2007 Owen's Top 10 Websites and Webcomics
As 2008 begins, it is time for the 3rd annual Year in Review: Websites and Webcomics. You can compare this list to last years'.
2007 Website Winners - Those sites that I frequent on a regular basis and/or have been very useful or interesting for one reason or another. Before I came up with this list I went back and reviewed last year's list to see how things compare a year later. Some sites are still going strong, others have fallen by the wayside.
(-) 9. Google - Okay, so its kind of a cop-out to put Google on a list like this (their ownership of YouTube notwithstanding). It's kind of like Time naming You person of the year (seriously, Time, that was lame). But I ran out of things to write and Google is really integral. Google search and Google Maps are probably my most visited sites of the year by page loads simply because google is my homepage at home and at work. Great site continues to be great. Not really news here. On to the more interesting sites...
(-5) 9. YouTube - Last year I wrote "2006 was the year of YouTube. This is a site that is on everyone's list." Well it continued in importance in 2007, but its power has been somewhat diluted by the proliferation of other video hosting sites. Although I do give them credit for jointly sponsoring a presidential primary debate with CNN. And youtube is still the de facto site for a lot of great videos. They also get points for a great internet phenomenon. So the placement in #9 is somewhat arbitrary, but it hasn't been on my personal map as much. Perhaps I should blame youtube's ubiquity and embedded video for it fading into the background of my conscious internet usage.
(-2) 8. Swem Library - This only applies for the first half of 2007 before I graduated, but I think my text from last year sums it up pretty well: "In lieu of listing all the various academic search sites I use, I'm just going to put down William and Mary's library website because that is the hub for all things academic that I use for school. In particular I use JSTOR, Project Muse, Infotrac OneFile, and LexisNexis with great frequency to find sources for papers. Swem is a fantastic resource, though, admittedly this one is the least accessible of my list to other people because you have to be a WM student to use the site." Though I was pleasantly surprised to find that our perpetual WM email address seems to give perpetual access to swem's resources. Score!
(-6) 7. Livejournal.com - Oh how the mighty have fallen. After two consecutive years at the top, LJ falls to number 6 on the top 10 list. Why you may ask? Well as the few remaining readers of LJ may note, I have not written more than a handful of entries in the last few months. Primarily this is a result of laziness and of working. While at college, there was frequent time to jot down an entry during the day, but now with a regular 8-4 job, I find that I am often too drained to write by the time I get home. I hope to update with more frequency in year 5 of my livejournal, but for 2007 it definitely fell by the wayside. That said, I would like to salute Jason and Charlotte for being the most consistent updaters on my friend's list. You guys keep me coming back to this site for more. Also, I hope to hear more tales from the ever-insightful Mr. Cassiday in 2008.
(New) 6. RottenTomatoes.com - Rotten Tomatoes (RT) is a site that aggregates hundreds of movie reviews from the press and blogs. The result is the best movie review site on the internet because at a glance you can see the aggregate opinion of all movie critics through their % Fresh score and excerpts from reviews. If I am ever in doubt about a film I look here. Interestingly, I also find it a good place to look after I have seen a film in order to gain more insights from reading various reviews. RT, don't see a movie without it.
(+2) 5. Civ Fanatics Center - Returning from its #7 spot in the 2005 top 10 list is the Civilization Fanatics Center, IMHO the best Civilization site on the net. My interest in Civ was rekindled this year first by the opportunity to play a couple multiplayer games with friends at school. Then, Josh introduced me to Fall from Heaven 2 a dark fantasy mod for Civ IV and the GameFlood RTS Mod of the Year . This incredibly rich mod offers practically an entirely new game with far more strategic depth than the original game. Brilliantly done. And as a result, I have spent a great deal of time on this site this year reading about strategy and updates and such.
(-2) 4. Facebook.com - Facebook falls two places in the ranking this year as the luster wore off and I got sick of invitations to yet another Pirates vs Ninjas application. This definitely was the year of the Facebook App, those magical monstrosities yoked to the great hype bandwagon that facebook has become. Seriously though, what is the appeal of all these stupid facebook applications? I think Facebook is a strong contender for most over-hyped phenomenon of 2007. There is no way it is worth billions, mainly because I am skeptical that anyone will figure out a way to monetize it enough to reach that value. Nevertheless, it remains the number one photo-hosting site on the internet and a useful resource for keeping up with friends and colleagues.
(-) 3. Wikipedia - Wikipedia is still going strong in my online repretoire. Sure, it isn't always accurate, but for the vast majority of things, it provides just enough information to satisfy my curiosity and sometimes it even points to some very useful third-party sites. Even if wikipedia will never replace professionally produced encyclopedias, wiki has set the standard for usability that future encyclopedias will have to meet. Not only that, but the concept of wikis (which now exist for many specific areas of interest) is a great part of the collaborative web.
