Archive for category Site Of The Week

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Mar 16

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week | 1 Comment

Measuring Inflation.jpg

This week’s winner of the site of the week was Measuring Worth. The site was founded by Lawrence Officer and Samuel Williamson. They’ve dedicated the site to helping people understand and calculate the relative worth or money over time. What’s neat about what they’ve created is that it includes several different calculators that you can use to help figure out what something in the past would be worth today.

This can be very useful for looking up information like whether the amount of money that pro basketball players make today is more or less then it was 20 years ago or whether the price of your home has appreciated faster or slower then wages.

The site does have some drawbacks. Because of the data needed to calculate these sorts of things, it can only track statistics up to 2005 and 2006 depending on the metric you are looking at, but on the plus side, their calculators can go as far back as 1,774, if you want to figure out what Thomas Jefferson would have paid for his broadband internet connection and you can actually go back as far as 1,257, if you wanted to see how much the price of gold has changed over the years. Overall, I found Measuring Worth to be very useful and I’m sure that it will be a resource that I come back to in the future. Congratulations to Officer and Williamson on creating such a great site and for winning this week’s site of the week award.

If you have any sites that you’d like to nominate for site of the week, please feel free to email them to me at Davis AT DavisFreeberg Dot Com. You can see the nomination for next week’s site of the week listed below. Please feel free to vote in the sidebar.

Useless Info

Raiden

Mini Putt

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Mar 9

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments

Protesting The Site Of The Week Hosted on Zooomr

Has their even been a website that has made you so frustrated that you wanted to unleash a chainsaw on it? Have your ever fantasized about what it would be like, if you could lock Jack Bauer in a room with PayPerPost? Or maybe, you’ve just always wondered what your own site would look like, if Dinosaurs attacked?

If you have ever fantasized about destroying the web, then you are in luck because Netdisaster.com will let you play out all of these scenarios on websites that are worthy of your wrath.

The site uses frames to overlay any of their many disasters onto a web page of your choosing. If you want to go nuclear on Amazon.com, you can, if you want to give your favorite blogger a healthy dose of flower power you can check it out. Overall, I couldn’t find any real practical uses for the site, but it was still fun mixing in different disasters on the various blogs that I visit.

Overall, I liked playing around with Net Disasters, but there were also a few limitations I’d like to see addressed. You can’t really surf the net with their filters because they don’t allow you to click any of the links that show up on a given site. I also had trouble getting the manual settings to work past the top 20% of a web page. There were also a few filters, that for whatever reason, I couldn’t get to turn on.

Despite these problems though, Net Disaster is still a fun filter to use on web pages that you already enjoy (or don’t enjoy depending on the circumstances ). It could be made better by incorporating the technology into an actual browser instead of just a page on the web, but it still doesn’t diminish the enjoyment factor of the site. Congratulations to Net Disaster for winning this week’s site of the week contest.

The nominations for next week’s site of the week are listed below. Please vote in the sidebar. Remember, it’s Ok to send this to your friends, but please only vote once. If you’d like to nominate your own site for site of the week, you can do so by sending me an email to Davis @ DavisFreebergDOTcom.

Measuring Worth

iSketch

Rock on TV

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Mar 2

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week, Technology, Video Games, Web 2.0 | Comments off

Site Of The Week Hosted on Zooomr

This week’s winner of the site of the week contest was the Falling Sand website. I first came across the site about a year ago when someone submitted it to Digg and it immedietely raced to the front page. At the time, the traffic to the site was so heavy that I couldn’t even access it for a couple of days. By the time I was able to play around with the game, I was instantly hooked.

I’m not sure why I found the Falling Sands game so appealing, but there is something about watching little grains of water, plants, salt and oil fall and mix (sometimes with explosive consequences 8)), that is absolutely mesmerizing. It’s almost Zen like to see the various elements slowly build up and evolve. On one level the game is very simple and has limited rules and functionality, but on another level, it also allows users to create some pretty complex designs.

The game was originally developed, by a Japanese blogger and while I don’t understand Japanese, I’m still thankful that he took the time to build such a cool program. While searching on the web, I found a number of people who have created some really impressive structures; Wohba.com took advantage of one of the many mods for the game and planted seeds to create a virtual plant, a reader from Gamerswithjobs took the time to recreate Edward Munch’s masterpiece the Scream and it turned out very nicely, I’m not exactly sure how to describe the ecosystem that So Many Schemes developed, but I still found it’s use of blues and sharp angles very appealing.

