Some of The Top Undiscovered Web Sites [via /www.pcmag.com ]

via www.pcmag.com

Some of The Top  Undiscovered Web Sites Animoto www.animoto.com Animoto auto-generates cool slideshow videos using your own uploaded photos and music. Just select which pics you want to use (from your hard drive or sites like Flickr and Facebook), arrange them in the order you want, choose a music track or upload your own, and then sit back for a few minutes and let Animoto work its magic. You end up with a polished finished product complete with transitions and effects. Thirty-second clips are free, longer clips cost $3. Jott (beta) www.jott.com Jott is one of the coolest application of speech to text technologies we have seen. Once you sign up for a free account, call Jott on your phone and you can leave a message which will be converted to text and posted on your blog, twitter speed or to do list. The conversion is surprisingly accurate. In fact, we spoke this paragraph into jot and this is how is came out. (You can listen to the original message here.) Mux www.mux.am Mux is an excellent video conversion/sharing site that lets you enter in the URL of a video clip (or its location on your hard drive) and specify what format you'd like to receive the video in (iPod, PSP, DivX, MPEG-4, and lots more). Give it a few minutes to work its magic, and Mux will send you an e-mail with the location from which you can download your newly formatted video. PageOnce www.pageonce.com PageOnce collects your account info for just about any online account you might have and aggregates the info into a single page that looks good and is easy to keep track of. Keep tabs on your bank or investment accounts, see what's going on with your social-network profiles, check how many minutes you have left on your cell-phone plan, or even which Netflix movies are on the way. Plurk www.plurk.com This Twitter-like microblogging service goes beyond Twitter by letting users share images and video clips through their Plurk feeds. The interface is also a lot more fun to use, and guess what: It rarely crashes (sorry, Twitter). Scrapblog www.scrapblog.com Want to do more with your pics than just dump them online? Scrapblog lets you grab your photos from Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Picasa, and many more photo sites, and use them to construct cool (and free) multimedia scrapbooks. You can also use video in your scrapbooks, and the interface is very easy to use. Utterz www.utterz.com This blogging/forum service lets you post your content—whether text, audio, photo, or video—across multiple blogs and social networks. Utterz is also specially optimized for use with mobile phones, letting you update your blog from anywhere. Oddee www.oddee.com Oddee collects and archives the weird photos blowing around the Internet, broken down into Digg-friendly and easily digestible lists. Honestly, we have no idea how some of these shots could not be tweaked by a creative photo editor—except, of course, for this list of the "12 Worst Photoshop Mistakes ever." PointlessSites.com www.pointlesssites.com PointlessSites.com is itself kind of an ugly site. But beneath its circa-1995 exterior lies the ultimate portal to online time-wasting. If you need to play a silly Flash-animated game, and you need to play it NOW, this site has you covered. You can vote for your favorite finds, or check out the top pointless sites of the month. Totlol www.totlol.com YouTube is a phenomenon, but it's not exactly guaranteed to be kid-friendly. Totlol takes care of that. Actual human beings vet videos from all over the Web as suitable for kids age 6 months to 6 years and embed them at this site. I found classics like Kermit singing "It's Not Easy Being Green" on Sesame Street on up to modern VeggieTales and Wiggles and lots of obscure stuff in between. And of course, cute personal videos abound, all kid safe, all in bite-size chunks great for those kid-size (and modern adult) attention spans. TypeRacer play.typeracer.com Put your typing skills to the test with TypeRacer, which pits you against other players for the chance to win money, fame, women, and a slot on TypeRacer's leaderboard! (You actually get only one of those.) YouTomb youtomb.mit.edu There are millions of videos up on YouTube, but thousands have also been removed, and not always with the owner's permission. If any footage online can be accused of copyright violation YouTube will take it down, whether or not the accusation was justified. YouTomb, a research project by the MIT Free Culture student group, tracks the top videos removed from the service for copyright violation, and retains the metadata about the videos so we, the public, can make our own decision about whether the removal was justified or not. Atmospheric Optics www.atoptics.co.uk Atmospheric Optics is a stunning collection of pictures that illustrate the strange and beautiful visual phenomena created by light, weather, and our atmosphere. Check out photos and explanations for everything from rainbows and ice halos to nacreous clouds and anti-crepuscular rays. Exploratorium www.exploratorium.edu The Web site of San Francisco's Exploratorium is an excellent resource for kids interested in finding out how the world around them works. Like its meatspace counterpart, the virtual Exploratorium emphasizes scientific discovery through activities and demonstrations, and there is plenty of fun content to keep curious kids engaged. Damn Interesting www.damninteresting.com Did you know it's quite possible that a severed head may actually feel pain for a while, post-separation? I think that's damn interesting, and so do the editors at Damn Interesting, enough to write an 1,100-word article about it. Their goal is to "collect and dispense damn interesting facts and ideas, whether they appeared in the past, the present, or the (anticipated) future." For example, did