What does it take to be a top 100 website?Exactly how many visitors does a website need for it to rank in the top 10, 100, 1000 of the web? Pingdom crunches the numbers. Facebook, the most visited site, gets 540 million per month.
Websites
The best websites to watch
Bored of Facebook and need a new internet distraction? Check out the winners of the SXSW top website awards, from BooneOakley, the best experimental website to Atlas Obscura, winner of the amusement award.
Daily Proposition: Become a blogger. Everyone’s doing it
Put an online journalist out of a job, start your own blog tonight. The software is free and bloomin’ easy to use. New blogger Elly Keating explains how.
Daily Proposition: Watch celebrities being funny (or not)
Make yourself laugh with top-shelf comedy videos from one of the internet’s best sources: Funny or Die. Even Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are amusing there, says Daniel Ziffer.
Google’s new best friend: small business
Google’s world domination is continuing, with the company now offering UK businesses free sites and domains. What is Google planning with all its new customers? asks Tim Burrowes.
Daily Proposition: Let Tony Martin tickle your fancy
What’s Tony Martin been up to? The Scrivener’s Fancy is the amusing answer. Have a read tonight — it’ll give you more laughs than Couples Retreat, says Daniel Ziffer.
The Guardian‘s 100 best websites of 2009
The Guardian names the 100 essential websites of the year. Naturally, 2009 is all about microblogging, real-time, social media and the search wars.
The sites already making paywalls work
With all the huffing and puffing over Murdoch’s plan to paywall his News Corp sites, you’d think no-one had ever actually done it before. But there are plenty of sites on the Web already making paywalls work for them. We can think of at least one…
Web ads: a watcher’s guide
Push-downs, troll ads, blogger endorsements and the Hulk — they’re all new and different ways advertisers and webmasters are trying to catch your eye (and clicks) online, to generate more (or any) money from the web.
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Politico and Wash Post to engage in DC territorial pissing
Online political news site Politico is going to launch a local Washington DC edition of the site, headed up by the former editor of WashingtonPost.com. It’s a pretty direct attack on The Washington Post’s DC supremacy, and HuffPo has its hands on an internal memo that outlines the plans.
RIP GeoCities: a loss for fluro text, animated GIFs and endless Midi files
Today, Yahoo is finally euthanising GeoCities, the original free, design-you-own webpage service where many netizens got their first taste of web mastery and popped their HTML cherries. Vale.
Wine online: a booming business
Vinfolio is a comprehensive site for the fine wine buff, with online bidding for wine, social networking and offline storage facilities. And it’s just raised $US4.5 million in venture capital. That’s a serious drop.
Websites: before they were famous
Before Facebook, Google, YouTube and others were the sleek, cutting-edge sites they are today, they went through the same awkward early years many online ventures do (The Drudge Report is arguably still there). Here’s how 20 top websites looked when they first launched.
Beauty goes web 2.0
Hearst, publisher of Cosmo and Marie Claire, is launching an ambitious beauty-focused website that brings together original content with articles from its own magazines and reader contributions, tailored to the reader’s age, ethnicity, hair color and product preferences.
Craigslist: an ugly, anarchic success
Classifieds website Craigslist is ugly, run by an eccentric introvert who pretends to be a squirrel, does no marketing and employs only a handful of staff — yet it attracts millions of visitors (and dollars) every day. Wired examines the internet’s most unlikely success story.
The e-store that cashes in on inconvenience
Alice.com — still in beta — promises to help customers make “sure you never run out of bathroom tissue.” It uses calendars and reminders to help tell you what to buy — way before it becomes a must.
Murdoch’s secret plan to charge for content
Murdoch has gobbled up many media assets in recent times — from the Wall Street Journal to MySpace, writes Stryker McGuire. Now it turns out, he’s got bigger plan for them. Cue evil laughter.
What Times readers really care about
Everyone loves a wordle — and everyone loves to see what readers actually read (as opposed to what they purport to read).
