As we get older, we realize what a surprisingly big part of our happiness simple fitness and health habits play. A growing number of sites help people to manage their diet, exercize, and health issues, and give them a way to rap with others doing the same. Following are the best health sites we know of. FitDay: This site helped me work off 10 pounds by forcing me to report honestly the foods that I was eating every day and their calorie counts. No more denial ("that donut couldn't have been more that 75 calories!"). FitDay isn't the only site that does this, but the breadth and depth of its food information and its easy-to-use layout lift it above the rest. iMedix: Although social networking sites are everywhere, many are focused on little worth talking about. iMedix (in beta), however, helps people form communities around their health issues (cancer, depression, and so on), so they can network with each other and share relevant news and research information. RealAge: Fill out a health questionnaire at this site, and it reports your "physical age" (the age of your body), which you can then compare with your chronological age. If you're in good shape, your body may be 35, even though your calendar age is 45. Or vice versa, if you aren't fit. Either way, the site produces a detailed health plan to lower your physical age.
Travel Sites
Let's throw in travel sites and vacation planners here too, because breaking out of the routine and getting out of town is good for the soul. Tripit: This beta site brings all the travel information you need to one place, and it works very well. So, before your next trip, use this tool to make a master itinerary, integrating every possible detail of your journey, from restaurants to rental cars to what the weather is going to be like. Kayak: Here's the online travel agent de jour. Punch in your dates and destinations, and Kayak brings back price quotes from most of the major airlines; it also checks in with other aggregators (Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity) to capture the best deals they have. Kayak lets you view and compare fares in list, matrix, or chart views, and even provides a calender showing the best rates that other users have found for trips similar to yours. TripAdvisor: Here's the "wisdom of the crowd" view for travelers. Reading its numerous negative reviews of a hotel I almost stayed at in Denver saved me from what would surely have been a bad experience. (A friend of mine who lives in Denver says the reviews were correct, too.) Besides hotels, the site also hosts reviews of flights, cruises, and restaurants. RoadsideAmerica: Here's a wonderful tool for those who have a taste (and the gas money) for road trips. It's the definitive guide to crazy and offbeat roadside attractions. To test its completeness, I ran a check of listings for my Midwestern home state, and it turned up some cool spots I hadn't even known about, such as the "world's largest ball of stamps" and Ole's Big Game Bar. PlanetEye: To plan a trip to Rome, I logged in to this beta site. It had just about everything I needed, including local news and blogs from an area expert, which clued me in to bargains and seasonal goings-on that would be happening during my stay. Lonely Planet: Read this site's Thorn Tree Forum posts (organized by travel destinations around the world), and you'll find discussions among folks who have just returned from the place(s) you may wish to visit. Many of the posts are by people who have been to the destination a number of times--veterans who should have a lot of good advice to share with first-time visitors.
With better broadband speeds and advances in server center technology, sites that are willing to host large amounts of your data are popping up everywhere, and some are free. Other sites take your photos or other content and help you turn them into something fun to watch and listen to. We rate these sites on how secure and inexpensive they are, how much data they will store for you, and the quality of the product that results from working with your content at the site.
Storing and Sharing Content
Drop.io: Here, you can dump up to 100MB of pictures, video, audio, documents, or whatever into a personal folder, and then share the URL (it would look something like 'drop.io/yourname1') with family or friends. It's supereasy to use, and my favorite hosting and sharing site.eSnips: At this center for social file sharing, you can store cool content, from documents to music tracks, online, and then easily access your "snips" at a later date and share the content with other users. But what makes eSnips different is that it's really a social network that provides users ample opportunity to discuss the things they're storing and sharing.
Publish Your Stuff
But storing and sharing is just one piece of it. A new breed of sites is making available to users some powerful tools that allow you to transform your content into cool new forms, like multimedia presentations, and then provide a platform on which you can publish the stuff to your Facebook page or your own Web site. Picasa Web Albums: Flickr is so 2007. Google's Picasa Web Albums does the same kind of stuff (that is, organizing and sharing your photos), with a smarter and friendlier interface. Lulu: You're a genius, and your book is brilliant--the world just doesn't know it yet. Go to Lulu, which will help you self-publish hard copies of your masterpiece at reasonable rates. Its services range from design to marketing. Animoto: Animoto takes your still photos and stitches them together into a little animated film using cool effects, and then adds music. It's free and easy to use, and the result is well worth the small effort. Photosynth: If you really want someone to experience what it's like to visit a place you've been to (a foreign city, an art gallery, a local pub, whatever) this site--developed by Microsoft's Live Labs research arm--assembles your digital photos to create a high-res 3D walk-through that people can enjoy via a Web browser. Capzles: Here you can make digital slide shows on steroids. Capzles creates highly controllable and information-rich slide shows of your photos, complete with background images and music. Vimeo: Vimeo is arguably the best video sharing and hosting site right now because of its generous file-size allowances, as well as its focus on professional-grade filmmaking from people who live and breathe it. Worth checking out. Sprout: Sprout is the easiest way to assemble your own Flash-style widgets, which you can then embed in your site or blog.
