Quick Thoughts

- add screen shot option - huh?

- be able to sort lists by Most Clicked, Highest Rating, Editor's Rating

- if one service is just so far above & beyond the others in its category, it should be nominated for some sort of recognition, like a gold star next to its name or something.

How This Guide Was Made

- By looking at random lists around the Web

- Mostly, by just adding things to it when I saw them, read them, thought of them, dreamt of them, spotted them in a comet"s tail, you know, that old chestnut.

Why This Guide Was Made

- There are now too many good resources for just about everything on the Web. What most people need are GREAT resources that are relevant to them.

TV can be organized in 2 ways, by:

- Channel: there are technically infinite possibilities for channel numbers, but there are realistically only a few hundred in existence. Channel names are determined by those who buy the channel number. Their materials are pre-approved, with the exception of live material.

All TV service providers currently provide a way to organize channels by channel number/name.

- Genre: these are not pre-set, but are inherent to their topic material. Genres can transcend channels, those channels typically represent only one genre, two or three at most. Channels can, however, have many subsets of genres within their main genre. For example, G4"s genre would be "gaming"; its subsets, however, include movies, history, sports, etc. all of which relate back to gaming.

All cable TV service providers currently provide a way to organize channels by channel genre. For those who don"t have cable, there is always the TV Guide website.

The Web can be organized in 2 ways, by:

- Domain name: there are technically infinite possibilities for domain names, and currently there are ~78 million active .com domain names (this number could be a drastic overestimate, however, due to fraudulent domain name purchases that are sold within 5 days when not successful).

Genre: these are not pre-set, but are inherent to their topic material. Genres can transcend domain names, though seemingly they don"t transcend as much as TV channels (except for journalist-style sites).

Ideas for how to organize the Web, like how TV Guide organizes TV:

- The Web was originally a fairly amorphous blob. No one really knew where to go, what to do, etc. The biggest businesses bought these strange things called "domain names," only under the idea that it could somehow help their business grow. Nowadays, much like how TV has channels, the Web has services. Of course there are millions of domain names, so how/why should they be filtered? Truthfully, it seems like based on 1) if they"re a service, and then 2) how popular of a service they really are.

- First, the noise MUST be filtered. Sites like Technorati, Google PageRank, and Alexa try to qualify websites via quantification methods. This serves as a good starting point, but only goes so far, as the layperson does not know about them, as well as the fact that they really are only for specific types of websites (except PageRank, but that"s only a 1-10 scale of potential usefulness, and even then you have to know the genre you"re looking for, at least generally) and as such cannot serve useful outside of their interests.

- Along those lines, people really don"t care to know that there are potentially 14 websites they could subscribe their RSS feed to or get an e-mail newsletter from just to keep UTD. They just want some simple information, and quickly, which is why sites like Yahoo! Answers are proliferating so quickly.

Via relsqui"s idea on xkcd, "Sites which are the reason the Internet should exist"

- eBay, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Etsy, Facebook, LinkedIn, Law databases (i.e. Library of Congress, etc.)

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