Google - the best general search engine around. See also images.google and the groups.google Usenet archive. The newest member of the Google family is Froogle.And on a more light-hearted note, Googlism and Googlefight...
An alternative might be Xrefer. Or MP3 Dimension or MP3 Finder for obvious purposes.
Livejournal. My journal. Useful links: Livejournal Portal, livejournal connect, Livejournal friends analysis, random LJ link, LJ match and latest LJ posts. Hours of fun...the comprehensive index of all things LJ-related is here.
An online dictionary and thesaurus site. See also the Cambridge dictionary online or Word Reference. They're no OED, but then the OED is subscription-only, which sucks. Answer all your grammar queries here. Meanwhile, the Jargon File will have all the words proper dictionaries don't. emoticon.com and Acronym Finder can also be useful. Multimap. Useful random link: A ROT-13 translator. Useful random link two: Make A Shorter Link. And one more: online conversions. What the hell, here's another: convert to ASCII art text.
Links to various news sites, the best of which are clearly news.bbc (low graphics) and news.google, although The Guardian Weblog has its moments.
Work out your train journey times here. Check your bank balance with Barclays online.
Out and about: Daily Information - everything you could want to know about what's on and where to go in Oxford. The Oxford Guide may also be useful. Blah Blah does the same thing for Reading and area, and Maidenhead.net does exactly what you might expect. The Institute of Contemporary Arts, Institute of Ideas, Oxford Union, Norden Farm and Reading Arts sites are all worth watching.
Eating out in London: Look here.
And look! The Cowley Road has its own website! For the university, see The Oxford Student and The Cherwell. The official university webpage is here. The local music scene is covered by Nightshift. The Guardian Film Page pulls together local cinema listsings.
The Complete Works Of Shakespeare, which I shouldn't have been surprised to come across online, but was. In a similarly highbrow vein, Edge has all sorts of interesting articles, and what it doesn't cover Arts and Letters Daily does. The High Hat and Spiked can also be worth watching. Meanwhile, I needed to fit links to The IMDB and The Internet Book List in here somewhere...and The Encyclopaedia Mythica is also useful.
At the time of writing, the top hit for a Google search on 'Jew' is an anti-semitic site called JewWatch. Please don't click on it; you'll only strengthen its position. Instead, follow this Wikipedia link to the correct definition of Jew and then, if you're in a position to do so, create an equivalent link somewhere on your website. Cheers. See also Google's explanation of this result.
Friends Reunited fits better in this category than anywhere else. Come to think of it, so does The Truck Stop.
Where else could you start but the SF site? This page hosts the websites for Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog, and the internet speculative fiction database, amongst many others (see SF Book.com as an alternative to the ISFDB). Other SF magazines worth mentioning: Spectrum SF has its own website; The Third Alternative shades into mainstream, but the website has a good message board (if not quite as active as the one at Night Shade Books or as indepth as the one at S1ngularity); the website for Argosy is here. Oh, and Sci Fiction has been making a name for itself in the online market.
The web groups at SFFnet are worth browsing. For writers looking for critiques, I'm told that either Critters, Holly Lisle's site, or hatrack.com are the places to go. A list of paying SF markets might also be useful...
The Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group website (on its way to moving here), constitution, Wiki and newsgroup. See also the silly games list; the nation state; the webpage of the equivalent Cambridge group, and a listing of student SF societies
Try SF reader and SF watcher.
Some more general links: Ansible, Dave Langford's infamous fanzine; the BSFA webpage and an archive of their publications; Best SF; The Agony Column;Susan Stepney's SF page, which has various interesting essays and links; The Alien Online has interesting columns by people like Adam Roberts; and, of course, the SF newsmags Locus (which has a pretty damn impressive links page) and the Science Fiction Chronicle. See also bluejack, Science Fiction Weekly and SF Crow's Nest. Con listings can be found here. Infinity Plus has short stores and reviews. Small press: PS Publishing is definitely worth keeping an eye on, as is Four Walls Eight Windows..
