| Yesterday it was Flickr, today it's Youtube; Google rules, but Digg rocks; and it's so hard to choose between Pandora and Last.fm, especially when there's a whole new bunch of interesting streaming music options. |
| If I had to name two sites that have made themselves truly indispensable, it would be Pop Urls (www.popurls.com) and Netvibes (www.netvibes.com). Neither produces original content; but both offer different but essential gateways to the new web. |
| The concept behind Popurls is deceptively simple. All it does is to provide a single page where you can surf the "headlines" and the latest stories from several of the most popular sites currently on the web. |
| Digg.com aggregates news stories and tech news; del.ici.ous.com was one of the first sites to aggregate the most useful links to stories and new sites on the web, and remains one of the most broad-based; youtube.com allows users to upload, share and view video clips, which could be anything from home movies to film and TV show clips. |
| In addition to these, Popurls also links to new content from Wired, Google News and Yahoo! News, Reddit, Flickr, Nowpublic, Shoutwire and a host of other places. Think of it as the web guide to the web guides, if you like. |
| As I've explained in previous @Random columns, most of the new "aggregator" sites combine the functions of an RSS feed aggregator and a search engine with feedback from what is usually a well-informed community of users. |
| This also allows for the subtle differences between one site and another. Reddit's community is quirkier and more interested in global over local news than many other websites (by contrast, Lifehacker.com, which comes close to being a personalised aggregator of useful stuff, is very strongly US-focused). |
| Digg appeals to geeks and techies, while del.ici.ous has a much more eclectic base. Youtube, which initially appealed to the discerning and the irreverent, is losing its "quirk" edge and becoming more boorish as it grows in popularity. |
| Popurls makes a huge difference for users like me, people who increasingly lack the time or the resources to be an active member of any one community on the web. The explosion in interesting commentary, cool new sites and technological innovations online has made many of us unwilling lurkers: we would be more active, if only there wasn't so much to do online. |
| The two models for today's web surfer are best illustrated by a look at del.ici.ous and a site like Newsvine.com. Del.ici.ous does a brilliant job of aggregating the news as reported by other people. Newsvine, which tracks news feeds and stories from all across the world, allows serious community users to become reporters and commentators themselves. |
| It has several safeguards: newcomers are kept in the Greenhouse for a while before they can comment, self-advertising comments and abuse are strongly discouraged, and "stars" in the Newsvine community tend to be "reporters" who have built up a solid reputation over a period of time, just the way it's supposed to work in the real world. |
| If Popurl's USP "" come, catch up on what's happening, but don't get involved unless you really want to "" is attractive for a Netizen of my stamp, it's precisely what turns another kind of user off. Many hardcore web surfers see Popurls as too passive; what they want is a similar portal to the web that is simultaneously more inactive. |
| This is where a site like Netvibes comes in: Netvibes is completely customisable, and allows you to effectively build your own Popurls from scratch. That's too much like hard work for me, but for thousands of others, it's just what they were looking for "" an opportunity to build their own web world, without interference. |
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