I came across this list a couple of weeks ago, but it is a really interesting one so I will share it with you guys. Basically the Telegraph (a British newspaper) compiled a list with the 101 most useful websites around the net, divided into technology, entertainment, advice, house and home, social, shopping and travel.
Here are the 10 websites included under technology:
It’s no secret: great ideas make the web spin around.
Community-based sites and web applications are rapidly becoming hot property. Young entrepreneurs are making startling amounts of money with simple ideas that connect people and places. Fancy becoming one of them?
The dream is a simple one: with careful planning and some spare time, someone just like you can take a smart concept, add some glitz and make a fortune. But where have all the hot ideas gone? Why are we seeing spin-offs, rip-offs and mash-ups instead of great new concepts? Where are all the rubies in the dust?
It turns out, they’re right where you’re standing. You just need to look a little harder. Here are 11 under-represented site ideas to steal today and make you rich tomorrow. Be quick! The clock’s already ticking.
The mini pitch: “Buy and sell work online.”
What it is: You know all those job boards you see littered around the web? This is a job board flipped on its head. Think of it as a “work wanted” board. Instead of employers posting job offers, this is a place for service providers to post requests for work.
How it works: Designers, developers, writers, and anyone else wanting work can post their request, together with the percentage or fixed fee they’d pay to someone providing a lead.
Why it’s hot: More people than ever are turning to the web as a source of work. Sometimes it’s very hard to find it, or very time-consuming to browse offers and make pitches. Wouldn’t it be great if people could find work for you? And imagine getting paid just for referring someone you know who needs a new website or logo design.
Where the money is: Take a commission when work is successfully placed, or charge a monthly fee to either buy requests or see contact details.
The mini pitch: “Yahoo Answers for website owners.”
What it is: A place where website owners can pay for advice and get opinions from a wide community of experts, dabblers and end-users.
How it works: Website owners use credits to post a screenshot with a link to their site, together with a list of their goals. Community consultants give advice, and credits are dished out between them accordingly. Credits can be cashed in or spent on questions.
Why it’s hot: Opinions and advice are essential to improving your site. This concept would shift the balance from whopping consultancy fees for one person’s opinion to micro-payments and group-thinking. It also puts a value on your own opinions and sagely advice at long last!
Where the money is: Website owners buy credits. Perhaps it costs 25 credits for them to submit their site for community consulting. You could take 5 credits, and get them to spread the remaining 20 between those who respond.
The mini pitch: “Wikipedia for arguments”.
What it is: Arguments litter every forum and web hangout. They’re very rarely controlled, and scarcely intellectual, insightful, or conclusive. There must be space for an online debating site that was well-managed and moderated.
The nearest I’ve seen is Squidoo’s “Hey Monkey Brain,” but I’m sure there’s space for more.
How it works: Suggest an argument. Pick a side. Build your case. Encourage the responses of others.
Why it’s hot: Everyone loves expressing their opinion. Your task is to help them do it in a controlled way, and one that you can monetize!
Where the money is: There’s a possibility that people would pay a small fee to start a debate, but it’s far more likely that most of your income would come from affiliate sales and carefully matched advertising.
The mini pitch: “Your online butler.”
What it is: Ever wanted to achieve something online, but couldn’t be bothered to spend ages searching around or filling in all those forms to book flights and cinema tickets?
How it works: You make a request by email, text or voicemail to your online butler. It could be anything at all — perhaps, “two tickets for Die Hard 8 at my local cinema tonight”. Your butler dutifully acts on your request. There are automated services that help with this out there already, but an efficient, human-powered offering would stand head-and-shoulders above the rest.
Why it’s hot: Outsourcing and personal virtual assistants are hot topics right now. A market-leading web concierge service could be big business. Think of all the high-fliers, entrepreneurs, and other busy people out there. You could start one service for the super-rich end of the scale as well as one for other busy folks with less cash to splash.
Where the money is: Monthly subscription fees or per-use charges are the way to go here.
The mini pitch: “Buy it now on steroids.”
