Five Websites I Can’t Believe You’re Not Using
Why bookmark when you can Spurl?
Maybe it’s just me but it seems that a lot of people have made a lot of noise about this thing called social bookmarking. Now, I am not smart enough to get involved in that discussion nor would I care to if I were. To me the more important, and much more interesting, topic of conversation is usefulness.
I mention Spurl–there are other social bookmark sites (e.g. furl.net, and deli.cio.us)–because, after trying others, I have found that Spurl works better for me. It is easy to use, easy to understand, simple to set up, and easy on the eyes.
With Spurl I have, and you could, stopped storing my bookmarks on my local machine. Spurl allowed me to upload my bookmarks from both my home and work computers; now I can access my bookmarks from anywhere. But what about bookmarks I want to keep from the eyes of others? Spurl lets me mark those as private, and nobody but me can see them listed.
With Spurl I can arrange my bookmarks into categories, attach keywords to each link, search my bookmarks, and share them with the world if I so choose(something even the mighty firefox won’t do).
While furl.net uses a similar pair-of-dimes, the site is a little too unwieldy and ugly for my tastes. And deli.cio.us is just a dump…err…a link dump. It is nowhere near as friendly as Spurl or even furl.net for that matter. You could spend an eight hour day dumping links into deli.cio.us and end up with something less useful than your Firefox bookmarks. However, if you’re like me, you have already invested lots of eight hour days in building your deli.cio.us link library; Spurl understands this and has a solution. Not only will Spurl import all your deli.cio.us links, but it will also (if you wish) post any new Spurls to your deli.cio.us account. Sweet huh.
All-in-all, Spurl gets five of those little heart shaped candies with the words printed on because it is always available, it makes Internet life easier, and it looks good while doing it.
Flickr
Don’t make me say it. Ugh! Ok, Flickr.com is the greatest thing since downloadable porn. Alright! Maybe not, but pretty damned close. Flickr comes in two flavors: free, and for a nominal fee you can go pro. The difference is in the amount of uploading you are allowed each month–pros get a lot, free gets a little. But if you are a hardcore amateur photographer (you own a digital but rarely keep batteries in it) the free account is just right.
The folks at flickr are a photo-bloggers best friend. They give you all the tools you need to mobile blog, post directly to your blog from their site, easily upload your photos from within the Windows explorer, and much more. To top it off, they have gone out of their way to build a nice big community of other photo-nuts. They are a helpful and giving bunch willing to share experience and tips. Flickr really is a must have, and I give it a rating of F16.
Morguefile
While Flickr is the perfect all around site for pro/am photographers; morguefile.com aims to be the go to site for those of us looking for free stock photography. Search for, and download the perfect image for your personal web site or hardcopy newsletter. Set up your own lightbox, take a master class, or check out one of their photography blogs.
Rojo
How many blogs do you visit every day? Five? Ten? More? Yeah, I thought so. Well, feedreaders are nothing new, and there are dozens of them, both PC and web based. So why not use one?
It doesn’t really matter which one you use because it boils down to a matter of opinion. But it does make sense to pick one that fits your needs. Don’t settle for the one your buddy says is the best, I never did trust that guy anyway. There are so many available that, with a little work, you will find the perfect tool.
For me the choice wasn’t exactly simple. I tested Kinja, Bloglines, and Rojo, and to tell the truth I wasn’t really happy with either of the first two(I could never even get the validation e-mail from Bloglines).
Rojo satisfied my feed-tooth. When you sign up you can tell Rojo to give you a bunch of default feeds, or that you will pick your own. Editing your feeds is a snap because they are stored, unlike Kija and Klipfarm, in a fully configurable hierarchical folder structure.
Rojo, keeps an eye on your feeds and even offers suggestions for feeds you might like based on your current subscriptions.
One things missing is bookmarklets. I would love it if Rojo would give me a way to add feeds from my browser while I am sitting on the page that I want to subscribe to. Regardless, over the past few weeks Rojo has become indispensable, and earned itself three stars and an old salt shaker I have been trying to get rid of for a while.
Network54/Yahoo Groups
One limitation of a blog is the level of interation; most blogs allow nothing more than comments. If you’ve got a blog and you feel that it is constrictive then maybe what you are looking for is a forum. Both Network54.com and Yahoo! Groups allow users to establish a community complete with threaded discussion, chat rooms, file/photo sharing, and voting or topic polling.
Of course there are limitations to both, but I can’t believe you aren’t using at least one of them.
Further reading:
10 Cool things to do with furl (note: can also apply to spurl)
