Hmm... Internet is the most amazing thing ever! As soon as I registered with Del.icio.us, I found Digg and StumbleUpon. The former didn't quite appeal to me as it is more oriented to those who want to spend loads of time online discussing everything what they cannot with their grandma. As for StumbleUpon : it's a beauty. It combines the strengths of Delicious with very nice Web 2 interface where you can both catalogue your favourites, discuss things, see most viewed pages, and in addition stumble upon a page that falls within your interests. The "StumbleUpon" button is the best feature to my taste as I spent hours reading stuff about the elegant universe, string theory, and Einstein's brain, which I would never find on my own - not because of the lack of interest, but because of the lack of time to look for it. My page there is http://foreigngirl.stumbleupon.com/

The second find of the year is Pandora radio from Music Genome Project. You can create your own stations, but this is not original and surprising anymore. What Pandora does differently is the way it classifies songs to find those that match your preferences. You can read all about how it is done here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project . I can only say, that it works perfectly, and it's simply the best, just the very best, music / radio web-site currently available.





The only problem is that it is licenced to work only in USA. When I was registering my account I indicated a US zip code, but after several days it didn't work anymore and I was coming into an apologetic page indicating my non-US IP. Believe it or not, but I was able to solve this problem. I thought that among all those millions on the Net there should be some similar desperate people who did not want there true IP addresses being revealed. There is a solution for all us security obsessed Pandora-lovers: it's a free Tor+Vidalia+Privoxy software bundle that helps you to obtain a random IP address from different countries. It works best with Firefox as there is an add-on for this browser, which helps to manage Tor. I admit that it's not really convenient as IP address assigned is always different and I have to disable Tor and then enable it back again several times in order to obtain a US IP for Pandora, but given the benefits of accessing Pandora I am prepared to do this!