Personal Favorites

• Metacritic
  • Aggregating what the critics have said about music, movies, TV, games and books and presenting both a total average review, snippets from the originals and links to them
• McSweeney's
  • Web home to Dave Eggers and posse - a cornucopia of writing and the writerly, along with miscellaning and the miscellany
• Epicurious
  • Food food food food food recipes food
• Television without Pity
  • Snappy episode recaps for popular shows and the most lively message boards out there

Buying & Selling

• Tech Bargains
  • Frequently updated and well-fed with tips from its community of users, this site keeps you posted on the best deals available both online and, increasingly, in stores
• Craig's List
  • Craig Newmark drives other internet entrepreneurs crazy, because his e-mail list of San Francisco events turned into a worldwide free classified-ad phenomenon, and he isn't milking it to every single dollar he can get
• Consumer Reports
  • You've got to pay for the site's best content, but it's worth it for its even-keeled, commercial-free advice
• iTunes Music Store
  • Granted, it's part of Apple's well-executed conspiracy to link you into the iPod forever, but it's the best organized, most easily used and most feature-rich online music service going
• slickdeals.net
  • Tips on how to save big money by combining online coupons and other tricks on Amazon, Dell, Winkflash, Snapfish and other sites

Information, Please

• Reference Desk
  • Amazing aggregation of free reference sources, from dictionaries to encyclopedias to new stories
• Wikipedia
  • Free encyclopedia composed entirely by volunteers. It's not perfect, but it's darned good
• The Mayo Clinic
  • Site of the famed Minnesota health outfit, this is great for hypochondriacs or anyone else who's ill or just needs to know more about any affliction, from the common cold to Alzheimer's
• Answers.com
  • Online Encyclopedia, Thesaurus, Dictionary definitions and more
• Snopes
  • Snopes investigates and debunks thousands of urban myths and legends

Kids (and their adults)

• Fun Brain
  • Straightforward but engaging collection of (mostly) educational games, quizzes, comics and more for grades K-8
• Boohbah Zone
  • An amazing kids' site derived from the TV show, a relative of "teletubbies," but it's better on the web
• Homestar Runner
  • Somewhere between Japanese anime, old video games and an anarchic sitcom lurks this deliriously inventive and funny site
• Amazing Kids!
  • Unique site celebrates kids' achievements and encourages all kids to explore their own amazing gifts

News & Media

• NPR
  • Great audio archives, solid search function, and easy listening to old and recent stuff on the web site of National Public Radio
• BBC
  • Great source of international news. A model of organization and user interaction
• Newseum
  • The "today's front pages" feature shows the covers of more than 500 papers in over more than 40 countries
• The Onion
  • Well-known, to be sure. Even old hat. But it's a funny, funny, funny old hat. The best parody of current events and, especially, the news media going
• Fark
  • The anti-Google News, this site is a simple little digest of funny (funny ha-ha or funny strange) news stories, most of them seemingly true

Services

• Google Maps
  • The best free mapping service going, especially when you choose the "hybrid view" that layers street names atop actual aerial images
• Find Articles
  • Want to see what's been written about a certain topic, but don't have a subscription to Nexis? This is the next best thing, a well-organized collection of a claimed 10 million articles
• Technorati
  • Want to know who is blogging about you or, for instance, about eggplant parmesan? This site searches more than 25 million blogs and can also tell you the internet buzz by measuring what's being most blogged on

Techno

• Wired
  • The web home of Wired magazine is the place to go for big-picture thinking on the internet and its implications
• The Wayback Machine
  • The inernet archive's enormous collection of web pates. See what amazon.com used to look like. Find a very early Google page