How to Know It All Online

What everyone's talking about on a given day may not show up in the traditional media. These sites will ensure that you're always in the know.

by Nick Douglas

Buzz up!on Yahoo!
Ten years ago, the chattering class's daily agenda was set by the radio, TV, and newspaper. No longer. Joe the Accountant needs a more sophisticated guide to the daily zeitgeist, since what everyone's talking about on a given day—for instance, this live video of Shiba Inu puppies that got almost three million views over the past few weeks—may not show up in traditional media for days or even weeks, if at all. These sites make the best tab set for a morning briefing. (Firefox users can load them all up at once.)

1. The Drudge Report
www.drudgereport.com



For years, I've checked this page in the morning to see if any world-changing news happened after I went to bed. When there's an earthquake or a terrorist attack, Drudge will often have the story first. Day to day, the site mostly links to "water cooler" stories focusing on national politics and tabloid stuff. Now that the election's over, editor Matt Drudge is toning down his right-wing slant, but liberals might want to balance this site with The Huffington Post.




2. Newser
www.newser.com



Combined with Drudge, Newser replaces your news site of choice by scouring the top papers themselves. Human-edited aggregators still trump automated sites like Google News (which tends to overemphasize dry stories that don't actually get talked about). Newser's photo-illustrated stories have sharp, informative headlines, each of which is linked to an executive summary.




3. Popurls
www.popurls.com



Headline news often misses social news: the stories that people are most often passing around, which frequently start on blogs. Popurls combines headlines from social news sites including Digg, Reddit, and Yahoo! Buzz. The list of tiny headlines can be hard to read, but visitors can click to visit each site that Popurls aggregates.




4. Viral Video Chart
www.viralvideochart.com



YouTube's "top videos" lists are too sloppily built to be useful, and plenty of viral videos don't even come from YouTube. I've hunted popular videos for three years and have found that the Viral Video Chart is the most consistently thorough list of the most popular current videos.

5. Twitter
www.twitter.com



Twitter can keep you informed in three ways: First, as a social radar about your friends, just as its creators intended. Second, as a tech news source, as PC Mag Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff explained, since most of Twitter's most-followed users are tech pundits. But there's another, more select upper crust of Twitter: The wits who use Twitter to write one-liners. During a heavy news cycle, the daily list of most-loved Twitter jokes is full of topical humor that you can steal when chatting with your friends.




6. Tumblr
www.tumblr.com



This scrapbook-style blogging platform is the next Twitter (and I expect it to follow Twitter into the mainstream next year). Just like Twitter, the quality of the site depends on which people you follow. No one user dominates the conversation, but there are a few (sometimes NSFW) popular bloggers who often post popular memes before most other bloggers find them: David Cho, Plan Nine, Slantback, Did You Ever Notice, and Kyle Bunch.




7. BuzzFeed
www.buzzfeed.com



This link aggregator (which I wrote for in August) lists current viral sites and pop-culture trends with a lighthearted, jokey tone. Sometimes the site runs a ludicrously old trend, so double-check before you forward a BuzzFeed item as if it's new (especially if you have one of those smug friends who loves to say "Seen it").




8. Slate
www.slate.com



Most news is fleeting, but some stories stick around long enough to warrant a deeper understanding. Slate, the magazine that thrives on upending conventional wisdom with a cheeky deconstruction of current news narratives, serves as my crib notes for sounding a bit more informed than I actually am. Occasionally, despite myself, I learn from it.




9. Boing Boing
www.boingboing.net



The granddaddy of trendspotting blogs has lost some of its luster since the above trend sites took over. It's not that Boing Boing has changed, but its "we'll post whatever we want" attitude seems almost quaint in a world of targeted trend sites. Still, because of its authors' idiosyncratic tastes, this group blog often starts its own trends.




Nick Douglas is a freelance tech writer, blogger (www.toomuchnick.com), and satirist in San Francisco. He is writing a screenplay about the Gold Rush.