Daily Archive for August 14th, 2006

Influential Web Sites

A very interesting email was waiting for me this morning in my inbox. My week-end round-up from the Guardian which in turn lead me to an article in the Observer/Guardian about “Websites that changed the world“.

Although this is the list that follows, do take a look at the article, it’s far more interesting than the simple list below :

Amazon used to be a large river in South America - but that was before the world wide web.

  1. eBay.com
  2. Wikipedia.com
  3. Napster.com
  4. Youtube.com
  5. Blogger.com
  6. Friendsreunited.com
  7. Drudgereport.com
  8. Myspace.com
  9. Amazon.com
  10. Slashdot.org
  11. Salon.com
  12. Craigslist.org
  13. Google.com
  14. Yahoo.com
  15. Easyjet.com

I personally feel that Google has had a bigger impact than being at number 13, but hey, being reunited with your friends is priceless isn’t it. However being placed after salon.com, what’s that about ? Have you heard people say just google it, and what about just salon.com it ? I think this is more about the Guardian/Observer journalists admiration than true ‘influence’ (sorry, changing the world) along with several other sites like Drudgereport, SlashDot etc. for them to be placed higher than Google.

The WebDNA of UbiKann

While visiting sites that link to UbiKann the other day I came across a site called Neatorama, which covers funny and unusual content.

One of the posts covers the story of the WebDNA project. When I tried it the first time the guy’s server must have been slowly dying under the numerous hits from so many visitors. Today however I was able to take a few snapshots of different sites.

This is UbiKann.com’s DNA profile “à la” WebDNA :

UbiKann Web DNA

This is Significant-Media.com’s WebDNA (a site I just finished) :

Significant-Media.com WebDNA

This is the WebDNA of Gossamer-Threads (my hosting company) :

Gossamer-Threads Web DNA

Finally this is the WebDNA of ‘A List A Part’ :

A List A Part's Web DNA

The Web DNA site explains that the structure of the content is used to create the image and that “a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code”…