Many friends and colleagues have asked me to list down all the websites that I keep talking about in a central location so that it is easy to refer in the future. So I took the advice and set out listing all those from memory that makes great use for an individual of my type. My type cant be described in a few words and I will let the website links do the talking

So here is the gopu44 list of useful websites as on January 25, 2008 at the airport in Mumbai waiting a delayed flight. Like all personal lists in this infinite information cyberspace this is only an iota of what is and what you can get. Mine is a list that I have gotten to like a lot and use often.

Bookmarkers

As this blog is on sites, where best to start than the online bookmarkng facilities.

http://del.icio.us > the pioneer in this area, also one of the 1^st sites to innovatively name themselves and move beyond the .com mindset. Lots of sites have followed suite.

The other options include: http://furl.net http://reddit.com http://www.digg.com http://www.fark.com

Learning never stops

One always wants an upgrade whether its software cars tech-gadgets or knowledge ! that’s the constant pursuit reality of human existence, for knowledge upgrades, the world has become easier through the open courseware project iniated by MIT, http://ocw.mit.edu and followed by many other universities finally culminating in the opencourseware consortium [http//www.opensourceware.org]. The MIT site has basically thrown open all course material on the web and you can go do you game theory or advanced electronics fundamentals there, these are also augmented by great classroom videos now being hosted by www.youtube.com and http://videos.google.com

Other references that I dig into are : English language history through http://www.etymonline.com as I look for linkages between languages across the planet.

Then I do crosswords and puzzles and look for anagrammatic combinations, sites like http://www.morewords.com is really handy are really handy. ; http://www.onelook.com helps find phrases and words from wild card entries therefore even helping your poetry prose or branding exercises. So all words ending in –phobia if you are quizzer and want a quick run down on that then just put in *phobia and you get the whole 9-yards.

For English reference there are a plenty of sites and my frequent water hole is http://www.thefreedictionary.com

Then the inquisitive mind is never satiated, some of the old time sites are great locations to look for info > http://en.wikipedia.org [ the English man that I am!]; and alternatively http://www.ipl.org ; http://ibiblio.org ; http://www.factbites.com ; http://www.faqs.org/faqs

http://www.qarchive.org

Finance and Business

I have delved in stocks for some time and sites like http://finance.google.com/finance ; http://www.moneycontrol.com ; http://finance.yahoo.com are very useful for stock quotes and company and industry information.

Management Reference

Being a consultant & in management activities it is critical to gather information and facts in projects. Data gather from external is a critical to the success of a project, some such sites are, http://www.itfacts.biz ; http://www.asianetnews.net > provides info on all happenings in our continent ; http://www.bnet.com > info on companies; http://www.econlit.org > economic journal on the; http://www.nowpublic.com gives some good

I have been bitten by the TRIZ innovation bug, TRIZ stands for theory of Innovative problem Solving in Russian Analgram, useful for my work and how I organize and break down problems in People managmenet, Business and technology the reference sites for TRIZ are : http://www.triz-journal.com ; http://triz40.com ; http://www.aitriz.org/;

Patent Search

TRIZ says that ~ 98% of you innovative problem solving need has already happened. Either you are going to be the application artist who learns from the past [98%] or sheer genius [2%] who is just about to change the way the world perceives. Likely hood you are the artiste! TRIZ says to be the artiste, one step [ in the ARIZ framework ] is to identify generic solutions for your generic problem [ read triz for further understanding]. The way out is to search for how people have solved their problems by reading through their patents. Some good patent search sites are:

http://patents.cos.com ; http://www.freepatentsonline.com ; http://www.google.com/patents ; http://www.uspto.gov/patft ; http://espacenet.com & www.WIPO.org

Then there is http://www.pat2pdf.org which can convert any USPTO patent into a pdf file for local saving and sharing.

Legal reference

Being in management and searching other patents needs legal advice !! It is also useful to track what is happening in the legalo-sphere and sites like http://www.freelaw.com & http://www.out-law.com/Default.aspx provide not only news but also regular weekly email on whats happening and not.