At one time or another, you might need to get the goods on a stranger, like a prospective nanny or a business contact. Public records and people-finder sites are often the place to look; we list the best ones here. These sites use cool, Web 2.0 techniques to help you locate people, then (if need be) dig deep to find the "sensitive" intel about them you need. WhitePages.com: WhitePages and PeopleFinders are both good tools for tracking down people, their addresses, and their phone numbers, but the nod goes to WhitePages for its upcoming addition of voice and mobile capabilities.FriendFeed: Many content sharing and social networking sites exist now--Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and so on--and my friends seem to be spread out evenly among them. I don't have time to visit them all. FriendFeed crawls more than 40 such sites to keep you updated on the Web pages, photos, videos, and music that your friends are sharing or commenting on.Spock: This site looks for a person's school, work, and social affiliations, then displays photos, links to social network pages, Web sites, videos, and blogs about that person. Facebook: I know, I know, recommending such a well-known standby as Facebook is like recommending that you wear sunscreen at the beach. But, really, what social networking site is more functional, more organized, and more populous than this one? Glassdoor: This site invites you to log in and anonymously write what you really think of the company you work for, the culture you work in (here's where you gripe about your boss), and the salary you're pulling down. Then (and only then) can you dig for some dirt on current or former coworkers and, best of all, see how much they make. Search Systems: Public-records sites do the legwork of collecting all kinds of public records from all over the country, and then sell access to them via the Internet. Search Systems, one of the oldest and most reliable of these companies, takes a no-nonsense approach to selling access to 36,000 public-records databases from around the country. You can access marriage and death records, property records, and business permits for a $5 monthly fee, or buy the "premium" service, which includes bankruptcy and criminal records. NETRonline (www.netronline.com): For a somewhat more hands-on approach to accessing public records, NETRonline's free public records portal is a very useful tool, with direct links to the actual county and state databases that contain the data. NETR also offers background checks and criminal-record searches, for a price. Criminal Searches: Do you really know the people in your neighborhood? Do some of them have criminal histories, including sex-related offenses, violent crimes, and theft (or just traffic offenses, as the site also details)? Criminal Searches provides their mug shots and even plots their addresses on a map, for free. FundRace: This clever mashup site plots political donors on a map and shows how much they contributed. What did your neighbor give to the Democrats or the Republicans this year?
Nowadays, it's hard to imagine the process of buying, selling, or renting without the Internet as a guide. Whether we are trying to find communities of people who buy and sell the same things we do, or are seeking "wisdom of the crowd" opinion on potential buys, the Internet is often the first place we look. The sites below, we feel, are best at bringing buyers, sellers, and renters together, and arming them with the intel they need to do the deal. Craigslist: Want ads work so much better on the Web than in print that newspaper want ads are all but extinct. You can buy, sell, or rent just about anything, anywhere on this no-nonsense site.Freecycle: This grassroots, nonprofit site organizes and connects (via Yahoo Groups) people who might like to trade items within their own communities. It works really well for finding someone to come over and get that one useless thing out of your house, but not into a landfill. Zilok: Whereas Freecycle focuses on giving or trading, Zilok focuses on renting. The site hosts rental listings from people in your community for things you might need to use only once--a power tool, a picnic table, a warehouse space, a van--things you'd usually be far better off renting than buying outright. CarsDirect: A great place to buy a car online--or at least to get a good starting point on a price--this is the only Web site of its kind that instantly shows you a buy-it-now price, with no haggling and no calls from snaky salespeople.Zillow: From some of the creators of Expedia comes Zillow, which gathers in one place a bevy of information on properties and their prices in many parts of the United States. If a house is for sale, you can find contact information, read descriptions, and ask questions of the sellers. Plus it's just fun to see how much your neighbor's house is worth. Greenzer: Greenzer brings it down to the local level by helping you choose products from companies that are really walking the walk, not just talking the "green" talk to help their bottom line. HousingMaps: "Mashups," to me, have been largely an overhyped, unrealized concept. HousingMaps, however, is a notable exception. It's a simple mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist housing listings. Choose the part of town in which you want to live, and see what's available in your price range.
