Three Clever Sites

1) Pandora Radio (www.pandora.com) "Create your own radio stations."

This is especially important if you live in Seattle, Houston, or other cities with miserable radio stations. Pandora asks you to "create" a radio station by asking for a song or artist. Then, based on clever algorithms, it plays you a whole string of similar songs. If you don't like one of the songs it plays, you can give it a "thumbs down," and your station grows smarter. I currently have 6 stations. I've found "Coldplay Radio" and "Jack Johnson Radio" to offer wonderful suggestions. I'm still working to perfect "Muse Radio" because Pandora seems to think Muse is related to some pretty wacky stuff. One opportunity for Pandora is to allow listeners to cater their musical tastes to attributes other the sound of the song. For instance, a station that only plays music from the Mid-Atlantic or Northwest. Likewise, my "Caedmon's Call Radio" station doesn't play other CCM music - it actually attempted to play Shakira!

2) FlightStats (www.flightstats.com) "Flight data galore"

Truly the best flight data website in existence. Before you book your flight - or before you go to the airport, check out FlightStats to find out reliability of your route, flight, airport, etc. Chris (brother-in-law) works on FlightStats and promises that its current functionality is merely the beginning. Great things are on the horizon for this project. I want to buy into that company's IPO. Check out Chris' post on FlightStats (I commented about how it saved my day last week).

3) Wayback Machine (www.archive.org) "You are what you write."

I've admonished my little bro's and sisters that what they write on their social networking sites are published forever on the information superhighway. The Wayback Machine is easy proof of this. Wayback has literally archived the internet. Enter a website you want to see from 2002 and it will show you. See what Banana Republic was selling last year. One fun hour was spent reliving Enron. Check out its progression from the 1990s websites until the day before the company's collapse. Note the company news that says Jeffrey Skilling is leaving Enron, but "it's all okay. Enron is a solid company." What a hoot!