What it is: Online auction sites are great, but few of them capture the same adrenalin rush and buzz that you get from a real auction room. I think there’s still space for a well-executed live auction site that makes listing and bidding super-simple.
How it works: Imagine a list of iPhones for sale — you can only bid on the one at the top, and it’s only available for minutes instead of days. Bids are live and backed by escrow, and when the top item’s been sold, the ones below float upwards and a new item becomes active and open to bids.
Why it’s hot: As a seller, it’s becoming increasingly complicated to list things online, generate buzz, and make a quick sale. A simple live online auction site could solve all that.
Where the money is: Make it free to list and just charge a commission for successful sales. You need to think carefully about how you’ll guarantee that all bids (and items!) are genuine. This could be by asking users to deposit funds into their account prior to bidding, or some other way.
The mini pitch: “Swap skills instead of bills!”
What it is: An online hub to swap your skills for those of others. Instead of paying for services, you simply swap your own.
How it works: Need something doing? Post a “help wanted” ad, together with a list of your own skills and examples of your work.
Why it’s hot: There are thousands of highly-skilled designers, developers, writers, illustrators, musicians and other talented folk littered across the web. But right now, there’s no good way to connect them. Provided you offer a way to mediate any disputes, and ensure that trades are fair and backed by guarantee, a skill trading site could be big business!
Where the money is: Charge monthly fees, or a smaller fee per swap request. Or simply charge for hopeful applicants to get contact info.
The mini pitch: “Sell anything with a barcode. Fast.”
What it is: Do you have a stash of books, games, DVDs or CDs lying around that you’re not using any more? It seems a shame, doesn’t it? A site or piece of software that enabled scanning of barcodes using a web camera in order to quickly list books could save hours and make megabucks.
How it works: Sign up, scan your books and name your price. Job done! This could work as a website, or it could be a standalone application that linked in with something like Amazon’s Marketplace.
Why it’s hot: Thousands of people have stacks of unused books, games and other items. They’re just too lazy to list them! That’s where you come in.
Where the money is: Take a small commission of book sales. (Or charge a flat fee for the software if you go the stand-alone app route.)
The mini pitch: “The web’s reading list.”
What it is: A community reading list for the web. Feed readers are great, but they’re not very sociable, and adoption by non-tech heads is pretty poor. What the web needs is something that everyone can use and understand — an internet reading list!
A site that combines reading, archiving and sharing is long overdue, and would be much more accessible a concept for your technically-challenged friends and family.
How it works: Ever come across a great article, but didn’t have time to read it? You could bookmark it, but you’ll probably forget about it pretty soon. Wouldn’t it be great if you could mark a page to “read it later” and have it stored in an online reading list?
Then, once a week, you could take an hour out of your day and read through everything, tag it with categories, and check out the week’s charts of the most-read items.
Why it’s hot: Feed readers are hot. Community-based sharing of links is hotter. Combine the two concepts for an explosive mix! Yes, there’s a Firefox plugin that does this, but we need something with wider reach.
Where the money is: This is another concept best exploited via advertising. Who says advertising isn’t a good basis for a business model? It’s worked rather well for Google and Digg seems to be doing OK too!
The mini pitch: “What’s your house worth right now?”
What it is: A live house price site backed by a powerful data-model, where house prices are overlaid on a map. There are already sites that do this to some extent, and the market is crowded. But if you could put out the first site to offer truly live, by-the-second house prices you’d be swimming in cash.
How it works: The data modeling would be very complex. You’d have to rely on a community-based element to correct your prices, and build a reliable estimation system based on previous house sales, local trends, market effects and the opinion of your users.
Why it’s hot: Every home owner loves to know what their place is worth. For property investors with large portfolios, the opportunity to track the value by-the-second would be incredible valuable. Furthermore, estate agents could probably benefit from a people-powered market index to help with their own sales and estimation.
Where the money is: The possibilities to monetize this concept are endless. Think private house sale commission, affiliate sales, estate-agent and property investor subscriptions, advertising, community ads, and more!
The mini pitch: “Your ad anywhere. Right now.”
