I've been using the internet for quite a bit now, from the mid nineties where you needed the local university computers and Mosaic to surf up to present, where the net is widely used, internet shopping and banking well established, and broadband is freely available. One of the things that is best to see is that a lot of the sites that were good and popular back then are still around and have not deteriorated in quality. Also there are a lot more sites selling items or requiring registration than there were but there are still lots of gems out there giving free information.


THE GOOD....

Here is my top 10, in no particular order:

bbc.co.uk
The bbc website is generally excellent with many many many areas. The ones I particularly like are the sport area with the sport academy site offering tips on sports and information and rules and training tips. The radio 1 site is also useful for getting the playlist (A, B and C list of about 40 songs in total), charts, featured songs and shows and what is going on in various genres of music. The news and weather are also among the best out there.

allmusic.com
One of my favourite music sites - features biographies of virtually every band or group ever plus discographies, reviews of their albums, and links to their influences, similar bands or genres. The reviews are all good quality and well written and pick out standout tracks on most albums. You can easily spend hours surfing through this.
Also worth a mention is Nme.com which has a very distinctively styled site and searchable database of reviews and gig guides.

http:\\veepers01.budlight.com
Provides hours of entertainment making talking pictures! You can either choose from the photos provided or upload a photo of a friend or victim and then animate it to speak any text you type in. You automatically get options to pick the eyes, head shape and mouth position so that the photo blinks, the mouth syncs to the tex
t and the head moves realistically. You can choose from a set of voices to read the message (american, sportscaster, scottish, american female) You can then email the picture to your friends (or enemy) and they get a hyperlink to the veeper, which stays saved for 14 days.

multimap.co.uk
Incredibly detailed maps of the UK and the rest of the world for free. You can zoom in from 5,000 (street names level) to 400,000 (country map). Very handy for getting directions or picking local facilities such as train stations, airports and motorway junctions or the local weather forecast. Usually you can search for a street name and town name and it will pick out and circle it and you can zoom in and out to find the route from city level down to individual street maps. The site also offers links to hotels, restaurants, traffic info etc through its partner sites. If you register you then can save maps and routes and retrieve them later. This site has won many awards and plaudits.

ebay.co.uk
I have used auction sites quite a lot in the past, not so much recently. This was mostly to buy software or books second hand although I did buy a computer on QXL. I have received all the goods quickly without any trouble. Ebay is probably the best known site and certainly has more goods on offer than any of the other auction sites (especially in comparison to QXL). It has the general features like being able to read about the seller or buyer and all their previous transactions and customer comments, email notification of how your bid is going and automatic bidding wizards. I find this site very well laid out and easy to navigate - one of the good features is that it automatically lists out the items that you have viewed at the bottom of the page so it is easy to get back to them. The bidding process can get quite exciting but check that you don't get carried away. Always good for a laugh if you can stomach it are the taxidermy pages, there are some very badly done
examples on it.


fool.co.uk
English version of the famous Motley Fool dot com site. Very good financial site with huge amount of forums discussing everything from individual companies and shares, financial tips and advice. There are also boards for a huge array of other subjects like diy, gardening, motoring and other hobbies. You can also sign up to their newsletter and receive weekly bulletins by email which contain some excellent articles. This site is best in that it offers generally independant advice and recognises the fact that a lot of the financial, pension and assurance providers aim to confuse and profit from people. This offers impartial advice and has lots of guides from everything to remortgaging, choosing shares and investments to general money management and how to save lots of money every year.
The forums are always good, friendly and free of the type of people you get on some internet sites who need to get out more or calm down.....

autotrader.co.uk
Has been going for ages and is still in my opinion the best site for finding or selling cars, unlike the hopeless Fish4 site (crap at finding cars, houses and jobs). You can create a user account on the site to get greater search options. This is linked to Autotrader magazine and classified ads so will scoop up most of the private sales around. I got my first car from this site many years ago, at a very good price.

gojobsite.co.uk
I used this recruitment site several months ago to find a job. It seems to specialise in engineering and technical roles although lists many more. I found this site much better than any of the others in the UK. You can search for particular job descriptions, locations or pick from a large number of lists an industry type (Defence, Aerospace, Automotive, Health, Retail etc). It has the support of a lot of recruitment agencies and you can also register and get email notication of new postings tailored to your requirements. It also
has some very good information about writing CVs, interviews and job seeking in general and issues about working environment and life, again which can be emailed to you as a gazette full of links.

www.insults.net/html/swear
Learn how to swear in over 30 different languages with a list of the swear words and insults! Also features a random insult generator and put-downs and crushing replies to put-downs too if you need to respond to people who have been surfing on this site.

www.howstuffworks.com
Large amount of articles on information from cars to computers to electronics and home. This site will have detailed articles on almost how any home appliance or gadget works, engines or car systems, economics and travel and science subjects. There are also articles on 'peoplestuff' with biographies, current affairs, culture, professionals and government. All the pages are packed with diagrams, pictures and animations. Makes fascinating reading although you could easily lose a few hours of your life.


I suppose I should mention dooyoo as well! Lots of good reviews and you can actually get paid to surf (or make other people money) or earn vouchers when you are at work and get opinions on anything and everything.

I'd also put in Google as this is the one I use for all my searches (is my homepage) and newgroups which usually have useful information on anything you need to find out about, particularly Office software and how to do particular tasks with it. Not to mention that I wouldn't get anywhere on the internet without it or have found this site.

THE BAD......

Worst web sites? These would have to be the ones that immediately launch hundreds of pop-ups to porn sites, casinos and other rubbish and end up giving you spam for the next few months, usually titled 'Warez' or 'Gamez' or something.ru. These usually have no content anyway just end up as banner sites to another one launchi
ng even more pop-ups. Just as annoying are the sites that appear on your search results pretending to have found something but then just turn out to be a directory or another search engine.


AND THE UGLY
mingers.com

Thanks for reading.