(New) 2. Europe in Ruins - Called EiR for short, Europe in Ruins is a fan-created modification of the WWII RTS Company of Heroes. EiR seeks to create a persistent online WWII game with a warmap like Risk and battles fought using a modified version of CoH. Though I have played other mods a great deal in the past (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Fall From Heaven, etc.) EiR is the first mod whose community I have taken an active role in. Since I discovered it in April, I have been an active forum poster and have joined the team as a map maker and forum moderator. Look at my two maps here and here! Through the online voice chat programs Teamspeak and Ventrillo, I have gotten to interact with dozens of players from all over the world. It is an amazing and inspiring experience to be able to participate in a tight-knit community of gamers and play with people in Germany, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Britain, and Denmark (to name a few!). EiR's website definitely deserves its debut number 2 spot for 2007 and I see the trend continuing into the new year I eagerly await the big 2.0 release later this month.
(New) 1. Digg - A newcomer to the top 10 list, Digg.com is a user-generated news aggregator much like Slashdot and Fark. I enjoy Digg because it has an incredible range of stories, pictures, and videos. It is one of the few sites where carved egg sculptures can coexist with news about scientific discovers and celebrity gossip. My one complaint would be the rampant Ron Paul spam and the vocal tin foil hat crowd in any article relating to politics. (For the later, see the idiotic comments on this article about the Census).
2007 Webcomic Winners - Like last year, webcomics get their own category because there are so many of them:
(-4) 10. Alpha Shade - Alpha Shade is the most artsy webcomic I read. It is drawn in a quasi-manga graphic novel style. The storyline is a drama set between our universe and a parallel fantasy/steampunk world. As of yet, the story has not explained exactly how the two worlds intertwine but it is neat. My biggest complaint continues to be that Chris and Joseph are very slow at updating their graphic epic, but I look forward to the day they finish the whole thing and I can reread it uninterrupted by long waits between pages. As such, I rarely read it now because it updates like once a month. I should probably just come back in 4 years and see if they ever finished it.
(-4) 9. Ctrl+Alt+Del - CAD is very hit or miss in its comics. Contrary to much of the internet that (apparently) hates this comic, I think it occasionally hit on gold. Best strips are to be found in the one-off strips not related to the continuity
(-4) 8. Sinfest - Still the only webcomic I actually own the books for. Sinfest falls on the ranking mainly because ther are other comics I like better. It i still good from time to time. Though I don't like the
(New) 7. Erfworld - Found on the same site as Order of the Stick, Erfworld is a hilarious comic about a dweeby guy, Parsons, who somehow gets transported inside the world of the table-top fantasy wargame he is developing. Hilarity ensues as the comic makes fun of all the conventions of turn-based board games and what it would be like if the world actually worked like them.
(+1) 6. Piled, Higher and Deeper - PHD comics is a MWF ensemble comic with limited continuity about grad students. Now, not being a grad student, I can't corroborate the jokes first hand, but many of the jokes do apply to undergrad as well. Think of it being like Dilbert but for college and actually insightful. Even if you aren't interested in following the comic, I highly recommend checking out some of the "best of" strips here.
(New) 5. Girls with Slingshots - An amusing comic about friends Hazel Tellington and Jamie McJack and their oddball cast of friends including Hazel's talking, tequila-guzzling cactus,McPedro.
(New) 4. xkcd - "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language," says the tagline of this brilliant MWF comic. The format is a 4-5 panel strip with no continuity from week to week. Jokes center around pop culture, math, computers, and general geekiness. Very witty and creative. Be sure to mouse over the comic for author commentary in the form of caption. Also has some very sweetly romantic comics in a geeky way (here, here, and here).
(-) 3. Order of the Stick - Is an endearing MWF fantasy comic about a hapless band of adventurers who are on a quest to save the world. OOTS is a comedy cartoon that makes fun of fantasy cliches and Dungeons & Dragons. Similar to what RPGworld did for the console RPG except a lot better and more consistent. OOTS also has the distinction of maintaining its distinctive stick-figure artistic style unchanged throughout its existence, unlike most webcomics that evolve from crappy to good.
(-) 2. Questionable Content - Is a daily M-F comic by Jeph Jacques of Massachusetts is hilarious story of a clueless lad, his crazy female coffee shop friends, and his mischievous anthropomorphic robot. Witty, exciting, and amusing, QC definitely deserves its #2 spot.
(-) 1. Penny Arcade - Hands down the combination of top-notch verbiage from Tycho and hilarious comics by Gabe, PA delivers a solid webcomic experience week every MWF.
Well that wraps up the year in review of websites. Perhaps I will update more often in 2008. I hope so, because it was fun to write this entry and it reminded me that I miss the creative outlet that is LJ. We'll see. Good luck to everyone on '08!
