Useful websites

[mikekn]

Once again, I'm looking for useful websites - specifically places that are good reference sites as well as letting you keep track of your own info.

My favorite examples are www.boardgamegeek.com and www.librarything.com - both great sources for information on games and books respectively plus they let you catalog your own collections (and boardgamegeek recently expanded to cover RPGs as well via www.geekdo.com .) www.imdb.com and www.tv.com are great references, but I don't have any use for them beyond that.

Three others I've started playing with are:

http://www.last.fm - sort of a mixture between Pandora and music based social network. As you play your music, it collects and catalogs it. It can use you collection to make recommendation and point you to people with similar music tastes. It will also let you know about upcoming events with your bands or similar groups. As a cataloging tool it isn't that great, but I've still been having fun with it. Does anyone else use it?

http://www.tourfilter.com/philadelphia - bertana pointed me to this one. Give it a list of groups you are interested in and it will let you know when they will be playing in your area. It only covers a few metro areas (it started in Boston) and still feels like a small operation, but it catches more shows then it misses.

http://www.gurulib.com - Primarily a cataloging site for music, movies, books and video games. It also tries to be a social network, but I don't see much use in that part. It has a decent interface for taking bar codes and looking up the items via Amazon. When I was looking to catalog our CDs it was the best I could find that met the requirements of free, on-line and export-able. And a good thing I could export it - it went down for a few weeks with no communications not long after I got our music on-line. I still plan to use for our movies, unless something better comes along.

Does anyone have any other examples? Favorites? On any of the above? (I'm always looking for people to "friend" on them)

Comments

[uncleamos]

I wonder what the criteria for inclusion in tourfilter are. Years ago a friend found a website that actually listed every single show in the Philadelphia area, and there were 2-3 times as many.

A quick comparison of tourfilter and Johnny Brenda's website shows about half of their remaining March shows on tourfilter.

[mikekn]

One criteria is that someone on the site needs to be following the group in question. Beyond that, I'm not sure where they get their info. I suspect it is all hand done still. I know I've submitted missing shows from time to time and had them included.

[dulcinbradbury.livejournal.com]

May not exactly be what you're looking for, but, I'm a big fan of del.icio.us -- I love being able to not only hang on to links to useful sites, but, also share them.

[mikekn]

I use that as well, but probably not as much as I should. I've got a collection of tags for site to visit later - stuff like: *watch, *shop, *listen, etc.

I'm MikeKn over there.

[dulcinbradbury.livejournal.com]

Oh I save EVERYTHING there. I just don't have it all as well organized as I really should.

[bertana.livejournal.com]

I have been saving more and more stuff there, but I think I'm in your boat -- tons of stuff, not nearly well-organized enough. (Which means, of course, half the time I have better luck googling than digging through my own darn links. Argh!)

[ubiq31.livejournal.com]

I love Last.fm; I like it a lot better than Pandora, as they have a ton of music that Pandora cannot touch (being that Pandora's American and Last.fm isn't).

[mikekn]

Yeah, been noticing that :) What is your id over there? I'm MikeKn23

[ubiq31.livejournal.com]

Looks like you found me :) mbroggy is right.

[alienor.livejournal.com]

It's rather specialized, but I'm on Steepster (http://www.steepster.com) a lot for tea. It's a ratings/review/tracking website. It also tries to be a social networking site.

For travel, Seat Guru (http://www.seatguru.com/) can help when you're picking out seats on an airplane.

For pets, Merck Veterinary Manual (http://www.merckvetmanual.com/mvm/index.jsp) can explain some conditions and treatments.

[reldnahkram.livejournal.com]

If you can't find me on last.fm, you're doing something wrong.