Cheryl LaGuardia

PC Magazine’s Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites

If you haven’t taken a look at PC Magazine’s Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites list yet, you’re going to want to. A selection committee composed of editors, writers, and analysts at PC Magazine came up with the list, judging sites based on their “content, update frequency, design, innovation, and usefulness or entertainment value (or both). [They] compare similar sites with one another, but [they] also look for a broad range of topics and categories.”

Those categories include: Apps and Services; Fun and Games; Health and Science; Info, Search, and Reference; Lifestyle; Money and Real Estate; Music; News; Photography; Shopping; Social Networking; Technology; and Travel and Maps. I’m particularly intrigued by the Info, Search, and Reference category, which includes, among other sites: Common Sense Media (“offer[ing] detailed, clear-eyed reports on the content of movies, music, video games, and more, without resorting to rants or value judgments”), Damn Interesting (a site whose goal is to “collect and dispense damn interesting facts and ideas, whether they appeared in the past, the present, or the (anticipated) future”), glassbooth (which “tells you, after taking a short quiz, how your views line up with each [Presidential] candidate's, and why”), and my personal favorite, Criminal Searches (it “provides the scary-but-useful data on how many criminals live in your neighborhood, what crimes they were convicted of, and, in some cases, their names and personal info. It's all culled from public records, and is presented as a Google Maps mashup”).

For knock-yer-socks off beautiful images, do take a look at Atmospheric Optics, in the Health and Science section. It’s “a stunning collection of pictures that illustrate the strange and beautiful visual phenomena created by light, weather, and our atmosphere.” Truly amazing.

More as it happens, from web site to web site,

Cheryl

Posted by Cheryl LaGuardia on August 20, 2008 | Comments (0)