PostSecret

PostSecret is a blog that people can send their deepest darkest secrets to anonymously on a postcard. You can use all your artistic talents to share your sorrow, heartbreak, anger, love, despair, hurt or any other feeling with the world. This site can make you laugh or cry. Sometimes the mood is uplifting and other times it’s depressing, but whatever the feeling, it definitely gets you thinking. Postsecret is updated with new secrets every Sunday.

Final word: Once you’ve been touched by a secret or really relate to one that’s been sent in, you’re hooked!

Discowiki: discogs.com

Once a word reminiscent of kiwis and other strange exotic fruit, the term “wiki” has now widely become loosely synonymous with “mucho mas informaciones” in Spanish. One popular example of this type of online collaborative content gathering is wikipedia.org; anyone can contribute, and as such, information is collected and compiled at an astonishing rate (hence the term “wiki”, which actually means “rápido” in Spanish).

Now to get to the point. Similar to wikipedia in the wiki-esque sense, discogs.com presents arguably the most complete online music catalogue in existence. Primarily a knowledge database, it also serves as a music market place and online community for contributing members (vinyl records as well as cd’s and cassettes can be bought and sold, members can communicate directly to other members, happiness abounds). Membership is free and only required for contributors or for people who have so many vinyl records at home that their insurance company requires them to catalogue their entire volume (this is done very easily through the site as most titles have already been contributed and your list when completed can be easily converted to an excel spreadsheet, for the real pros). Otherwise, feel free to search for your favourite group or artist and see exactly when your favourite EP was released in Japan and even memorize the catalogue number for those Friday night trivia games with your friends and family.

Final Word: Fun stuff !

10/10

Windows Vista on a CD-R?

Vlite.net is by nuhi, the creator of the popular nlite which allows people to customize their Windows 2000, 2003, and XP installs. Vlite allows users to customize Vista by letting them decide which components to install and which to leave out. Theres a long list of parts which can be removed and consequently shrink Vista to beable to comfortably fit on a CD-R.

I’ve been experimenting with Vlite and managed to keep Vista’s prettiness with the functionaly I need while making the install CD under 700MB (under 4 gigs installed). Not only does Vlite make the install faster but it allows the Vista to be run well on lower end computer who dont have at least 1 gig of ram. Read the forums to see how some people are running vista on 256MB of ram.
I will provide a screen shot of what I removed a little bit later. I have 1 gig of ram and a dual core CPU, Vista flies.

Final Word: This rocks! There’s so much crap preinstalled on Vista. This lets you decide what stay and what goes.

News by the people for the people.

Digg.com has been around for about 2 years. It has over 1 million users. The concept is user driven news. Someone submits an article, picture set or website and the community votes one what they like. The top stories end up on the homepage. People can browse the top stories in the past 24 hours, week, month or year.

I browse this site constantly at work to pass time. Articles tend to be very techie because the people who sign up to vote on stories are typically male IT geeks. The site founder and his close friend host a podcast called Diggnation which review the top stories of the week with humor.

Final Word: A great place to waste time. News voted by the people for the people. Something worth checking on a daily bases.

IT news, a daily addiction

TheRegister.co.uk features up to date hardcore international IT news. Clean articles that get to the point. If your an IT junkie this site will keep you informed. Not for the average internet surfer.

Buddy of mine swears by this site. He works in the IT industry.

Final Word: Up to date IT news. Loads of great content, useful if you’re tech navy.

Bumpin House Station

Friskyradio.com has been around since 2001 and seems to be quite well known by dance music fans. I found out about this site though the Soulseek “house” chat room. I ask a room of 300 people for a good online house radio station, Frisky was the overwhelming response. I listened I liked.

Final Word: Popular, easy to navigate, reliable for bumpin beats.

Music sharing at its finest.

Soulseek is a ad-free, spyware free, file sharing application. Mainly for music.

Strong community and virtual rooms lets you to meet people, share information, find new music and chat freely using real-time messages in public or private.

What can I say? Soulseek rocks. I always find the rarest music with it that I cant find anywhere else. One of my favorite features is the wishlist. If you cant find what your looking for type the name in the wishlist and you’ll be notified as soon as someone with the file logs in.

Remember to leave your searches going, it never stops searching.

Final Word: Not the fastest p2p network but one of the finest ive seen.

Very cool house station

Pronton radio plays house and electro and lets you buy the cool songs you just heard. They’ve been around for a while and have a great style sound and layout. Kinda hard to figure out how to play the music tho :/

I’ve had a very good experience with them. I signed up recently to find out the track listing for a set but never got the confirmation email to my yahoo account. I wrote the admin a quick email and within 15 mins he got back to mee and fixed my account. I really like the style of music they play (personal taste). I also like the fact that they link to Beatport.com so you can (in most cases) buy the songs you really like.

Final Word: Nice to look at, nice to listen too. Not so nice to navigate.