The only downside I found to the game is how easily it is to spend way too much time distracted by it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to the site for just a minute and then ended up spending way too much playing around. Congratulations to Falling Sand for winning this week’s site of the week contest.

Next week’s nominations are listed below. You can vote in the sidebar. It’s Ok to send this to your friends to vote, but please only vote once. If you know of a good site that should be considered for the site of the week, please feel free to nominate it by sending me an email at Davis :AT: DavisFreeberg.com

Net Disaster

Internet Traffic Report

Ugly Dress

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Feb 23

Posted by Davis in Music, Site Of The Week, Technology, Web 2.0 | Comments off

Guitars Hosted on Zooomr

As a music fan, I always enjoy checking out new bands and learning more about the bands I already follow. For years, I’ve pretty much exclusively used All Music Guide for my music information needs, but last year I came across this week’s winner of the site of the week contest and have found it to be even more helpful then AMG.

Like AMG, MusicPortl is a site that tracks information about bands, but unlike AMG, they rely on the fans to help populate their data. By pulling in information from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr and music videos from YouTube, MusicPortl has become a one stop shop for learning about your favorite bands. One of the features I like best is their similar artists browse field that helps me to find new bands that may be of interest. MusicPortl also pulls in feeds from Technorati and LastFM to compliment the information they already have.

The overall site design is very clean and contains limited advertisements. Because the site relies on Javascript and Ajax for most of their content, it loads very quickly and creates a dynamic environment where the information is constantly changing.

MusicPortl also offers a Firefox and IE plugin that allows you to add their site to the search bar in your browser. This is especially helpful if you tend to look up a lot of bands on the fly.

While MusicPortl has come a long way considering it was launched less then a year ago, there are still a few more features I’d like to see added. Right now the site doesn’t scrape the web for lyrics to songs, which would be a great service to offer. It also doesn’t incorporate photos from sites like Zooomr or videos from sites other then YouTube. It would be great to see an even more diversied pool of resources for them to draw upon. As the site continues to develop, I’m sure that we will see more features added, but even without this support, MusicPortl is still a pretty slick site. Congratulations to MusicPortl on winning this week’s site of the week award.

The nominations for next week’s site of the week are listed below. You can vote in the sidebar. If you’d like to nominate you own site for the site of the week, feel free to send me an email at Davis (@) DavisFreeberg Dot Com and it will be considered for nomination.

Tacky Postcards

Falling Sand

Drive-In Theater

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Feb 17

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week, Video Games | Comments off

This week’s winner of the site of the week contest was the game Wone. With such a crazy name, I’m not exactly sure how to phonetically pronounce the name of the site, but I do know that the game is a lot of fun. The game is actually pretty simple, you control a tire in a bizzarre world made up of ramps, walls and platforms. You can roll the tire left or right, but must collect a series of barrels in order to pass each level. At each stage the game gets harder and harder and while I played the game quite a bit over the last week, I still couldn’t make it past level 4.

What I like about the game is that it is simple and yet it is still highly entertaining. There are no nuclear bomb buttons, no super power moves, no vertical jumping, just the ability to roll back and forth like an old tire. Trying to figure out the optimum speed to jump off the ramps could be tough, but once you hit it just right there is a great feeling of satisfaction from making your way through this virtual garage. Congratulations to Wone for winning this week’s site of the week contest.

You can see the nominations for next week’s site of the week listed below and can vote in the sidebar. If you’d like to nominate your own site for site of the week, feel free to send me an email at davis [at] davisfreeberg dot com and I’ll be happy to add your site to the pool of nominations.

Map Message

Work Friendly

Music Portl

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Feb 9

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week | 3 Comments

This week’s winner of the site of the week contest was The Maobot. Technically, the site is actually a sub-page that is being hosted at Kevan.org (which also has a ton of other fun stuff), but the game of Mao is the crown jewel on the site. It was a tough race this week, but I’m really pleased that the Maobot won out because the game of Mao has special memories for me. I first became aware of the game of Mao about ten years ago when a Mao grand master introduced me to the game during a late night drinking session and I’ve been in love with the game ever since.

