Get help from the online community on which sites to trust

MetroChannel is based on the premise: Where there is smoke, there must be fire. In other words, if some site or blog is popular, it might be worth checking out. But should we enter a site in blind faith? The Online Shadow Economy is not in a mood to spare anyone. So it is a good idea to get help from the online community i.e other surfers who have visited and rated over 20 million websites so that we know which ones to avoid and which ones to trust.

Esa Suurio, who heads Web of Trust, calls it people-driven Internet security.

Quantcast traffic, demographics and lifestyle assessments

Even though collaborative filtering is so powerful a technique, Internet users barely get to benefit from it. No doubt, it is implemented in myriad ways on many sites but most such implementations do not go through any sort of active feedback loop so as to keep optimizing their effectiveness.

Quantcast takes a different approach. It’s traffic, demographics and lifestyle assessment presents the raw data itself.

Google Insights for Search

By far, the best tool to get to know what people are searching for, in other words, what is hot right now.

Announcing Google Insights for Search

Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew
Aug 05, 2008

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/08/
announcing-google-insights-for-search.html

News and Top Blogs at Wikio

What is Wikio?

http://www.wikio.com/about-us

Wikio is an information portal with a news search engine that searches press sites and blogs.

With Wikio you can very easily create pages to follow the breaking news that interests you. Our info is continuously updated!

Wikio is a participative service: you can publish an article directly on the site or comment on an existing item.

You can also vote for an article or a group that captures your interest in order to increase its visibility on the site.

Each page offers an RSS feed that allows you to subscribe to receive the information that appears there in the reader of your choice.

Top 20 sites tracked by SiteMeter

Site Meter Can Provide the Answers!

http://www.sitemeter.com/

Site Meter’s comprehensive real time website tracking and counter tools give you instant access to vital information and data about your sites audience. With our detailed reporting you’ll have a clear picture of who is visiting your site, how they found you, where they came from, what interests them and much more.

Blogrolling Hot 500 blogs

These are the Hot 500 links being displayed by Blogrolling users. Updated daily.

http://www.blogrolling.com/top.phtml

These links can also be syndicated via JavaScript, RSS, OPML and PHP. Click here for more info:

http://www.blogrolling.com/get_500code.phtml

One can also search links via:

http://www.blogrolling.com/search_linked.phtml

Directory of Indian Blogs at IndiBlogger

we blog, therefore we are.

IndiBlogger maintains an active and well organized directory of Indian Blogs. Search for Indian Blogs by name, city, title and tags.

http://www.indiblogger.in/

Browse and search the directory here:

http://www.indiblogger.in/directory.php

FAQs

Click here to get the skinny on how to sign up:

http://www.indiblogger.in/faqs.php

1. Your listings and the IndiBlogger directory
2. Finding other bloggers
3. The IndiBlogger network
4. Blogger Meetings

Yahoo! Pipes for open and extreme feed manipulation

A growing body of content is now available as a structured feed. While feed readers make use of this structure to organise various feeds in groups etc, Yahoo! Pipes allows the content of feeds to be manipulated programmatically. Yahoo! Pipes is not just a visual programming platform, the pipes created by the users are open source and can be incorporated or even cloned and modified. Pipes can be thought of as feeds of feeds (meta feeds) and can get to be extremely complex and powerful.

Time Magazine’s top websites for 2008

10 Essential Sites

http://www.time.com/time/specials/
2007/article/0,28804,1812202_1812206,00.html

Wikipedia

http://wikipedia.org/

Despite repeated attempts to compromise its integrity, Wikipedia remains the most popular online encyclopedia on the Web. Since anyone can create or edit a Wikipedia page, both companies and individuals have been caught airbrushing and embellishing their own entries.

Yahoo! Finance

http://finance.yahoo.com/

A haven for armchair investors and money junkies, Yahoo! Finance has everything you need to keep up with business – news, stock-specific research, charts, even press releases. For all the criticism about Yahoo!’s failure to innovate, its finance site showcases the best of what the company has to offer.

Craigslist

http://craigslist.org/

In the $15 billion online classified market, Craigslist is a Web pioneer that will never go stale, and remains the essential site for want ads ranging from real estate and used furniture to jobs, romance and one-night stands. Its services are available in over 500 cities in 50 countries.

Power 150 media and marketing blogs

Todd Andrlik (http://toddand.com/) ranks the top media and marketing blogs and hosts the list on Advertising Age. While the name conveys otherwise, actually over 650 blogs are listed, click here to browse the rankings:

http://adage.com/power150/

PCWorld India Web Awards Best Indian Websites 2008

Best Indian Websites 2008: PCWorld Web Awards

By PC World Team (Friday, June 6, 2008)

http://www.pcworld.in/india/features/Monitors/
Best_Indian_Websites_2008_PCWorld_Web_Awards/4325507/12

Jury Members

How Websites were Evaluated

Seoquake data on over 350 cricket and sports sites

The unexpected success of the debut season of the Indian Premier League can be attributed to a number of factors but most importantly it was proof that Indian cricket fans can be equally proud of their regional teams as they are of their national team. And of course, the reduced duration of a 20:20 match only served to rope in more and more fans. As if all this wasn’t enough, IPL 2008 climaxed with a cracker of a match with just 1 run needed to win on the last ball. All this fanfare resulted in additional traffic for both new and established cricket sites.

To get an idea about what cricket websites and blogs to visit, Seoquake (http://www.seoquake.com/) was used to get data on various sites covering sports, cricket and IPL. This raw data was then made uniform in format (values which were not available were changed to 0, while for parameters where lower is better, these were changed to the highest value available) and a composite score was calculated so as to gauge how the websites fared on a wide range of parameters.

Seoquake for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer

Seoquake provides over 50 parameters for page strength (including Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and others) on the fly. This data can then be exported as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file and manipulated in a spreadsheet. This makes it possible to define your own composite page strength using normalization and weightages. If needed, custom parameters can also be created, further adding to the flexibility.

Note: Frequent use of big amount of parameters may lead to the ban from search engines.

Popular Feeds and Readers

Getting Started With Feeds

BBC – The Feed Factory – What are feeds?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/feedfactory/help_what.shtml

RSS is also an international standard, and is rapidly growing in popularity. It used to be just technology and blog sites that offered it, but RSS is now becoming mainstream: many bbc.co.uk sites now offer RSS feeds.

Reviews of top email providers

PC World India

Best Mail Artist

http://www.pcworld.in/india/
features/Internet/Best_Mail_Artist/4259914/12

By Aditya Nag & John Maringmei (Wednesday, February 27, 2008)

What’s in an e-mail? A service by any name should ideally be no different from another. But as our detailed tests discovered, this was not entirely true. On the testing block were eight of the most popular e-mail providers on the Internet. They were tested on various criteria like storage capacity, interface, upload and download time and the various extras they offered. And this is what we found out to help you decide whether you should stick to your current e-mail address or move to one that is better suited to your needs.