sites or any text you paste into a window, between many languages, including French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Dutch, etc. The translations are far from perfect and sometimes nearly nonsensical, but if you work at it you can sort of figure it out. The service is free.

 January 2007, Week 3

 ·  OnlineNewspapers.com. Our previous go-to site for newspapers online was ecola.com. We know, it sounds like a disease, but that's spelled with a "b." This new site has hundreds more newspapers than we could find before, including 22 of them from Azerbaijan, for example. Who knew they had so many newspapers?

·  AmericanFolklore.net. You can find a lot of the classic tall tales here, like stories about Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill. There are four categories: Tall Tales, Myths and Legends, Spooky Stories and Children's Stories. Under this last category there are even tongue twisters, like: "I wish to wash my Irish wristwatch." There are also bedtime stories to read to your children.

January 2007, Week 2

    1. AskSam is a well-known and well-regarded random access database, but the company also operates a Web site, askSam.com, that lists hundreds of databases, each divided into areas called "Surf Reports." Each of those reports, like "Science," "Health," "Biographies," "Government," etc., has links to dozens of sites related to that topic. Think of it as a bibliography of pre-screened Web sites.

   2. Travelistic.com lets you explore the world through short travel videos. Most are supplied by advertisers and tourist bureaus and have little feel of what the place is really like. But a few are created by individuals who actually know the area. We really liked the ones by a young woman who shows you a bit of what Newport Beach and Palm Desert, Calif., look like. She was as charming as the Travel Channel's popular Samantha Brown.

December, 2006, Week 4

   BobVila.com is a how-to site for home repairs, construction and crafts projects. Bob Vila himself used to host "This Old House," a home repair program on public television. What interested us most about this site is the section called "My Projects," where people show off their personal projects and describe how they did it and what they used.

December 2006, Week 3

 ·  WorldStart.com will deliver free computer tips to your desktop either daily or weekly. For instance: You can open Windows' Task Manager by right-clicking anywhere on the task bar (blue bar at the bottom of the screen) and see what's running and what you might want to stop. If a menu on your screen freezes up, you can clear it with a right-click of the mouse anywhere on the desktop; select "refresh" from the little menu that comes up.

·  Epocrates.com  has detailed information on more than 3,000 drugs, their use, side effects and possible conflicts with other drugs. The Web site says that about 65 percent of people who visit a doctor's office leave with a prescription, and it is often a wrong one. That could well be; last year we saw the results of a study that found medical mistakes were the fastest-growing cause of death in America.

 December 2006, Week 2

  ·  Spymac.com  has approximately 1 million registered users, making it easily the largest international online community for Mac owners. The home page has 50 links to news stories about Apple, and in one of them we learned to our astonishment that about half of all Mac users are 55 and older. (We would have guessed that it was overwhelmingly young people.)

·  OnlineIdols.com  is set up like the TV show "American Idol." You compete by sending a video of yourself singing, dancing or playing an instrument. There's a new contest every month. Each winner gets $400, and presumably some attention for his or her talent.

December 2006, Week 1

·  GreenTortoise.com: We went searching for cross-country luxury bus trips, and what we found instead was the Green Tortoise. Luxury, it's definitely not, since those who have ridden the tourist trail described sleeping on the bus each night, or the ground, if you have a sleeping bag. The feel of it was definitely "young people." But it sounded like fun, and it was fairly cheap. The Tortoise has several trips that cover different parts of scenic America.

·  HostelWorld.com: And as long as we're on the no-frills travel tour here, HostelWorld.com has suggestions for eco-tourists. There's a wind-powered Hobbit Hole in Ireland, an Icelandic hostel with geothermal swimming, a working farm in England that runs on bio-fuel and wind power, and a state-of-the-art tree house hostel in the Philippines. They have others, and the hostel scene is no longer just for young people.

·  http://blog.fotolog.com The Daily Flog is a new blog put together by a former photo editor at the New Yorker magazine. There are some awesome photos of thick lightning bolts in Australia.

 November 2006, Week 4