Have It Your Way. When you’re listening to the radio and a
song comes on that you don’t like, do you quickly switch stations? Then
you need Imagine Radio, where
you determine the music and artists that are played and how
often. You start by choosing the genres you prefer, then you rate a wide
range of singers on a scale from 1 to 5. After that, you can listen to
your favorites while you surf and adjust your preferences whenever you
like. And, like so many great ideas on the Web, it’s free.
Help Around The House. When you need home improvement advice,
the Net is the place to get it. Housenet stands out among the other
offerings because it’s a complete home and garden site. If you
don’t know a thing about growing petunias, but want your yard to be an
asset to your house, it has good advice for beginners. It also provides
tips and articles on decorating, even sewing ideas, as well as how to
solve emergencies around the house and do home remodeling projects. The
content changes daily, so you can always find something interesting and
helpful.
Homework Helper. It’s back-to-school time, so you need to
check out those reference sites that you bookmarked last year. One that
teens and younger students will want to add to their list is Education Index. It’s an
annotated guide to some of the best education sites on the Web, from
anthropology to women’s studies.
For Teens. Written and edited by teens, Grip Magazine is the online version of a
print publication aimed at high school and college students. It covers
the usual entertainment, music reviews and interviews, but also gets
more diverse with art, poetry, fashion and comics.
Surf’s Up. Teens as well as younger kids will enjoy Kid Surf It points readers to the home
pages of other kids around the world who are interested in sports,
computers, arts, music, pets, etc. The teen section provides only
“clean” teen sites, and there are even links for a diverse selection of
church and faith-related sites, which is pretty unusual.
Business Information. If you’re in business, particularly if
you own your own business, you want to keep up with the latest
information and know that the Web is an excellent place to do it. But
there’s so much material out there: How do you find what’s most useful?
One good starting place is the Dow
Jones Business Directory. It’s a guide to what the Dow Jones news
editors see as the highest-quality business websites (and they explain
how they made their choices). These include career, news, law, public
records, reference, small business and more. There’s a tremendous amount
of practical information here, waiting to be mined. Non-business types
will find much of interest, as well.
High-Tech Origami. At the Electric Origami Shop, you’ll
discover online kaleidoscopes, high-tech art and custom crystals that
grow in real time to remind you how far we’ve come from when you
grew crystals in a bowl when you were a kid.
Pooh’s Pastime. What better time to goof-off than the end of
summer? In the “Winnie the Pooh” books, A.A. Milne had his characters
drop fir cones into a stream and watch them float away. You can do the
same online at Virtual
Pooh Sticks.
Joke Of The Day. If your friends don’t already e-mail you more
than enough witticisms, Jokes.com offers a joke du jour, which you
can rate according to how funny you think it is.
Too Much Java. Speaking of jokes, the Caffeine Archive offers a bunch
of zingers
on the topic “You know you’re drinking too much coffee when …” What
could be more timely with Starbucks and coffeehouses popping up on every
corner?
Whatever Happened to Scott Baio? If you’ve ever wondered where
a former child star is now and what he or she is doing, Former Child Star
Central has the answer or will find it for you. The site contains
numerous interviews and profiles, as well as links of interest to those
who are curious about former kid actors.
Swing’s The Thing. At NeoSwing
you can sample albums, see videos, learn swing-speak, read about swing
fashion and catch up on what the swing revival is all about.
More Hitchcock. Earlier this month, we gave you a MysteryNet
site saluting the 100th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s birth.
Amazon.com has one, too. It contains lots of articles and a list of the
top-selling books about the master of mystery, but the best feature of
the site is the daily trivia
quiz. There you learn Hitchcock’s favorite of his films, that he
considered casting Lana Turner in Janet Leigh’s famous role in “Psycho”
and what each of his films contained (besides his own cameo appearance).
Reverse Look-Up. When you have a phone number, but no name and
want to know who it belongs to, try AnyWho’s Reverse Lookup service.
Unearthed: Excerpt from Joe Biden’s memoirs
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