The Guardian (UK) has put out a new list (and commentary) on the 100 Most Useful Web Sites.  I might argue about some of their choices, but I am not really mainstream ... I am pretty much  immersed in several areas of what is sometimes called Web 2.0.

Scrolling down the list, it is considerably more Web 2.0-ish than in previous years, meaning that the list is crammed full of web sites where users interact, participate, and either (or both) take content to remix and publish or upload content for others to use.

While many people have complained about the term, the Web is clearly becoming a vast arena for copious amounts of "user-generated content".

And while content has long been considered "king"  (it's what attracts the mainstream metric of eyeballs), this relatively new report from Bear Sterns (The Long Tail: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment) concentrated on television / video suggests that increasingly context and the aggregation of material will play critical roles.  Thus, Bear Sterns concludes that a key part of creating value is how content is packaged (Slide # 29) ... for distribution and use (use being a term that covers many forms of what people do with content).

Anyway, back to the 100 Most Useful Web sites.  i think that this is an irreversible trend pointing us to an environment where people will eventually move back and forth seamlessly between two worlds, and in many cases sites like those on the list play an essential role in many peoples' daily activities (if they don't already).

The new 100 most useful sites
Thursday December 21, 2006
The Guardian

Two years ago most Britons didn't have broadband and Web 2.0 was barely a twinkle in a developer's eye. Things have changed - as our cream of the crop for 2006 shows

In 2004, the internet was a different place: there was, for example, no YouTube, and most Britons online didn't have broadband. That's changed dramatically: now, more than 75% of users have broadband, and the arrival of Web 2.0 has brought sites where the interaction is as fast as if it were on your machine. So we've revisited the "cream of the crop" that we brought you two years ago.

Some of the crop is brand new; some has stood the test of time. As before, we have 100 sites in 20 categories.

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