2007 Website Winners - Those sites that I frequent on a regular basis and/or have been very useful or interesting for one reason or another. Before I came up with this list I went back and reviewed last year's list to see how things compare a year later. Some sites are still going strong, others have fallen by the wayside.
(-) 9. Google - Okay, so its kind of a cop-out to put Google on a list like this (their ownership of YouTube notwithstanding). It's kind of like Time naming You person of the year (seriously, Time, that was lame). But I ran out of things to write and Google is really integral. Google search and Google Maps are probably my most visited sites of the year by page loads simply because google is my homepage at home and at work. Great site continues to be great. Not really news here. On to the more interesting sites...
(-5) 9. YouTube - Last year I wrote "2006 was the year of YouTube. This is a site that is on everyone's list." Well it continued in importance in 2007, but its power has been somewhat diluted by the proliferation of other video hosting sites. Although I do give them credit for jointly sponsoring a presidential primary debate with CNN. And youtube is still the de facto site for a lot of great videos. They also get points for a great internet phenomenon. So the placement in #9 is somewhat arbitrary, but it hasn't been on my personal map as much. Perhaps I should blame youtube's ubiquity and embedded video for it fading into the background of my conscious internet usage.
(-2) 8. Swem Library - This only applies for the first half of 2007 before I graduated, but I think my text from last year sums it up pretty well: "In lieu of listing all the various academic search sites I use, I'm just going to put down William and Mary's library website because that is the hub for all things academic that I use for school. In particular I use JSTOR, Project Muse, Infotrac OneFile, and LexisNexis with great frequency to find sources for papers. Swem is a fantastic resource, though, admittedly this one is the least accessible of my list to other people because you have to be a WM student to use the site." Though I was pleasantly surprised to find that our perpetual WM email address seems to give perpetual access to swem's resources. Score!
(-6) 7. Livejournal.com - Oh how the mighty have fallen. After two consecutive years at the top, LJ falls to number 6 on the top 10 list. Why you may ask? Well as the few remaining readers of LJ may note, I have not written more than a handful of entries in the last few months. Primarily this is a result of laziness and of working. While at college, there was frequent time to jot down an entry during the day, but now with a regular 8-4 job, I find that I am often too drained to write by the time I get home. I hope to update with more frequency in year 5 of my livejournal, but for 2007 it definitely fell by the wayside. That said, I would like to salute Jason and Charlotte for being the most consistent updaters on my friend's list. You guys keep me coming back to this site for more. Also, I hope to hear more tales from the ever-insightful Mr. Cassiday in 2008.
(New) 6. RottenTomatoes.com - Rotten Tomatoes (RT) is a site that aggregates hundreds of movie reviews from the press and blogs. The result is the best movie review site on the internet because at a glance you can see the aggregate opinion of all movie critics through their % Fresh score and excerpts from reviews. If I am ever in doubt about a film I look here. Interestingly, I also find it a good place to look after I have seen a film in order to gain more insights from reading various reviews. RT, don't see a movie without it.
(+2) 5. Civ Fanatics Center - Returning from its #7 spot in the 2005 top 10 list is the Civilization Fanatics Center, IMHO the best Civilization site on the net. My interest in Civ was rekindled this year first by the opportunity to play a couple multiplayer games with friends at school. Then, Josh introduced me to Fall from Heaven 2 a dark fantasy mod for Civ IV and the GameFlood RTS Mod of the Year . This incredibly rich mod offers practically an entirely new game with far more strategic depth than the original game. Brilliantly done. And as a result, I have spent a great deal of time on this site this year reading about strategy and updates and such.
(-2) 4. Facebook.com - Facebook falls two places in the ranking this year as the luster wore off and I got sick of invitations to yet another Pirates vs Ninjas application. This definitely was the year of the Facebook App, those magical monstrosities yoked to the great hype bandwagon that facebook has become. Seriously though, what is the appeal of all these stupid facebook applications? I think Facebook is a strong contender for most over-hyped phenomenon of 2007. There is no way it is worth billions, mainly because I am skeptical that anyone will figure out a way to monetize it enough to reach that value. Nevertheless, it remains the number one photo-hosting site on the internet and a useful resource for keeping up with friends and colleagues.
(-) 3. Wikipedia - Wikipedia is still going strong in my online repretoire. Sure, it isn't always accurate, but for the vast majority of things, it provides just enough information to satisfy my curiosity and sometimes it even points to some very useful third-party sites. Even if wikipedia will never replace professionally produced encyclopedias, wiki has set the standard for usability that future encyclopedias will have to meet. Not only that, but the concept of wikis (which now exist for many specific areas of interest) is a great part of the collaborative web.