The "wisdom of the crowd" model works very well for how-to and advice sites like Yahoo Answers and Instructables. The content at these sites is created and contributed largely by the communities of people that frequent the sites. At some of the sites you can ask a question, and then read what informed members of the community have to say about it. Yahoo Answers: One of the best examples of community participation on the Net. At Yahoo Answers, regular folks write in questions ("How do I get the ring around the collar off of my white dress shirt and make it white again?") and site users offer helpful answers. The answers are rated on usefulness by other users. HowStuffWorks: The perfect site for the endlessly curious, it lifts up the hood on everything from carburetors to communism and explains in simple terms what they are and how they work. The explanations aren't very deep (most visitors don't want to read Das Kapital anyway), but it's the breadth of the topics the site explains that's so impressive. Lynda.com: To learn how to use new software, we used to sit in darkened hotel conference rooms watching a bored instructor drone on with a training demo and a laser pointer. Or we bought a manual to go it alone. Neither of those approaches works nearly as well as the subscription-based online videos offered by Lynda.com, which teaches you to use just about any creative, design, and development software you can think of. Instructables: Learn how to make anything from a corsage to a catapult. Users write in about what they do or have invented, and how they did it. The site originated with guys at the MIT Media Lab who needed a place to demonstrate their latest inventions. FixYa: Your iPod just flat-lined. Don't panic, and don't throw it. At FixYa, a team of experts and a large group of users address common tech and gadget breakdowns and how to fix them. You can get help by posting a message on the site or by having a Web chat with one of the experts. Treehugger: Here you can find a lot of information on how to live greener every day. The site specializes in covering the "green" aspects of many parts of life-everything from food to business to recreation to fashion. You'll also find news and views on the Green Movement. Livemocha: Livemocha (in beta) is a new, free approach to learning new languages, enhancing the process by establishing learning alliances with "language buddies" from around the globe. Dictionary.com / Thesaurus.com: The English language is complicated, and in some ways, illogical. As such, I need a good user's manual for it almost every day. Here it is. Return to the "100 Incredibly Useful and Interesting Web Sites" main stor
We found numerous sites that are full of good advice on how to save money and protect your financial interests. In a sour economy, sites like these are getting more attention (and site traffic) than ever before. GasBuddy: GasBuddy is actually a network of local sites (such as sanfrangasprices.com for the San Francisco area), each of which allows consumers to find and report high or low gas prices around town. Fuelly: Fuelly is a cool little Web tool that lets you track and keep a history of your vehicle's gas mileage and compare your results with those of other drivers. RetailMeNot: Find coupons (about 85,000, the site says) for thousands of stores nationwide. Many of them are sent in by site users, for others to use. It's not the only online coupon community, but it's the biggest and probably the best.BillShrink: A big chunk of your money probably goes to your wireless carrier every month. BillShrink asks you for your locale, wireless usage habits, and current plan, then recommends other plans in your area that might be better deals for you. It's a small way to trim the fat, but every little bit counts. Prosper: Prosper is like a dating site that brings people who want to borrow money together with people who want to lend it. Borrowers post their borrowing requests, and prospective lenders bid on the interest rate at which they're willing to loan part or all of the money. Kiva: Kiva follows roughly the same business model as Prosper, but adds a philanthropy aspect. The site allows you to extend a loan to a person in the third world who needs the money to get a small business off the ground, for example. Bankrate: This is the largest and most complete aggregator of financial rate information that we've seen on the Web. The site constantly surveys 4800 financial institutions in all 50 states to provide real-time rates on around 300 financial instruments--mortgages, credit cards, car loans, money market accounts, and certificates of deposit--so you can find the best rates and save money. Pageonce: You've accumulated numerous online accounts--everything from banking sites to Netflix to shopping sites to social networking--and they all have separate log-ins. PageOnce brings all of your accounts together in one dashboard where they're easy to access. But it does much more than store passwords: Once the site is linked to the accounts, it notifies you of any changes at them--from payment alerts to new-friend requests on Facebook. AnnualCreditReport: Since 2003, the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act has made it possible for individuals to obtain one free annual credit report from each of the three major credit reporting agencies per year. AnnualCreditReport.com is the only site that provides them without strings attached.
