December 24, 2004
The Top 10 Websites of 2004
10. The Internet Movie Database In 2004--as it has every year--the IMDB saved me from that nagging "Where have I seen that actor before?" feeling again and again and again.
9. eBay The best shopping-as-blood-sport site you can find.
8. The Electoral Vote Predictor Amongst an abundance of websites covering the US presidential election, Andrew Tanenbaum's clear-headed look at the ever-changing electoral votemap was a standout.
7. Random Acts of Reality The online diary of a London EMT.
6. Bloglines An easy, powerful tool for keeping track of your blog addictions.
5. MetaFilter If it weren't for the sporadic lapses into internal civil war, this grandaddy of Internet communities would rank even higher.
4. MonkeyFilter It started off as a Metafilter clone, but MonkeyFilter quickly developed into a real online community.
3. Travel Aggregators I'm cheating here a little bit, by lumping a bunch of sites into one. But among the new crop of travel aggregators--sites which do the work of searching muliple travel sites and finding you the best price--no single one has yet distinguished itself as the King of the Hill. So for now, let's consider it a 5-way tie among Mobissimo, CheapFlights, Qixo, Kayak, and Sidestep. Now, if only somebody could aggregate the aggregators...
2. Google Such an obvious choice, I almost forgot to include it.
And the Website of the Year award goes to...
1. BattleShip-Ron.com If you aren't a regular visitor to BattleShip-Ron.com, it's going to be difficult to fully explain just how generally brilliant it is. All I can tell you is, creator BattleShip Ron is a genius--and I say that with full knowledge of how sadly devalued the word "genius" has become. Trust me; in Ron's case, it's an understatement.
Posted by jacobw at December 23, 2004 06:45 PM
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