What it is: A network of billboards, news stands and projectors linked to a single website that allows regular people just like you to place adverts in public spaces. Think of the “one million pixel” site but outdoors.
How it works: You register, upload your advert, choose a location, hit go and see a live webcam feed of your ad displayed in any public space in the world.
Why it’s hot: The cost of billboard advertising is prohibative to most small businesses and individuals. A public, global, mini-billboard network of ads for regular people and businesses that updates at the click of a mouse could earn megabucks. Make it work, and I’m sure Google would want a word with you too.
Where the money is: Simply charge a flat fee or monthly recurring cost to place an ad. You could split your electronic billboards and projectors into small segments, or sell the whole space or network to one advertiser.
The mini pitch: “The place to buy and sell websites.”
What it is: If you’ve got an established website to sell, where do you go? There is still no clear-cut market leader in this field. What’s stopping you from filling that gap?
How it works: List your website for sale at either a flat fee or auction rate. Include screenshots, traffic, pagerank and earnings info and watch the money roll in!
Why it’s hot: Domain name sales are big business. But selling a website for what it’s really worth, or buying an online property in a trusted way is still rather tricky.
Where the money is: Take a commission from successful sales in return for offering escrow and listing services, or charge for each listing.
The gaming niche is characterized by its haves and have-nots. You’ve seen Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Joystiq, 1UP and the others, but what about the great, lesser-known gaming sites?
This post introduces 18 great gaming sites you might not have seen before. Whether you’re looking for freebies, music, laughs or oddities, there’s something here for occasional and hardcore gamers alike.
1. Overclocked Remix is a community hub of users who painstakingly remix and arrange video game music. There are thousands of tracks available for download. If you like the soundtrack to your favorite game, you can bet it has been remixed and reworked here.
2. The Freeware Indie Games Database offers just under 1,000 play-tested freeware titles from independent game developers. The games here are innovative and unique. Some of them are bound to be re-developed as Wii titles.
3. POKE is a light-weight utility that allows you to cheat in almost any single player game, whether it’s already published or to be published in the future.
4. The Daedalus Project gets into the minds of MMORPG players. The website’s author has surveyed over 35,000 gamers and provides a detailed break-down of his findings in areas such as the player life-cycle, making friends and status reversal. It’s fascinating stuff.
5. Gaming Magazines of the Pre-Internet Era is a treasure trove for retro gamers. It links out to .PDF databases of old and out of print gaming magazines.
6. The Grand List of Role Playing Game Clichés is a list of 100+ painful clichés any RPG fan would have encountered before. My favorite? The No! My beloved peasant village cliché: “The hero’s home town, city, slum, or planet will usually be annihilated in a spectacular fashion before the end of the game, and often before the end of the opening scene.”
7. GameCakes is the website for people who love cake and video games. These game-themed cakes run the gamut, from the bizarre to the majestic. The scrumptious photos will have you baking your own cupcakes in no time.
8. CrazyPC is the hardcore gamer’s place for computer accessories. All the neon, case mods, plexiglass, tubes and coolant fluid you can poke a memory stick at.
9. VGMusic is host to 24,000+ midi versions of video game tracks from all your retro favorites: Megaman, Mario, Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, et al.
10. Build Your Own Gaming Computers is a website dedicated to helping you… well, you can probably guess. Gaming rigs sell for thousands of dollars and learning to build your own can save you lots of cash. This website provides advice on the entire process, from choosing parts to installation.
11. Abandonia offers thousands of abandonware DOS downloads. Abandonware essentially means games which aren’t sold anymore, prompting their release into the public domain. They’re the games you might have owned and loved as a child or teenager. Chances are you’ll find some old favorites here.
12. Jay is Games sources out the best casual games and brings them directly to you. The blog’s authors sure know their stuff and their opinions are worth listening to. Subscribe to their feed for a daily stream of gorgeous, idle distractions.
13. Old Grandma Hardcore is the blog of a foul-mouthed, lovable gamer grandma (with the pictures to prove it!). No, we’re not talking Brain Training and The Sims — we’re talking games like Bioshock and The Darkness. This grandma really is hardcore!
