Plan Your Weekend With Goby

Want to know what’s happening in your town this weekend? Go to Goby, a search engine for your free time. You just type in a location, a date or time, and a category of what you’d like to do (food and drink, events, adventure and extreme, etc.), and Goby will find it. You’ll get a complete listing of fun things to do for any location, and everything is shown on a map. You get all the important details, plus photos and even what’s going on nearby. Goby is great for planning activities on a trip or vacation, but it’s also terrific for planning your next weekend’s events. It’s a search engine focused on fun!

Best People Business Search

If you’re looking for a great people search engine, stop by Pipl. Unlike other people search engines, Pipl scours the “deep Web” for information. This means that Pipl’s robots visit searchable databases that aren’t covered by the big search engines, and they collect facts, contact details and other relevant information from personal profiles, member directories, scientific publications, court records and numerous other sources. You just type in a person’s name, address, email address, phone number (or any combination thereof) and you’ll get a flood of information, including pictures, social networking profiles, public records, and more. This is a great tool for business research, but it’s also useful if you want to locate a friend, family member, or colleague you’ve lost touch with.

Turn Your Doodles Into Art With PhotoSketch

This application is so much fun you may have trouble getting on the Web site to try it out, because the site is getting overwhelmed with users. PhotoSketch lets you  create photos from doodles and instructions you give it. You simply draw some basic stick figures (I can do that!), then add labels for each of the items, as well as the background, and voila! PhotoSketch creates a picture for you. The program, created by five Chinese Computer Science and Technology students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore, scours the Internet for images that fit your instructions, then puts the best ones together in a Photoshopped image that’s uncannily accurate. This is an amazing application that I predict will be extremely popular once people find out about it.

Free Software Downloads

The quality of free software on the Web is getting better all the time, and there are free versions of just about every major software program on the market. You’ll find a good review of some of the best free software at 5 Open Source Alternatives. These are programs from the open source community, which is made up of people who develop software in the public domain. Here you’ll find programs for image editing, video and audio editing, graphic design, word processing, and more. These programs have most of the features of the big commercial ones, and they have a very attractive price tag — free!

Of Death and Statistics

There are all sorts of calculators on the Web, so I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s a death risk calculator. Yes, that’s right — now you can calculate the chances that you’ll still be around this time next year. At Death Risk Rankings you can enter your age, gender, and some other variables and get a table or chart showing your risk of dying in the next year. The statistics are based on current mortality data from the U.S. and Europe, but to really understand what the numbers mean you should probably read the Tutorial section. There are also links to other death calculators on the Web, so you can really get a clear idea of what the statistics say about your chances of hanging around. Statistics can’t account for everything, of course — you can get a clean bill of health from your doctor and then get hit by a bus walking out of his office — but it’s an interesting exercise to visit these sites.

Fanbase: a Great Site for Sports Fans

If you’re a sports fan, you’ll love Fanbase. It calls itself “the Web’s largest almanac of pro and college athletes, built by fans”. This site has a database of 1.7 million athletes, 20 thousand teams, in 23 sports. You can look up statistics for your favorite athletes, check schedules for upcoming games, see who’s on each team’s roster, and even get historical data, like results from your favorite team’s season 25 years ago. Some of the profiles for the college athletes are a little thin on information, but this site keeps growing — fans can add articles, pictures, and videos of their favorite players. This is going to be a popular site with sports fans, I predict!

Spezify — A Fun Visual Search Tool

Search engines come in all shapes and sizes, and some are more fun to use than others. Spezify is a lot of fun because when you type in your search term it bombards you with a screen full of pictures, text, and videos about your term, and it just keeps adding more to the picture all the time. It’s a kaleidoscope of a search list, much more entertaining than a numbered, linear list like you get on Google or Yahoo. You can move around this list quite easily, and if you see something you like you just click on it to get an enlarged version of the picture or text. Videos will play right in the screen, so it’s easy to see if the video is relevant to your search. If you want to visit the site of a particular item on the search list, just click on its URL, and you’ll be there in seconds. I don’t think Spezify is going to replace Google anytime soon, but it’s worth a visit if you want an overview of a search topic.

Best Travel Deals

There’s no excuse anymore for paying top dollar when you travel. There are dozens of Web sites focused on discount travel, and Best Travel Deals is a good example. Membership at this site is free, but it allows you to review, share and vote on the best travel deals. Travelers and travel providers will find this site useful. What’s great about this site is that it gives smaller travel providers the opportunity to reach a larger audience with their travel offerings. Travelers can reap the benefits of a networking community where thousands of people are recommending great travel deals. There are deals here on airlines, cruises, vacation rentals, hotels, motels, restaurants, travel packages, coupons, and much more. You can read the comments of other members, which will help you make your buying decision.

A Penny Pinching Site

Like a lot of people these days, I’m watching my pennies more closely. I look for deals and discounts before I make a purchase, and I love Web sites that help me with these types of buying decisions. Wisebread is one of those sites. It claims it will help you live large on a small budget, and it has articles, advice, software, calculators, and lots of other things that will help you spend your money wisely. Click on “Personal Finance” and you’ll see a review of a program called Pocketsmith that will help you forecast your expenses better. Click on “Frugal Living” and you’ll find an article on 30 household products vinegar can replace. Click on “Deals and Coupons” and you’ll find, well, deals and coupons that will help you save money. Wisebread is a good site to bookmark if you want to make those dollars (and pennies) last longer.

Huge Map Collection

There are lots of sites on the Internet where you can download maps, but the grandaddy of them all is the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. This was one of the first sites I found when I started writing a newsletter about useful sites back in 1997. It’s a no-frills site that is well-organized and has a huge number of maps for you to look at. There are political maps, topographical maps, relief maps, historical maps, and more. Some of my favorites are the thematic maps, which show things like: ocean currents and sea ice; mean annual precipitation; oil and gas pipelines; population and tribal groups; and natural vegetation for various countries and regions of the world. If you like maps, you’ll love this site.