Archive for Best sites
CoverItLive: blogging goes real time
January 14th, 2008 • Best sites, Media
God knows how many people will use it, but huge credit to the Einsteins behind CoverItLive.
Sign up for an account (which is free, by the way), and you have instant access to a turbo-charged blogging tool that blurs the line between blog and instant messaging.
All you do is add a line of code to your site that embeds the CoverItLive console into your page. Read more »
Gliffy: share those boxes and arrows
September 5th, 2007 • Best sites, Internet
Now this is cool. Just spent the day brain-souping a new site with a few colleagues, and reached the point where we needed to work on individual sections. Problem is, we also needed to see what each of us were up to.
A quick Google, and up pops Gliffy. For years, I’ve been an OmniGraffle addict - for a Mac user, it’s the easiest way to rapidly map an idea or a web page. While Gliffy may not be quite a razor refined as ‘Graffle, it’s frighteningly easy to use, and comes with the not inconsiderable benefit of being sharable.
Sign up for a free account, log in, and you can create a new page in seconds. Boxes are all drag and drop, everything’s re-sizable, and nothing appears to glitch out. You can save your doodles into folders, or export stuff to jpeg for later digestion.
The $20 a year paid account may not bring major benefits for the casual user, but is laughably cheap if you’re a serious wireframer: paying the cash removes the limit of image uploads, and gets rid of the subscription nag-ad at the top of the frame.
Too many online collaboration tools are willfully obstructive: Gliffy seems to be a genuine peach.
Multimap reborn: Google Maps now has rival
August 16th, 2007 • Best sites, Internet
One from the Mediocre Coincidence Dept. I’m boring a colleague senseless today on the sheer awfulness of Multimaps compared to Google Maps (yep, I’m that dull). Hey presto, I open a browser this evening to find a brand new Multimap.
And… it’s excellent. In fact, it actually looks as though they’ve spoken to people who use online maps. You search by your postcode, and it finds the location quickly. Alongside, it shows a menu of nearby utilities - petrol stations, railway stations and the like. Select one, and pegs appear on the map.
The only downside appears to be a fixation with banner advertisements, which are doing their level best to overwhelm the maps. But that’s a niggle: if you’re a Google Maps fan, take five minutes to give it a spin.
AOL relaunches picky YouTube rival
August 16th, 2007 • Best sites, Video
I’d mentioned the Mullet Strategy a while back. Its principle is simple: business up front, party at the back.
In practical terms, it means letting the world lose on contributing to your site (the party), but making sure you have a gang of crack editors ensuring that only the mavellous makes it to the top-level pages.
Musicovery: lose hours just playing
August 15th, 2007 • Best sites, Internet, Music
Just stumbled across this, and lost the next 30 minutes. I suspect it’s not that new (I seem to remember a develop buddy mentioning it a while back), but what the hell - it’s shockingly addictive.
fav.or.it: the news reader goes social
August 15th, 2007 • Best sites, Social
Now this is a nice idea. Like many people without better things to do in their lives, I’m a Google Reader addict. It does a finer job of allowing you to swallow vast dollops of information in single sitting than any other tool out there. It has even given birth to a new term - ‘river reading’ (if you use it already, you’ll know why).
But it has a flaw. You can share the stories you read with others (cleverly, it automatically creates a web page featuring those tales that could can show others). But you can’t actually discuss the stories in real time.Enter fav.or.it, stage left. Still in private beta, this new service aims to inject the real-time social element into newsreaders. It describes itself as a ‘mashup of newsgroups, forums, search engine and reader’, and the early screenshots suggest they’re close to delivered exactly that.The concept of a live global debate around the news as it happens may be nothing new (the ability to comment quickly on news stories has been around for yonks - just look at the BBC or USAToday), but fav.or.it may take it one stage further.
USAToday records massive traffic hike
August 15th, 2007 • Best sites, Media
File this one under ‘What The Hell Do I Know, Anyway’.
I admit to hating this year’s re-launch of USAToday. In particular, I hated the panel from hell that dominated the home page - 30 seconds to load in the early days of the re-launch, and determined to hide a good headline behind a small picture. I also took an instant dislike to the OTT inegration of social networking, if only because it allowed people to post ‘AGhhhgGGG…jrrrr’ (or something like that) on the home page.
Which only goes to show that I obviously have no taste, because the site has just annonced a 20%-plus leap in traffic year-on-year - or does it…
The release is careful to point to a big Simpsons competition and an exclusive JK Rowling interview being ‘major drivers’ behind the boom. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Neilsen/NetRatings figures with those two events factored away.
In the meantime, I’m happy to share my news trawling between the rather wonderful new CNN and the stalwarts at the Beeb.
USATODAY.com Reports 20% Year-Over-Year Increase in Traffic: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
Guardian Weekly relaunches…
August 6th, 2007 • Best sites, Journalism, Media
…as The Guardian Weekly Global Network.
I’ve been following the piecemeal revamp of the nation’s favourite quality online newspaper for the past few months. In case you haven’t paid the main Guardian site a visit recently, the home page has seen a pretty radical overhaul - although many of the sections once you click through are the ‘old’ design.
I’ve found it jarring on two levels. While the new home page is graphically powerful, it’s also too much for my ageing mind to take in - not helped by the use of colour coding. And I’m finding the leap from home to old section just too much, like walking through the doors of a multiplex only to find a battered backstreet Ritz inside.
But the new GWGN may just have earned a new fan. It’s simpler to work than the main site, and the quality of journalism from the foreign correspodents is superb. OK, there’s the obligatory ’social networking’ functionality to battle through, but even that’s fine once you’ve grasped that it’s the BBC’s Have Your Say in a new wrapper.
And it’s nice to see a site editor so publicly state his association with his product: as soon as you register for the comments facility, Mark King is included as someone on your Watchlist by default.
Music video site, Coverflow style
August 5th, 2007 • Best sites, Internet, Music
Justin.tv - Live video, event streaming, and lifecasting
Well, somebody had to do it. Not satisfied with the very flicky Coverflow starring in iTunes, someone has lovingly borrowed the interface for their music video site. Dead pretty, too - even if, truth be told, it’s not the most instinctively way to skip through the latest releases.
Newser: nice, but not so new
July 30th, 2007 • Best sites, Media
Perhaps I’m just in a grumpy mood. I’ve just come across Newser, a new news aggregation site much in the mould of DayLife and Newsvine. I went to the About page, looking to discover what made this newcomer special. Here’s what it says:
Newser does the reading for you. Newser selects the day’s most important and most talked about stories from the 100 top news sources. In succinct, lively summaries, Newser’s editors distill articles and opinion pieces, telling you what you need to know, what you want to know, and where to go for the best coverage. You can’t follow 100 news sources, but we can follow them for you.Newser is the first online news service to fully leverage the Web and is creating the first major news brand native to that medium.
OK, I am having a very bad day. ‘…Selects the day’s most important and most talked about stories…’. Isn’t that what an editor does? ‘You can’t follow 100 news sources’. Yes I can - I have Google Reader.
I am being a misery. In fact, Newser is pretty smart, and is visually very strong (although I still prefer DayLife for its depth and context). I suppose I wonder about the role of news aggregators such this, when the quality of news from the sources is so high.
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