14. Insert Credit is a multi-author Japanese games and culture blog specializing in breaking news from the land of the rising sun.
15. Replacementdocs is an online archive of .PDF game manuals for thousands of popular games. If you’ve experienced the frustration of losing the manual to your favorite title, replacementdocs should have a solution for you.
16. Wonderland is an odds-and-ends gaming blog mainly known for its cool gamecrafts. From Darth Vader backpacks to Quake coasters, this blog is proof that gamers are an arty bunch.
17. The Speed Demos Archive is host to hundreds of videos documenting the efforts of those dedicated individuals who’ve conquered games in the shortest time possible. Watch epic games like Half Life 2 and Icewind Dale beaten before your lunch-break is over.
18. The System Requirements Lab analyzes your computer, benchmarking it against the minimum requirements of a specific product. Ever wondered if your computer can handle that gorgeous new release? Now you’ll know.
Update: Here are some more great websites that you might not have seen before, suggested from our readers:
The web is home to a treasure-trove of free culture. Thousands of artists, writers, film-makers, poets and illustrators craft impressive creative works and share them freely online, in the interests of making their work accessible to as many people as possible. We thank them for that.
In this post, I want to highlight a booming segment of the online free culture movement: graphic novels.
Each link will take you to a page where you can download or view a high quality graphic novel or excerpt freely and with no strings attached.
There are plenty more to be found, but these seventeen are some of the best you’ll find.
1. NYC2123 is a graphic novel designed for the Sony Playstation Portable, though it can easily be viewed as an image slideshow on any PC. It’s a B&W cyberpunk story, set on a post-apocalyptic earth. There are currently 6 issues available for download.
2. Fell #1 by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith follows Detective Richard Fell, recently dumped in the roughest part of town and forced to try and stay afloat amongst the decay. Like many graphic novels, this one is heavy on the dystopia and will please anyone who likes their characters dark and morally ambiguous.
3. Crossing Midnight Vol. 1: Cut Here is a fantasy meets Asian horror story of two twins born under strange circumstances. It’s set in present day Nagasaki, Japan, and is bound to please fans of J-Horror.
4. Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile asks the question: what if classic fairy-tale characters were banished to present day New York?
5. Deadman Vol. 1: Deadman Walking follows the journey of a man struggling to solve the mystery behind his own death.
6. Salamander Dream is the whimsical story of a girl and her salamander spirit friend. The print version of the novel was named one of the best comics released in 2005 by Publisher’s Weekly.
7. Y: The Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned is the story of Yorick Brown, the last man alive in a world inhabited only by women.
8. Meanwhile is an interactive comic from Jason Shiga — kinda like a much cooler version of those Choose Your Own Adventure books you read as a kid.
9. The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes, written by best-selling Sci-Fi author Neil Gaiman, chronicles the story of Morpheus, Lord of Dreams.
10. The War of the Worlds graphic novel adaptation is available freely online courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.
11. DMZ Vol. 1: On the Ground is the story of an embedded war journalist trapped in the war-zone that is now New York City.
12. Outside the Box chronicles the dangerous adventures of a bored dotcommer drawn into events much larger than himself.
13. Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Crawling From the Wreckage twists the group of superheroes stereotype on its head.
14. Indefensible Positions is a modern day story where magic and myths are real.
15. Hellblazer: Original Sins follows the early days of John Constantine, a British occultist with murky morals who is often forced to save the day.
16. Chaos PhD is a finely crafted and off-beat homage to the Silver Age of American comic books.
17. Swamp Thing Vol. 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing tells the tale of an unlikely hero: a swamp creature forced to fight against the destructive influence of a corrupt and decadent human-kind.
Google’s got a way of keeping its users uptodate with latest on content. And that extends right from the most compelling links to the very doodles that appear on the home page. The Doodles (the Google logo) have a very interesting history in themselves – having been produced for the first time in 1999 by Sergey and Larry themselves after they attended the Burning Man Festival.
