worthwhile websites

If you’ve been in the market for a digital camera, you know that choosing one camera from all the competing brands and models can be a challenge. Many people like to research before they make a major investment, and there are some great resources to help guide you with your purchase. This blog post is mostly about a tool called Snapsort, but to more fully appreciate that tool, it’s worth briefly mentioning a few other resources that are available.

Flickr Camera Finder

A camera’s specifications are important, but so are the photographs that it can produce.
The Flickr Camera Finder is a great tool for looking at photographs taken by a specific model of camera. Flickr makes it easy to filter by the content of the photograph (such as portraits, landscapes and night shots), as well as photographs that other Flickr users found interesting. Flickr also lets users post their photos into groups that are specific to a camera or even a camera and lens combination, and these groups are another way of finding sample photos for a particular camera.

Of course, product reviews are important, and while there are many camera great review sites, two in particular stand out as my personal favorites: DPreview.com and DCResource.com.

DPReview

It came to my attention recently that my tag cloud was more of a tag pile, since individual tags were not shown at different sizes based on the frequency of their use on this site. Since I fixed the tag cloud I see that "worthwhile websites" is the most frequently used tag. In the several months after I became more seriously interested in web development, I wrote brief blurbs about different websites I found worthwhile and tagged them as such. I don't write a blurb for every website that I think is worthwhile, and despite the fact that that tag for these blurbs is so prominently featured, they are not really intended to be a main feature of this site. Just throwing that out there...

This interesting article by Byron Calame, the independent Public Editor of the New York Times, discusses interactive features that the Times introduced on its website in 2006 and how users "are using it to question, criticize” and, yes, praise” the news staff to a degree never seen in the print paper."Direct interaction between readers, reporters and editors is a major change from the mostly one-way communication model under which the paper has operated since 1851. will affect the way the paper and other major news organizations operate. 

http://maps.webfoot.com/

Fairly self-explanitory and somewhat astounding.

Google Gadget Awards

http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

http://www.google.com/transit

Google's public transportation directions website. Currently still in beta at Google labs, Transit only supports the Portland, OR metro area. I prefer it to Portland's Trimet trip planner because the interface displays more information and the map is much easier to use, especially for figuring out how to walk to\from the Trimet vehicle.

http://www.pollstar.com

Useful for seeing which musical artists or comedians are coming to town, Pollstar is a consolidated artist tour schedule that allows you to view by artist, city or venue. Pollstar is a major agency which charges for inclusion in its lists, and the artist or venue you're looking for must be a paying member to be included. Their most useful feature is an e-mail notifier which alerts you when changes to an artist, city or venue on your list of interests occurs. Free accounts allow for up to 5 notification watches. Note that it's always a good idea to check the website(s) of the artist and venue, as discrepancies in content or posting time for different websites does occur.