One of the cardinal rules about the game of Mao is that you are not allowed to reveal the rules, so I’m limited in what I can tell you about the game, but I can say that it’s a lot of fun and if you ever get invited to play, I’d encourage you to try it out. After playing the game for almost a year, I was finally promoted to a Mao Grand Master myself and I went through a bizarre and surreal ceremony where all of the rules were finally explained.

As a new player you are thrown right into the thick of things without knowing any of the rules behind the game. Part of the fun is figuring it all out. When I first played the game, it took about five minutes and I had already been heavily penalized for a variety of violations. After a few rounds I quickly began to figure it out, but by then there was little chance of beginners luck helping me win the game. Because you are not allowed to talk in the game of Mao (unless it’s during a point of order), it makes it more difficult to figure out what the heck is going on.

The Maobot is a site that contains a program that does it’s best to simulate the game of Mao. You can also play two other derivatives of the game, but by far my favorite is Mao. You can only play one on one against the computer, so it’s not as much fun as playing with a group of friends and because the computer is in control, it gets to dictate the rules, but nontheless playing around with the site this week has been a lot of fun. Over the last week, it’s been really neat rekindling my love affair with the game and I’ve already wasted far too much time trying to beat the computer after a three rounds.

Congratulations to the Maobot on winning this week’s site of the week contest and for helping me to remember how much fun the game really is. The nominations for next week’s site of the week are listed below, you can vote for your favorite in the sidebar. If you’d like to nominate a site for the site of the week, you can email it to me at Davis DavisFreeberg Dot Com.

Wone

Bad Fads Museum

Hello Kitty Psychology Test

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Feb 2

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week | 1 Comment

Day After Day, Alone on the Hill by Thomas Hawk Hosted on Zooomr

This week’s winner of the site of the week contest was FindAGrave.com While the over arching theme of the site is a little dark and morbid, the site is defintely loaded up with some great information and serves as an excellent compliment to another previous site of the week winner, The Birthday Database. Find a grave allows you to search through 14 million cemetery records and locate where someone is buried.

It allows you to search for graves in a number of ways. You can look up someone by their date of birth, when they died, the state that they are buried in and of course by name. When I first saw the site, I mostly used it to oggle all of the celebrity graves that they had, but having the ability to look up people that you have known turned out to be a much more powerful feature for the site. I didn’t find everyone that I was looking for, but I found enough people for the site to impress me.

One of the cool features about the site is that if you have a photo of someone’s grave or a cemetery, they allow you to upload the picture so that people can actually see the grave from the internet. They don’t have anywhere near 14 million photos, but they do have a lot of the celebrity grave photos and for those who’ve uploaded photos to the site, it really helps to personalize the graves.

Congratulations to Find A Grave for winning this week’s site of the week contest. Here are the nominations for next week’s site. You can vote for your favorite in the sidebar. To nominate a site, you can email me at Davis DavisFreeberg com

Gig Posters

OfficeSlang.com

The Maobot

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Jan 26

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Netflix, Site Of The Week | 2 Comments

Compete Graph Hosted on Zooomr

This week’s winner of the site of the week contest is compete.com. On the surface, Compete is a just another search engine on the web. They use Yahoo! to power their search results and while their interface looks a lot cleaner than the Yahoo! home page, when it comes to search technology, there really isn’t anything all that special about the results. If Compete was just a search engine, it would be just another average site on the net, but what makes Compete truly special is their site snapshot feature that allows you to look at an analysis of traffic that different websites get.

In many ways, Compete is very similar to Alexa, but on steroids. Instead of just tracking how one site ranks compare to others, they break down their data to a level where you can see an estimate of the number of unique visitors to a site, the amount of time that web users are spending at a page and the number of repeat visitors to a site. Like Alexa, Compete relies on statistical sampling to come up with their estimates, but unlike Alexa, they utilize a more diversified sample pool for there statistics.

This means that their snapshot tends to be more accurate then the stats you see on Alexa, but like Alexa, there are still a few shortcomings. If your site doesn’t get a lot of traffic, than their sample pool may not have enough data to get an accurate picture of what your traffic looks like.

