“Grand Place”

I like this photo because it abstracts the incredible structures of the Grand Place (Brussels, Belgium) and focuses on the cobble stones below. It’s always good to look at things from a different perspective.

“Pudong (Shanghai) from The Bund”

Well, how often does one travel to China? For most people, not very often. I used a tripod and a long shutter to capture Pudong, a region of Shanghai with an unforgettable skyline.

“Brussels (Parc)”

To get this photo, I used my point and shoot Casio camera. I set it on a stone next to a fountain and pointed it towards two strangers (you can see their outline on the right side). I used a timer on the shot to eliminate camera shake in the low light. I really like how the reflection turned out, and it reminds me of an ink blot.

“Le Louvre Nuit”

This is a photo that almost didn’t happen. After walking all over Paris taking pictures all day, I was ready to call it quits with no real winners. A friend of mine pointed this scene out when we walked through the Louvre courtyard. I used a tripod with a long shutter for the shot, and I think the results were amazing. With the location of the moon, the scene was almost too perfect. If you haven’t figured it out, I really like taking long shutter night shots. It’s even better if there’s a reflection involved.

“Light Bass”

This was the first time I had ever tried light painting, which is a ton of fun. Here’s an explanation of how I did it.

“Amsterdam Bicycle”

This photo was taken during Slamsterdam 2K8 with Tad. Bikes like these are all over Amsterdam and they make great photo subjects. I love a few things about this photo: The colors, the tight focus on the bike creating a bokeh effect, and the blurred out people in the background.

“6th Street Bridge”
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This photo was taken in Milwaukee. I like how the bridge structure and the light streams are framed. I used a long shutter and tripod.

“Oslo”

This photo really takes me back to my trip to Oslo, Norway. The colors came out very true to life and every time I look at it, I feel like I’m standing there, staring down the path in the brisk winter air. Awesome place to visit by the way.

“Summer Concert”

I took this photo during the Kanye West concert at Lollapalooza 2008 in Chicago. It’s one of my favorites because it captures the Chicago skyline and the details on the faces of the summer concert goers.

“De Toren”

Dutch for “The Tower”. I took this photo in Amsterdam, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t think it was anything special. Then my friend Tad made it into Black and White with Photoshop, and I really like it now.

One of the greatest things about Flickr is the phenomenal photography from the community. Here is a slide show of my favorite photos. These are a great inspiration to a hobbyist like myself.

Here they are. These are the best and brightest web sites out there right now. What do they win? Nothing… but maybe they’ll get a few new visitors when this hits the presses. Check them out, and leave comments!

Netvibes has become my homepage of choice as of late. It competes with iGoogle and PageFlakes in the personalized homepage space. Netvibes wins out because it looks cooler (I’m into visuals) and it has a ton of useful widgets to choose from. Some of my favorites are Google Calendar, Facebook, Weather, Twitter, and Gmail. You will begin to see that everything is connected on the web these days… netvibes does a pretty good job of pulling it all together.

Facebook is a major game changer. Never has a social network been so useful or prolific. Everyone shook their heads in amazement (including me) when Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly turning down $2 Billion offers to sell. Now the company has a valuation of $15 Billion!! It’s worth so much because it has so many users. It has so many users because it’s so addicting and useful. Yes, it will waste your time – a lot of your time. But it will also allow you to stay connected (even if minimally) with many, many people (which can be bad too). It’s become a one stop shop for checking in on everyone, and letting your friends see what you’ve been up to.

Say what you will about Wikipedia. It’s an encyclopedia that literally anyone can edit. The results could be disastrous right? Poor information could get spread all over the web… I look at it like this. Even though there’s a high probability that everything on there isn’t correct, it gets me a hell of a lot closer to the truth than I’d be without it (and quickly too). If nothing else, it points me in the right direction. One thing I always keep in mind when searching Wikipedia is how polarizing is the topic? If you’re looking up Hillary Clinton, or the Iraq War for example, who the heck knows what you’re going to get… This is a case where you’ve got passionate people on two sides of a topic (conservative and liberal), and they’ll be constantly overwriting each other on Wikipedia.

I’ve been a huge fan of Flickr for about two years now. I use Flickr so much, that some of my friends even call me Flickr. There are plenty of photo sharing sites out there and people often ask me what makes Flickr the best. I think if you love, photography (and I do), the community is what makes Flickr so good. You get to see amazing photos by people from all around the world. You can ask them what they did to get the shot. You can even see what camera they took the picture with in most cases. Flickr is the gold standard right now if you’re interested in photography.

Google knows what’s up when it comes to web applications. They either build the best or buy the best. I’m pretty sure they built Gmail from the ground up. Gmail is so smooth and easy to use, I almost hate using it because I have to use an alternative at work. It’s easy to search (Google is pretty good at that by now), and it’s easy to set up automatic rules. Even though it’s the best, they are still rolling out improvements. Google probably knows everything about me by now (since their computers are crawling my email)…should I be worried? I’m not.

Meebo is a problem solver. I’ve got friends that use multiple instant messaging clients, and it would be a huge pain to sign into all of them at once. That’s where Meebo comes in. It let’s me sign into Google Talk, AIM, and MSN all from one spot. It’s also completely web based, which means I don’t need to download anything to use it. They’ve even announced video chat for up to 6 people at once. I’ll probably never use that…but I could.

Popurls is where I go daily to find Interesting stuff on the web. I used to go to Digg for this, but I’m not impressed with the quality of info on Digg lately. Popurls (think popular urls) brings in the top stories from a ton of sources (like Google New, Del.icio.us, Digg…). I get to see it all in one place and the interface is very clean.

I wasn’t sold on the value of del.icio.us when it first came out a couple years ago. It’s a website that lets you store your bookmarks online. Now I use it as my repository for anything new and interesting. Every time I find a new site that I like, I plug it into del.icio.us and tag it with meaningful key words — this makes it easy to find later with a simple search. I’m also a big fan of the way it can separate your tags into different RSS feeds/pages. For example, here are all of my bookmarks that have been tagged “Belgium”

Simple GTD is all about Getting Things Done. And that’s what I like. It’s an online To-do list tool with everything you need and nothing you don’t. You can easily create multiple lists and drag items from list to list. I usually have this open all day at work and it keeps me on track. If you want something a little more robust, try basecamp. If you want something a little less robust, try pen and paper.

Google Reader is, hands-down the best RSS reader I’ve ever used. If you don’t know what RSS is, or why it’s important, click here for an explanation. Google reader lets me quickly browse top stories from all of my favorite sites in one place. If I find something good, I can “star it” and it becomes easy to find at a later date. It also has a slick e-mail sharing feature that lets me send stories to people quickly. The interface with my Gmail account automatically brings in my contacts, so I only need to type the first few letters of someone’s name and it finds their email address. I also really like the shared RSS feed feature. This allows me to share my favorite stories with whoever wants to subscribe to them.

Honorable Mention:
Mint is a great tool for managing your finances in one place. It would be a top site if it was better at categorizing my expenditures.

Deezer let’s you make music playlists that you can post all over the web (like this one).

Meetup is a great tool for finding people with common interests around you. It helps you find events in your area, and it will even export the even calendar automatically to Google Calendar, iCal, etc.

Mango offers a ton of free foreign language courses on the Internet. Nothing beats learning a language one on one with another person, but this is about as good as it gets on the web.

Geni is a great Family tree building site. It let’s you post photos of family members and will send you email reminders when someone’s birthday is coming up.

Sketchcast is a tool that let’s you draw out diagrams and record your voice at the same time. It’s great for creating lessons on something, or explaining material over the web. After you create a sketchcast, you can post it on your blog, etc.