Tags: best internet sites
01/01/10
The International Academy of Digital Arts and Science (IADAS), home of the Webby Awards, chose the ten-best web moments of the 2000s. It's a good approach to take, to concentrate just past the primordial websosphere, since a complete survey of the internet would have dwelt on such wheel-and-fire-level developments as email, Navigator, the first online forum, newsgroups, Drudge, etc.
I thought it would be fun to list the ten best web sites of the 2000s. The criteria? I use them every day, in most cases. A couple I don't, but recognize those sites' influence. I avoided sites that promote piracy, which are really variations of a trend that started in the 90s with Napster anyways. Online dating grew in the 2000s. Again, a practice that started in the 90s.
1. Wikipedia.
Every technological advancement brings benefits and harms. Whatever derision the Internet may receive, there are two undeniable society-wide benefits to that vast series of electronic tubes: information and communication.
The king of online information is Wikipedia. Online encyclopedias like Encarta and Britannica have been around since the nineties. Wiki holds its own against those established info-peddlers. It's Wiki’s user-generated content that makes it stand out. Wikipedia has in-depth articles on important but unjustly-ignored subjects like Stargate. Does Britannica have a picture of weapons-grade Naqahdah? Want to find the third song on Debarge’s second album (“I Like It”)? No problem.
Stargate SG-1: The Complete Series Collection
Some people deride Wikipedia as an unreliable collection of yahoo-generated ephemera. My experience has been different. It's well-written and factual, in most cases. It's also pretty fair, politically and world-view-wise, which makes ideology-based imitators like Conservapedia, ridiculous crybabies.
2. eBay.
True-life situation:
I’m a squid (nerd, to the layman). I got deep into James Bond for about six exhilarating months in 2002, reading all of the books and watching the movies. One of the items mentioned in the books is a Ronson lighter. I don’t smoke, but I’m a squid: I must have one.
James Bond Ultimate Collector's Set
Pre-eBay:
I go to garage sales, look in papers or the yellow pages. Cost: gallons of gas, hours of time. Probably wouldn’t get what I wanted. Surely, wouldn’t if I lived in a small town or another country.
Post-eBay:
Search, buy, happy squid.
My wife and I have sold hundreds of things on eBay, some of which would have ended up in the trash.
Bottom line: The time saved lets you spend more time with your product and it's good for the environment.
2b. Paypal.
Now we can bypass greedy credit card companies and pay fees to other greedy people.
3. Youtube.
Like all of the services in this list, I didn't understand what Youtube quite was when I heard about it, nor did I anticipate using it. Well, at least a half hour a day, now. My friend Noel was the first person to show me a youtube video. I think it was late 2006 or early 2007. He's into Call of Cthulhu and wanted me to see this video.
H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America) by H. P. Lovecraft
4. Amazon.
Sells everything. Good service, prices. Interactive, with many competent reviews and instructive playlists. DRM-free mp3s. I can see myself using the movie service. I've also sold stuff online when I was too lazy for a full eBay write-up. When/if I get a Kindle, I'll spend even more time on it.
Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation)
5. Daily Kos.
The Huffington Post has since surpassed it in popularity, but The Daily Kos was the one that started the blog craze. It spoke for a large group of people and served as a gathering place for a large community of like-minded individuals. It birthed the term "netroots" and held real, as opposed to virtual, gatherings called "Netroots Nation."
6. Facebook/Myspace.
These two services basically do the same thing. I've included both because while Myspace was first, Facebook has more momentum, at least with people over 17. They extended the blog format to allow participants to find and acquire "friends," keeping each connected to each other and automatically updated of their goings-on.
Being mostly interested in my blog, I don't use Facebook often; however, it can do something impossible otherwise: connect me to friends of whom I only remember a name or graduating class.
Sarah Palin's "death panels" comment signaled that Facebook had become a serious influencer. Rapes, murders, suicides, child molestation, and various crimes seared social networking sites into the consciousness of even non-techies.
7. Craig's list.
I used a site called Recycler to sell things that were impractical to send over the mail, like my brother's motorcycles. Craigslist's taken off and rendered that site and the newspaper classifieds obsolete.
8. Netflix.
Another service that's greatly enriched my life. I tend to only watch movies once** so a movie collection would be a complete waste. Renting takes time and resources, if you can even find what you want. Enter Netflix. Everything I could ever want to watch- documentaries, drama, comedy- and some I don't, just a couple of days away. Could anybody have imagined such a thing just 30 years ago?
Netflix has rebuffed challenges from Walmart, Blockbuster, and disposable DVD formats like Flexplay, DVD-D and EZ-d. The former never had the homey feel of Netflix and the disposable DVDs were just dumb. Blu-ray and on-demand content will keep Netflix relevant for years to come.
**Exceptions for Lord of the Rings (Extended, of course), Star Wars, and a few others.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Extended Editions) [Blu-ray]
9. World of Warcraft.
Not a website, exactly, but influential. It's wasted more time for more men than anything since pyramid-building. It proved the viability of MMORPG and gave the green light to X-Box and Playstation gaming.
10. Google.
Google revolutionized search by ranking pages by "authority," how many other sites link to it, rather than their repetition of keywords. It's continued to grow, adding the marvelous Earth in 2005, tools that I incorporate into my classroom like Google Docs, and stuff for almost every web task one can imagine- all for free.
It's hard to imagine that the 10s will have as many breakthroughs as the pre-tens.
Tags: best internet sites, best websites ever, websites
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