An essay by Vernor Vinge on the singularity, and an essay by David Brin on the morality of Star Wars and Star Trek. Interesting reading...
Revolution SF covers all sorts of things.
The webpages for the BSFA, which has a pretty comprehensive selection of links to SF awards and UK publishers; the SFWA (home of the Nebula awards); Worldcon (and Hugo awards); the James White award; and the Arthur C Clarke award.
One of many websites purporting to list the 'Great Science Fiction and Fantasy Works'; this one limits itself somewhat by eschewing the Winslow Compounce school of SF and purporting instead to judge works as Literature. Which is fine, so far as it goes, but I can't help thinking that the absence of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, Paul di Filippo and Greg Egan strays beyond casual omission into outright negligence; and also, the list is perhaps a little too skewed towards fantasy for my tastes. Still, diversity of opinion is the spice of life, and overall it's an interesting site; well worth browsing because if an author you like is included, chances are there'll be a comprehensive discussion of his or her works to point you towards books you might have missed.
A much less pretentious SF Reviews site. I haven't had time to look around this one properly, either. Let's see which lasts longer in the links list, eh?
Tangent Online and shortform review short stories, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction reviews everything..
A few notes on the Culture, by Iain M Banks.
A complete list of Culture ship names, plus some made-up ones.
The comp.basilisk FAQ, by Dave Langford (note: PDF file).
Mary Doria Russell - several excellent interviews, in particular, at this site.
Geoff Ryman's internet novel 253 should be read by everyone.
The official site for AI, and a page describing how the AI game works.
A Farscape guide. Having studiously ignored this show for its first two seasons, I have now been talked into watching it by friends. Other sites that seem good include farscape.com, and reviews at the Farscape vault. The BBC also has a site here.
Three sites that archive Farscape episode transcripts: Farscape Episode Transcripts, Exodus From Genesis, and Xenajules2.
The Smallville epguides page and a transcripts site. I've been following this since it started on C4; as of 'Kinetic' and 'Zero', I'm officially a fan, so I'll be looking out for other Smallville links and review sites...in the meantime, here's the webpage of uk.media.tv.smallville (which I got created. Yay me!)
A Smallville transcripts site is here.
Here's a page with some quite good Deep Space Nine reviews. PsiPhi's reviews aren't bad, and Jammer's reviews are recommended.
Mainframe Entertainment, makers of ReBoot. If you haven't heard of it, then...shame on you!
Ian J Ball's TV page.
SciFi.com, notable for the Sci Fi Wire news pages.
TNMC TV. Good site, although I'm still not entirely sure what the acronym stands for.
Entertainment Geekly. Which fits as well here as it does anywhere else.
The Council Of Watchers - rating Buffy, Angel and Firefly episodes, plus some analysis.
Television Without Pity's Angel and Buffy recaps - with extra cynicism! And if you think they're bad, check out the forums...here for Angel, and here for Buffy. Oh, and here for Firefly. And there's more snarkiness at snarkfest.
Psyche - which usefully hosts transcripts and the shooting scripts for Buffy and Angel episodes. It's been a bit temperamental recently, so here's another site with Angel and Buffy transcripts. See also the lists of episode titles and writers to be found here, and the Buffy dialogue database (sadly, it is just Buffy, and not Angel).
Slayer News, to keep up to date. See also slayage.com.
The Bronze VIP Posting Archive (A VIP is someone involved with the shows, like Joss Whedon or Tim Minear).
Blood Screaming - everything about the history of Angel, Darla, Spike and Drusilla. The livejournal of the person who runs the page is here. Another ME-related LJ is here. A more general timeline is here.
The Adventures of Buffy and Evil Vampire Willow...and the advent Buffyquiz.
The City Of Angel - the canonical Angel site. Includes episode and character guides, and a comprehensive news section.
Chief Seattle's Angel reviews - lengthy, but thorough. They're gradually moving to a new home here; at the moment, the new site only contains S3 Angel and S5 Buffy reviews.