(New) 2. Europe in Ruins - Called EiR for short, Europe in Ruins is a fan-created modification of the WWII RTS Company of Heroes. EiR seeks to create a persistent online WWII game with a warmap like Risk and battles fought using a modified version of CoH. Though I have played other mods a great deal in the past (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Fall From Heaven, etc.) EiR is the first mod whose community I have taken an active role in. Since I discovered it in April, I have been an active forum poster and have joined the team as a map maker and forum moderator. Look at my two maps here and here! Through the online voice chat programs Teamspeak and Ventrillo, I have gotten to interact with dozens of players from all over the world. It is an amazing and inspiring experience to be able to participate in a tight-knit community of gamers and play with people in Germany, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Britain, and Denmark (to name a few!). EiR's website definitely deserves its debut number 2 spot for 2007 and I see the trend continuing into the new year I eagerly await the big 2.0 release later this month.
(New) 1. Digg - A newcomer to the top 10 list, Digg.com is a user-generated news aggregator much like Slashdot and Fark. I enjoy Digg because it has an incredible range of stories, pictures, and videos. It is one of the few sites where carved egg sculptures can coexist with news about scientific discovers and celebrity gossip. My one complaint would be the rampant Ron Paul spam and the vocal tin foil hat crowd in any article relating to politics. (For the later, see the idiotic comments on this article about the Census).
2007 Webcomic Winners - Like last year, webcomics get their own category because there are so many of them:
(-4) 10. Alpha Shade - Alpha Shade is the most artsy webcomic I read. It is drawn in a quasi-manga graphic novel style. The storyline is a drama set between our universe and a parallel fantasy/steampunk world. As of yet, the story has not explained exactly how the two worlds intertwine but it is neat. My biggest complaint continues to be that Chris and Joseph are very slow at updating their graphic epic, but I look forward to the day they finish the whole thing and I can reread it uninterrupted by long waits between pages. As such, I rarely read it now because it updates like once a month. I should probably just come back in 4 years and see if they ever finished it.
(-4) 9. Ctrl+Alt+Del - CAD is very hit or miss in its comics. Contrary to much of the internet that (apparently) hates this comic, I think it occasionally hit on gold. Best strips are to be found in the one-off strips not related to the continuity
(-4) 8. Sinfest - Still the only webcomic I actually own the books for. Sinfest falls on the ranking mainly because ther are other comics I like better. It i still good from time to time. Though I don't like the
(New) 7. Erfworld - Found on the same site as Order of the Stick, Erfworld is a hilarious comic about a dweeby guy, Parsons, who somehow gets transported inside the world of the table-top fantasy wargame he is developing. Hilarity ensues as the comic makes fun of all the conventions of turn-based board games and what it would be like if the world actually worked like them.
(+1) 6. Piled, Higher and Deeper - PHD comics is a MWF ensemble comic with limited continuity about grad students. Now, not being a grad student, I can't corroborate the jokes first hand, but many of the jokes do apply to undergrad as well. Think of it being like Dilbert but for college and actually insightful. Even if you aren't interested in following the comic, I highly recommend checking out some of the "best of" strips here.
(New) 5. Girls with Slingshots - An amusing comic about friends Hazel Tellington and Jamie McJack and their oddball cast of friends including Hazel's talking, tequila-guzzling cactus,McPedro.
(New) 4. xkcd - "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language," says the tagline of this brilliant MWF comic. The format is a 4-5 panel strip with no continuity from week to week. Jokes center around pop culture, math, computers, and general geekiness. Very witty and creative. Be sure to mouse over the comic for author commentary in the form of caption. Also has some very sweetly romantic comics in a geeky way (here, here, and here).
(-) 3. Order of the Stick - Is an endearing MWF fantasy comic about a hapless band of adventurers who are on a quest to save the world. OOTS is a comedy cartoon that makes fun of fantasy cliches and Dungeons & Dragons. Similar to what RPGworld did for the console RPG except a lot better and more consistent. OOTS also has the distinction of maintaining its distinctive stick-figure artistic style unchanged throughout its existence, unlike most webcomics that evolve from crappy to good.
(-) 2. Questionable Content - Is a daily M-F comic by Jeph Jacques of Massachusetts is hilarious story of a clueless lad, his crazy female coffee shop friends, and his mischievous anthropomorphic robot. Witty, exciting, and amusing, QC definitely deserves its #2 spot.
(-) 1. Penny Arcade - Hands down the combination of top-notch verbiage from Tycho and hilarious comics by Gabe, PA delivers a solid webcomic experience week every MWF.
Well that wraps up the year in review of websites. Perhaps I will update more often in 2008. I hope so, because it was fun to write this entry and it reminded me that I miss the creative outlet that is LJ. We'll see. Good luck to everyone on '08!