And the oodles have gone all the way from the commemoration of Louis Braille’s birthday to the once-every-122-years Transit of Venus. And the man behind the Google Doodle, Dennis Hwang does the doodles only as a small part of his job as Google’s International Webmaster.
You could also go ahead and send in details on any event that you feel needs to be reflected on the Google home page.
And if you’ve noticed recently, Google’s present doodles are ‘in-the-making’ holiday doodles. Click on the image and you are led to a page with a set of holiday images and quizzed on what to expect next.
Another first from Google I think, doodles for a doodle in the making. Its the face of the company to the world and it reflects the real-time dynamism that has made it the powerhouse of the Web.
People stabbing each other (in real life) for magic swords (inside an online game); men kidnapping a top player to steal his game password; a girl that dies after playing her favorite multiplayer game for several days in a row….
It is a crazy (virtual) world, what can I say! Below you will find the 6 most bizarre online gaming incidents in history:
1. Lengend of Mir 3 player stabs fellow gamer to death
Back in 2005 Qiu Chengwei, a 41 years-old Shanghai resident, stabbed fellow gamer Zhu Caoyuan repeatedly in the chest, causing his death. The reason? Zhu sold the “dragon sabre,” a weapon that they won jointly in the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game).
According to the China Daily, Qiu Chengwei went to the police first, but after being told that virtual items were not protected by law, he decided to make “justice” with his own hands.
Qiu Chengwei received a life sentence.
2. Brazilian gang kidnap top GunBound player
Earlier this year four Brazilian men, with ages between 19 and 28, developed a plan to steal the game password of a GunBound (an online multiplayer game) top player. The objective was to sell the game account on the Internet for $8,000.
The first step was to get the girlfriend of Igor, head of the gang, in contact with the GunBound player. They accomplished that via Google’s social networking site Orkut, which is extremely popular in Brazil. After exchanging messages for a couple of days, the girl asked the boy to meet her at a shopping center.
He went, but instead of the girl he found Igor waiting for him, armed with a gun. They took the GunBound player away, and here comes the bizarre part. After five hours of interrogation at gun point, the boy was still determined to not reveal his password, so the four men released him.
The boy went to the police, who arrested all the gang members.
3. Girl dies playing World of Warcraft
Back in 2005 a Chinese girl nicknamed “Snowly” died of exhaustion after playing the MMORPG World of Warcraft for three days in a row. She was preparing to kill the Black Dragon Prince, other players explained, hence why she had no time to rest between the game sessions.
Interestingly enough, her fellow game players held a virtual funeral inside the game, as reported by Yahoo News China.
4. Teenager arrested for stealing virtual furniture
A couple of weeks ago a seventeen year-old boy stole almost $6000 worth of virtual furniture in the online game Habbo Hotel. Habbo is a virtual world where people can create houses and other scenarios, but the items need to be purchased with real money.
The company alleged that the boy, with the help of some friends, created a website to lure other players into revealing their passwords. After that it was just a matter of logging into the game and transferring the furniture into his own room.
It would be a perfect crime, except that the police (the real one) was called and the boy was arrested.
5. Belgian Police decides to patrol Second Life after virtual rape case
The details about the case were not revealed, but two Belgian newspapers reported early this year that the Belgian Police would setup an in-game patrol unit to investigate virtual rape incidents.
Absurd as it sounds, the event spurred a myriad of discussions around the web, from sexologists arguing that even virtual rape can be a traumatic experience to online gamers that wondered the technical details that enabled a virtual rape to occur in the first place (in fact it is hard to conceive how someone would not be able to simply turn the computer off…).
6. A plague ravages World of Warcraft
In the middle of 2005 Blizzard introduced a new area to its popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The boss of the area was able to cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which was supposed to infect and cause damage to all the players nearby.
Contrary to what Blizzard planned, however, the players remained infected even when they returned to their towns, contaminating pretty much everyone around them. The plague spread through the game servers and thousands of players died.
Blizzard manage to create quarantine zones within the game, and shortly afterwards it introduced a “cure” for the infection. Despite the remedies the event created a lot of buzz in online forums and community websites.
In one word: bizarre!
