• NewsHub. This site collects headlines from lots of major news outlets and updates them frequently.
• CBC News Online
• BBC News
• CNN
• CRAYON's list of news links. Unbelievably vast -- find out what's happening everywhere from Lubbock, Texas, to Vladivostok.
• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Find out what the major news outlets are distorting or not telling you at all.
• Common Dreams. Progressive news and commentary, plus lots of links.

Sites of the day

• The Cool Word of the Day
• Dictionary.com Word of the Day
• Cool Jargon of the Day
• Quotes of the Day
• The Astronomy Picture of the Day
• The Fruit of the Day
• Weather in southern Ontario (where I am)

Zines

• SMUG. My friend Leslie's great zine, with more New York City attitude than you can possibly imagine.
• Salon. I used to visit it every day, but I don't like it nearly so much since their most recent redesign and their fawning attentions on whiny rich Boomers with spoiled kids named Tyler and Brittany.
• The Onion. How I love The Onion.
• C'est Need to Know! -- bills itself as "the weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the UK." Always a fun read; comes out on Fridays.
• FEED. Lots of smart writing about interesting stuff.

Web logs

• Robot Wisdom -- one of my favorite sites these days. An intelligent, thought-provoking Weblog with some great Webcam pages. The owner seems very prickly when it's suggested to him that not all Weblogs are created alike, though.
• Memepool -- "life support for the terminally bored."
• Flutterby
• CamWorld
• Honeyguide

Other diversions

• RinkWorks. Home to the best collection of stupid computer user stories I've ever seen, plus the hilarious Book-a-Minute condensed books, and lots more.
• The Internet Movie Database.
• The All-Music Guide -- a great search engine for just about every song and artist you can think of.
• Dogman's page. His resume and AOL Geek of the Week Gallery kill me.
• My Boot -- check out the movies page, especially if you have a fast connection.
• Where's Fatso?
• Addicted to Stuff. "One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop."
• The Frequently Asked Questions lists for all the Usenet newsgroups that have them. Still useful, and still maintained.
• The Dead People Server.
• Spam.
• The MIT Gallery of Hacks. At MIT, a hack is a prank or a practical joke, or even a visit to a part of campus where you shouldn't be (like the top of the Green Building or one of the domes). This page has lots of great pictures of things like a fake campus police car atop the Great Dome (I never made it there, alas, but I did get to the top of the small one), along with descriptions of some of the best hacks perpetrated in recent years.
• Spatula City. All spatulas, all the time. What the Web was like in '95.
• Useless Web Pages.
• The Captain James T. Kirk Sing-Along Page. Visit this page. Be awed.
• Cyrano's Valentine Server.
• The Nose Pages.

Software and toys

• Ambrosia Software, a company that develops Macintosh shareware that rocks. I particularly recommend Apeiron, a game based on Centipede, and Chiral, which is sort of Tetris for chemists.
• LucasArts, George Lucas's software company. They produce some fantastic games. We lost at least a week to Sam and Max Hit the Road.
• RealNetworks, software that enables you to listen to audio or watch video in real time. Listen to Jim Hightower's daily rants, tune in to CBC Radio, and more.
• Imagine Radio. Program your own radio station in RealAudio.

Search engines

So: the biggest advance in search engine technology recently seems to be Google. It lists sites according to how many other sites link to them, so you know the first few sites listed are well-respected by others on the Web. Scott Rosenberg, a columnist on Salon, points out that a couple of graduate students came up with Google, and says, "That a couple of grad students could build a better search engine than a whole raft of media and technology companies with stock-market valuations in the billions does not speak well of how these firms are spending their budgets." Heh.