you know a supercollider was almost built under the plains of central Texas? Or that New York almost had a subway system based on pneumatic tubes? If you find that damn interesting, visit Damn Interesting. Damn Interesting www.damninteresting.com Did you know it's quite possible that a severed head may actually feel pain for a while, post-separation? I think that's damn interesting, and so do the editors at Damn Interesting, enough to write an 1,100-word article about it. Their goal is to "collect and dispense damn interesting facts and ideas, whether they appeared in the past, the present, or the (anticipated) future." For example, did you know a supercollider was almost built under the plains of central Texas? Or that New York almost had a subway system based on pneumatic tubes? If you find that damn interesting, visit Damn Interesting. Howcast www.howcast.com Without a doubt, Howcast has the best-looking how-to videos on the Web. Perhaps better yet, the videos don't take themselves too seriously. How else to deal with topics like "How to Become an Ultimate Fighter" (quote: "embrace your failures") or "How to Get Rid of a One Night Stand" (you will need cunning and a poker face). Sign up to get a How-To Video of the Day via e-mail, as well as to be able to edit their how-to wikis, talk to experts in the community area, or upload your own videos. The user-generated stuff is okay, but the Howcast-produced vids are particularly great. WhatTheFont www.whatthefont.com Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and WhatTheFont helps you imitate the best graphic designers. To find out which font is being used in an image or on a Web site, upload a scanned image of it to WhatTheFont, or submit the URL. The service analyzes your submission and sends you the name of the font so you can use it in your own design projects. Design*Sponge www.designspongeonline.com There are lots and lots of design and DIY blogs out there, many of which are locked in an arms race to see who can find the most outlandish projects (like an antique chair reuphol-stered with thousand-dollar bills or a shower curtain made of clouds and rainbows). Design*Sponge sets itself apart in this crowded space with the practicality and doability of the projects it offers readers. As in: You and I could actually do most of this stuff and make it look great. Design*Sponge www.designspongeonline.com There are lots and lots of design and DIY blogs out there, many of which are locked in an arms race to see who can find the most outlandish projects (like an antique chair reuphol-stered with thousand-dollar bills or a shower curtain made of clouds and rainbows). Design*Sponge sets itself apart in this crowded space with the practicality and doability of the projects it offers readers. As in: You and I could actually do most of this stuff and make it look great. Tag Galaxy www.taggalaxy.de Visual representations of data are nothing new, but Tag Galaxy takes it to new heights in searching Flickr photos. Enter a single keyword (I used "frog") and you'll see a 3D representation of a solar system with the keyword as the sun, orbited by related word "planets" (e.g., "amphibian," "green," and "toad"). Click a planet to combine keywords, or just click the sun (your main keyword) to get a unique photo-sphere covered with up to 236 images pulled from Flickr. Spin it in any direction with the mouse, clicking shots for close-ups. It takes a while to surf them all this way, but makes for a fascinating time waster. Gazelle.com www.gazelle.com The big dilemma for early adopters is what to do with all that not-quite-obsolete tech gear that you've already replaced. Gazelle will pay you cash for it. Just enter the make and model of your gadget, and its condition, and you'll get an on-the-spot offer. You'll get a box in the mail to ship it in, and you're done. The service accepts cameras, MP3 players, cell phones, laptops, and much more. FriendFeed www.friendfeed.com We have stared into the social-networking abyss and it is the information overload named FriendFeed. The service aggregates all your social content and activity from Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, Last.fm, blogs, and so on. It aggregates your friends' activity, too, giving you a meta-feed of your online social life. Depending on how active your friends are, it can be a pleasant stream of sociality, or like trying to drink from a firehose. Either way, we love it. Coding Horror www.codinghorror.com Programming sites aren't supposed to be fun to read, right? Perusing a blog on the subject should possess all the excitement of scanning a page of source code. Coding Horror breaks this cardinal rule by offering up posts that, while full of information for Web programmers and developers, are also surprisingly readable for the rest of us—well, the rest of us geeks, at least. Hack n Mod www.hacknmod.com Let's face it, we can't all be Ben Heck. Fortunately, the kindly folks at Hack n Mod have developed a site that can help you build pretty much anything out of pretty much anything else. Some of our current favorites include turning a GameBoy into an iPod, turning an old PC into a functioning server, and creating your own electric bike. OhGizmo! www.ohgizmo.com All gadget blogs are created equal, right? Far from it. When you're sick of reading about the umpteenth Apple rumor, check out OhGizmo!, a site devoted to the more offbeat gadgets on the Web, from MP3 players devoted to the rock band Journey to Louis Vuitton Trash Bags. This blog shines the wackier it gets. Web Designer Wall www.webdesignerwall.com It's a touch ironic, to be sure, but it's rare to find a Web design site that's actually, you know, well designed. Featuring tips, tricks, and tutorials, Web Design Wall is chock-full of helpful tips for amateur and professional designers alike—and it's pretty nice to look at, to boot.