Archive for the ‘Cool websites’ Category:
Free Business Magazines
Similar to newspapers, magazines don’t really make their profit from subscription sales. They live or die on their advertising revenue, and to fluff those numbers and increase members of certain key demographics, they often give out free subscriptions to people who work in businesses that their advertisers are trying to reach. For about a decade now, I’ve been receiving dozens of free magazine subscriptions from websites such as Mercury Magazines or Free Biz Mags.
Some of these free magazines are trade publications that would only be of interest to webmasters or IT professionals, but they also offer me a surprising assortment of consumer magazines. Over the years I’ve received free subscriptions to magazines such as Wired, Boating, Maxim, FHM, Stuff, Car & Driver, Horses Illustrated, US News & World Report, and many more. While I hate to endorse reading magazines offline and killing more trees, sometimes it’s just nice to have a physical magazine that you can stuff in your bag and pull out whenever you have a free minute or need to kill some time. They make good bathroom reading as well, and, more importantly, they’re free. I have a hard time saying no to anything that’s free.
Widget Box
If you have a personal website, blog, or even a Myspace page, you’ll want to check out Widget Box. Widgets are cool little gadgets you can add to your website by cutting and pasting a little code from sites like Widget Box. They let you do things like embed video games, movies, and time wasting applications onto your site. As an example, I’ve embedded one of my favorite games, Puzzle Bobble, into this blog post. There are thousands of widgets at Widget Box and just as many creative uses for them.
Hulu: The future of online video?
If you’re a person who watches much television, you’ve definitely noticed that there’s a writers’ strike going on, which has halted production on just about every show on television. What you might not know, is that one of the main reasons for the strike is that writers are demanding a share of the online revenue that studios are expected to generate in the near future or are already generating. At the core of the issue is a new service called Hulu, which may just change the way videos are shared on the web.
Watching TV online
Eventually, we’ll all be watching our television shows and browsing the Internet on one device. Some of us, however, are already halfway there. Besides downloading television programs via services like bit torrent, there are thousands of TV stations that stream their content to the web. A list of these stations, including several Indiana networks, can be found at wwiTV.
Personally, I think it’s interesting to watch Japanese music video channels, the local news from Iraq, and to sample other cultures through their TV networks. However, if you’re only interested in watching local Indiana stations, there are fourteen of them available.
