January 2009 Please note that some links may have expired due to the ever-changing nature of the Internet. Let us know if you find anything unexpected or offensive so we can remove or change a link. Youthwork magazine and CCP ltd are not responsible for the content of external sites accessed from youthwork.co.uk Sifting through the net With the exploding number of websites available at the click of a button, it can be harder to find what you're looking for. John Allan helps out and selects the ten must-see sites for this month. How many websites would you say there were on the Internet? Maybe three million? Whenever I've tried that question on a few people, a majority of them have usually agreed that, yes, it must be somewhere around three million now. But they're wrong. There are actually three million new websites every month. The total figure is somewhere over 185 million! Which means that the Internet is playing a larger and larger part in everybody's life, and there are more and more good new resources around for youth workers to use. It makes it tougher every month to select just ten to review! Take this month, for example. Where do I start? There's LetterPop, where you can not only design your youth group mailings in full colour for free (even if you have no artistic skill whatsoever!), but also have it automatically mailed out for you to a list of e-mail addresses that you supply. There's Create HDR, where you can generate stunning High Dynamic Range pictures from your own photographs. (HDR allows you to show a range of tones and detail which normal pictures can't - look at the examples on the website and you'll get the idea.) There's FaceInHole, where you can take any facial portrait picture you have (or photograph youth group members with your web cam on the spot) and insert it into a photograph of somebody else. After researching it for you, I ended up with a picture of myself as a muscle-rippling Arnold Schwarzenegger which I'm not quite brave enough (sorry) to put up on Facebook... We all have to work with PDFs, and they're useful, but sometimes you wish a PDF was a Word document - or vice versa. (Unless, of course, you use a Mac, in which case skip this bit.) Well, Convert PDF to Word does just that - instantly, on your desktop - while Koolwire invites you to do the opposite and e-mail them documents which they will then transform into PDF and send back. They'll do this not only with documents - Mac users, wake up again - but with graphic files too. Or they'll convert PDFs and documents to sound files so that you get your words read out for you. All for free! Nimbb must get a mention this month, because the ability to make thirty-second videos, with a click, right on your desktop, and then upload them in an instant to the youth group blog page - well, that's just so useful. But then so is Deadline, yet another tool for planning your life - yes, we've reviewed some of these before, but this is the simplest, starkest, most intuitive one I've ever seen. We've covered lots of ways of keeping your group pictures online too, but can we really miss out PiccDrop? Probably not, because it's so easy to use; for people who don't want all the bells and whistles of Flickr and the like, just an uncomplicated, membership-free way to upload photos instantly and keep them there, PiccDrop is wonderful. Hmmm. Eight sites mentioned already, two slots to go. Which will it be? Maybe VideoSurf, another way of finding the perfect video clip to illustrate a talk or an epilogue? Yes, we've seen these before too (we talked about one last month), but VideoSurf lets you download just part of the clip - so if only ten seconds of the film is useful to you, that's exactly what you get. It will search for videos using face recognition, too, so if you want everything there is containing Matt Redman or Barrack Obama, that's what it delivers. Pretty useful really. And the final slot... SoundSnap, with its thousands of downloadable sound effects and loops? ScreenToaster, which records everything that happens on your desktop, allowing instant 'screencasts' and video recordings? Or shall we give the last slot to a 'silly facts' site like Snowy's Silly Facts, Weird'n'Wacky or MatchDoctor? Youth workers always need plenty of those to amuse the troops. BeAmused won't do, because too much of it is blue humour, although it does contain some fabulous bits and pieces in amongst the smut, and there is an enormous collection there; but the Top 15 Bizarre True Stories at List Universe, could be a contender. In fact, List Universe has loads of useful lists for all purposes: Top Ten Influential People Who never Lived, Top Ten Bizarre World Records, even the Top Ten Coolest Transformers... I can't leave it out, not really... You see my problem, don't you? If somebody would just stop the Internet for a couple of months, we might stand a chance. But somehow I don't think it's likely... and what a good thing for youth workers that actually is. John Allan is based at Belmont Chapel, Exeter, UK, and is a regular contributor to Youthwork magazine. Back to main page