Ants on the Melon
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Most websites out there on the big Interweb are pretty useless, but occasionally I come across a site that is so useful that it becomes part of my Internet Arsenal (I just coined a term!). Of course, Google is such a fundamental part of my life now that I can’t imagine what things were like before it. Here are a few other sites that I now use on a daily basis:

• Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia collectively written by thousands of people. Anyone can contribute content to Wikipedia, or edit what others have written. The result is an evolving base of knowledge unlike anything else. Need to know what a fedora is? Want to know more about Warren Harding, the 29th president of the United States? Wondering what Topoisomerase is? It’s all there in the Wikipedia. And if you are using Apple‘s OS X Tiger then you can use the Wikipedia dashboard widget to quickly search Wikipedia from your desktop. Be careful though, you can easily spend hours following links.
• Bloglines is another great tool that I’ve recently discovered. Bloglines is a news aggregator, and provides an easy to use interface for reading news, blogs, or any other site that publishes content through a RSS or Atom feed. Once you create a Bloglines account you can begin adding feeds (like the one for this site), and read all your favorite sites in a single page. Here are some other feeds that I subscribe to:
  • Google Sightseeing (RSS Feed)
  • Wikipedia’s WikiNews (RSS Feed)
  • GoogleBlog (Atom Feed)
  • Mac Rumors (RSS Feed)
  • Yahoo! News Top Stories (RSS Feed)

  If you read a lot of blogs or news sites, setting up a Bloglines account might be worth your time.

• Google Local is another amazing tool that I use almost every day. When you are trying to find information about something local to your town or city, searching the entire web is almost never helpful. Google Local allows you to limit your searches to a specific area. So when you are looking for the number to the nearest Papa John’s pizza, you don’t end up at the Papa John’s corporate website. It is even integrated with the excellent Google Maps site, which makes it extremely easy to find out where you need to go to pick up the pizza.

That’s all for now, enjoy!