It also means that if an abnormal number of people in their sample group who visit a site more then then the rest of the population, it can distort the traffic stats as well. I’ve been watching the site for about three months now and for the most part the traffic numbers look like they are accurate, but I have noticed a few anomalies. For example, if you take a look at the traffic estimates for Digg, it seems to show that Digg is receiving approximately 10 million unique visitors per month, but if you look at the traffic estimates from last October, it reports that the site was only getting a couple million unique visitors each month. Last year, Digg claimed that their internal numbers suggested that they were getting about 20 million unique visitors per month, so I’m not really sure how to look at Compete’s data, but at the very minimum it’s fascinating to look at, even if it isn’t always 100% accurate.

Perhaps even more remarkable then the public data on Compete’s site, is some of the private statistics that the company is tracking as well. Last week, Matt Pace wrote a fascinating analysis on Blockbuster and Netflix’s traffic and it turned up some interesting facts about both companies.

In the report, he was not only able to accurately predict the number of new subscribers that Netflix picked up during the quarter, but was also able to show that 58% of Blockbuster’s traffic is being driven by subscribers accessing their site from laptops that Blockbuster has put into their store locations. This is fascinating data indeed and shows that Blockbuster’s total access may be expanding the size of the online DVD market, by giving subscribers who do not have internet access, a way to still subscribe to the service. While I disagree with some of the conclusions made in Matt’s analysis, I still felt that it was one of the best articles on Netflix vs. Blockbuster, that I’ve read in a very long time.

Congratulations to Compete.com on winning this week’s site of the week contest. I’m looking forward to watching the site, as the service continues to develop. If you would like to nominate your own site for the site of the week contest, feel free to email me at Davis (AT) DavisFreeberg.com for consideration. In the meantime, here are the nominations for next week’s site of the week.

Bauns

The Movie Quote Generator

Find A Grave

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Jan 19

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week | Comments off

This week’s winner of the site of the week contest is the television graveyard known as Jump The Shark. The site is dedicated to uncovering television shows that are currently (or have been previously) locked into the downward spiral of mediocrity. It’s name came from an episode of Happy Days, where the Fonz tried to jump over a shark with his motorcycle. In retrospect, this was the point where Happy Days lost it’s hip cool factor and started it slide into second rate TV. The site can be pretty brutal and it’s no fun seeing some of my favorite shows getting skewered, but it also offers some pretty entertaining commentary on pop culture and there are a lot of shows that do deserve to be on their list.

Some of my more favorite features on the site include, the ability to vote for the worst television show ever, a list of TV characters that have been played by more then one actor, and it’s list of shows that never ended up jumping the shark. Jon Hein, who runs the site for TV Guide, also has a blog that he updates semi-regularly.

Congratulations to Jump the Shark on winning with this week’s site of the week contest. You can see the nominations for next week’s site of the week below and can vote in the sidebar. If you have any sites that you’d like to nominate for site of the week, feel free to email them to me at Davis < @> DavisFreeberg Dot Com.

Yesterland
Dave’s Daily
Compete.com

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

Jan 12

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week | Comments off

ANDREW -This is the worst fake ID I’ve ever seen…
Brian laughs.
ANDREW – Do you realize you made yourself sixty eight?
BRIAN – Oh, I know…I know, I goofed it…
ANDREW – What do you need a fake ID for?
BRIAN – (like it’s obvious) So I can vote!
from The Breakfast Club

After a week of voting the polls have finally closed and the Internet Movie Script Database won the honor of being this year’s first site of the week. It’s hard to imagine that this site is operating in full compliance of copyright law, but it’s still a great resource for discovering hard to find quotes. It features scripts for a large number of popular movies that have come out over the years. Some of the scripts only contain a few scenes and some of them are early rough drafts that were later changed, but if you are looking for that killer quote from a film and can’t seem to find it, IMSDB is the place to look.

While surfing the site I noticed that I seemed to gravitate more towards films that were recognizable and that I had already seen. I got more enjoyment from reliving classic moments in film history than from reading through scripts that I had never seen on the big screen. The site’s use of aggressive pop up ads was a bit of a turn off for me, but the overall quality of the content made up for this intrusion.

If you would like to nominate a site for consideration as the site of the week, you can email your suggestions to Davis AT DavisFreeberg Dot Com, in the meantime here are the nominations for next week’s site of the week.

Rude People

Clumsy Crooks

Jump The Shark