Search Code easy

Even though I come from an MBA background I have dabbled with code and software and continue to active code in VBA, perl and SQL [ if that can be called coding!] so the assistance on the web is for code search utilities like

http://www.codase.com ; http://www.koders.com ; http://www.krugle.com and googles own www.google.com/codesearch

Jobs search

Freedom is an expression of being able to move from one job to another. There comes a time when you want to gauge your market-ability; job search is useful here and these sites are useful beyond the well known job portals > http://www.bixee.com google like search interface, meta-search engine on all job sites wonderful utility;

Personal Interest

Personally I do research and study on ancient Indian history and philosophy and I find these sites useful : http://hindubooks.org/dynamic www.hinduismtoday.com

Then there is this bug to know whats cool and happening, amazon has come up with an interesting site which is a social ranking site for any topic from restaurants to books etc.. check out http://unspun.amazon.com.

For white page listing in India nothing like http://www.justdial.com/default.asp ; http://sulekha.com

While google or yahoo maps are seriously awesome sites, http://www.wikimapia.org is a great map tagging utility where one can [using google maps API ] identify locations of interest on the map. Don’t be surprised to find your local mall & theater mapped into this site.

For Indian filmy music download of high quality check out http://www.onlinetamilmp3.com/mp3.html also check out http://raaga.com

http://www.compete.com provides comparison of sites with some very interesting insight. I will leave it to you as to what you take from this site. Say compare yahoo.com, google.com and msn.com

http://videodl.org helps extract videos from http://youtube.com and http://videos.google.com

Open Source and Free software

The open source wave is bringing new tides of change to the world of IT whether it is the enterprise or the personal PC.

The complete repositories of FOSS [Free & open source software ] are found at http://freshmeat.net ; http://sourceforge.net ; http://slashdot.org . these are like project portal for FOSS where you can get download, help and wikis.

If you are searching for FOSS then sites like http://www.ohloh.net ; http://www.swik.net help search and catalog FOSS software.

For the desktop there is http://www.opensourcewindows.org or http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm

Finally I worked in performance optimization and testing of software and infrastructure in an very interesting phase of my life, http://www.opensourcetesting.org is a veritable source for such tools and techniques you can also get direct gyan from http://videos.google.com by searching the right keyword combo.

Pictures and images

A picture is worth a 1000 words and presentations need them, sites like http://www.flickr.com ; http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php ; http://yotophoto.com ; http://www.stockvault.net/ http://everystockphoto.com/index.php are good sources for searching images using keywords. Better than the google / yahoo image search.

Beware! >> You would get high quality professional pictures here.

Unique document shares

www.slideshare.net

A website that helps upload ones personal fantasies of thought and search for those of others in diverse subject areas very useful stuff here to instigate thought

Go search a presentation that you would like

Gadget reference & Purchase

We are in a gadget world, we like to surround and surround sound ourselves with electonics and radiation. Some great sites for comparing the best poisons are : http://amapedia.amazon.com ; http://www.engadget.com ; http://www.nextag.com ;

Once you have been poisoned then comes the support issue, http://www.zolved.com & http://www.fixya.com may help!

Science and general reference

Certain things from school never go away, interest in general stuff or basic maths geography stats etc.. etc.. some sites of that nature > http://www.worldbrainbook.com; http://mathworld.wolfram.com; http://www.federallabs.org; http://www.matweb.com/index.asp?ckck=1; http://www.w3schools.com for tech reference.

Shopping

For book buying in India this may not be a well known site but is very good, http://www.firstandsecond.com.

Torrents and file shares

40% I hear is the packet share of torrenting across all TCP bandwidth usage of the internet today. If you are not torrenting you are not happening! Some starting points > http://thepiratebay.org seriously illegal sounding site. www.torrentz.com

Miscellaneous personal pursuits

Random walk theory I believe in and like the chaotic universe is our lives, the next moment however well predicted or predicated has its own surprises, so be random. The result is interesting interests! Like http://pipl.com where one can search people out, there are other good alternatives too. http://www.ozgrid.com a great site for EXCEL resources like add-ins and code. While there may be many video scraping utilities for offlining youtube / google videos, http://www.videodl.org is a great SAAS. If you want to know feel and be amazed by web 2.0 happening sites go to http://www.go2web20.net. http://www.useit.com is a great web design reference site managed by Jacob Nielsen a design guru. Then for movies reviews and facts there are http://www.imdb.com or www.rottentomatoes.com