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freeform goodness is still alive and Dave threw a little web silliness along. The objective is to list websites that you use on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. As this is labelled ‘web 2’, I’ll assume that we are only talking about sites with some degree of interactivity here.
Let’s say I’ll look at these more than once a week. Some of them daily or even more frequently, others just the odd few times: The first site of course is our very own site. It gives me all sorts of fun things to do – like deleting spam comments, fixing the odd thing, adding new posts, answering to comments or even checking the mysterious access stats.
Then — sadly — there is Google Mail. I hate web mail and I wouldn’t use it. However, friggin’ Spotlight has been broken for me for about half a year now and Mail’s searches are useless without Spotlight. So Google Mail steps in. And Apple should be embarrassed that even if Spotlight worked, loading GMail and doing the search may well be quicker and less annoying that doing the search in Mail itself. (I keep saying that the dangerous thing about Google is not that they are evil but that they are so good.) Of course I am also addicted to the crack that are Google’s other services such as search.
It’s likely that I use delicious a few times per day via a bookmarklet to add some links with inane commentary and silly tags. I also slowly add photos to flickr at a rate of approximately one per day. And while I just rarely visit the web site, iScrobbler does some magic scrobbling over at last.fm for me. I am also fooling around with that Twitter thing. But it’s so unreliable that it isn’t much fun. Twitter is the new Technorati,
I say. In terms of unreliability anyway. When looking around for books, CDs and films I also like using the big catalogues provided by amazon. Other recurring fixes are MathSciNet, the arXiv and the central library (although our departmental library is quite good, so these accesses may not be as frequent).
There are all sorts of silly things to check for the longer term. Did we make any money from our Google ads? Amounts are so little, that more frequent checks won’t do any good. Or did I refer people to buy some book or DVD at amazon (there should be links for that on many posts and I set up little shops featuring things I discuss her or otherwise like for the US and Germany)? That’s even less profitable but it’s cool if somebody buys something. Not only because I ‘earn’ a few cent but also because it gives me that fuzzy feeling of having pointed someone that way. Then there are also a number of bank accounts as well as PayPal which need to be used from time to time. Apple’s bug reporting sites also see occasional visits as does eBay. On the more pleasant site there is IMDB whose heavily cross-referenced film index is great for people like myself who can’t remember the names of actors or directors. And there are a number of Mac software sites where we check whether any interesting remarks about our applications appeared.