top 100 useful sites

you might be interested in this article from mail & guardian online on ‘the new 100 most useful sites‘.

the top 100 sites were divided into categories like applications, email, gaming, maps, politics, news, blogs writing, blogs reading, with 5 sites to a category – 20 categories all together (thus 100 sites).

since i’m a blogger and blogging about this, here’s an excerpt on blogging!

Blogs: reading
There are millions of blogs out there; you need to pick the best. Step forward RSS (aka web feeds) and blog search engines to simplify things. Technorati is occasionally flaky, but generally a reliable indicator of what’s being blogged about. Icerocket runs it close. And you’ll need an online aggregator to keep abreast of the feeds you’re most interested in: Newsgator and Google Reader are good choices. Bloglines is an excellent alternative feed reader.
technorati.com
icerocket.com
newsgator.com
google.com/reader
bloglines.com

Blogs: writing
To do it rather than read it, you need a good set of tools. The open-source and free software project WordPress has risen to prominence, elbowing aside many rivals with its blog creation, management and (importantly) spam-beating tools. WordPress.org is the free software; wordpress.com offers paid-for, managed versions of the free package. Blogger is the best of the rest; Vox is neat, easy and free, and plugs into lots of social applications. Statcounter counts, well, statistics for your site; the free Google Analytics (if you can get an account) is good too.
wordpress.org
blogger.com
vox.com
statcounter.com
google.com/analytics

do hop over to the article to read it in full, ok.