The Sanctuary episode guide - almost the direct opposite of Chief Seattle; short on analysis, but excellent for trivia and plot details.
To Shanshu In LA - a genuinely decent, up to date fan site.
Blueshift Studios - notably, these guys archive David Hines' Buffy and Angel reviews. Again, it's a different style to the other sites; Hines looks at the episodes from a writer's perspective.
I like these rants, but the site is a real pain to navigate.
Loey's guide to Angel.
There now appears to be a sister site to Buffyguide, AtSGuide.
The wibblings of Tim Phipps, a fellow umta poster. Entertaining and insightful!
Michael Hickerson's reviews - Buffy, Angel and Farscape.
Angel's Night - news, pictures, reviews, etc. Like COA, but a bit less so.
Loey's guide to Buffy.
Buffyguide - one of the few decent Buffy review sites I've come across.
In-depth analysis at All Things Philosophical on Buffy.
The random thoughts of Andrew Poulter, another poster to umta and umtb.
Angel's Secrets Reviews. White Hats covers both shows.
The reviews of Allan Jenoff.
Firefly is coming. The official site and Firefly Fans are the two sites to watch right now.
The Minearketeers, the Tim Minear fan club. Tim Minear is responsible for writing most of the best episodes of Angel. See this post to alt.tv.angel for what fans think of him.
A fan site for Rob Kral, the man who writes the scores for Angel episodes.
The UMTA home page. The mythology FAQ may be helpful.
The homepage of the associated IRC channel, #thehellmouth. In case you were wondering what the channel looked like, here's a picture. And here's a different one.
A link to Wolfram (the #thehellmouth bot)'s quotefile, which is generally amusing even if a few of them are made up.
(Not that I would ever look at these. Oh no).
The Buffy spoiler slayer.
The Bloody Awful Poet spoiler zone also seems quite thorough.
The Chosen Two host Buffy and Angel sites with spoiler summaries.
As mentioned above, Ain't-it-cool News and Wanda at eonline have been known to have spoilers.
NME.com - the best music news site I've yet found, although dotmusic and drowned in sound are also worth checking.
...And to be fair, Popbitch is much funnier.
Webpages for various bands I like: Radiohead (official),Radiohead (unofficial),Starsailor,Embrace,Stereophonics,REM,The Bluetones (unofficial 1), The Bluetones (unofficial 2),The Bluetones (official),Ash, The Music, The Music (official), and Lowgold.ktb.
Some radio stations: BBC Radio, Virgin Radio, and Xfm.
Webpages for UK TV channels - The BBC, Channel Four, ITV, and Channel 5. Multi channel listings can be found at Radio Times online or Digiguide.
Epguides - air dates and descriptions for pretty much every US TV show.
I found out about these sites thanks to Caption, a small-press comics convention that is run by friends of mine. It takes place every August in Oxford. Anyway, that's where I first encountered the joys of Favourite Crayon Stories and Bahala Na - favourite strip probably being the indomitable Spon. See also Pulp Kitchen and Square Eyed Stories. More recent discovery: Dark Place, online home of the indomitable Rubins sisters. BugPowder is the relevant blog.
The horrors of Chick Tracts.
Webcomics are go! Check out Cat and Girl and Penny Arcade. More conventionally, here's a Calvin and Hobbes website. And here are some other C&H strips.
(Yes, I'm shallow)
Ain't-it-cool news. Often imitated, sometimes surpassed.
Entertainment Online - an american showbiz site. My excuse for keeping an eye on it is that Wanda has been known to have Buffy and Angel spoilers...
Zap2it.com, which covers TV and film. teevee is another good site for, well, TV. test pattern and scoopme are also worth a visit.
It's not as if it's just showbiz, but salon.com seems to fit best in this section.
The W3C HTML validation page. One day, I might even get around to making my webpage fully compliant...Meanwhile, check the validation of my style sheet or go to a list of CSS properties.
Slashdot, and some alternatives.
The WikiWikiWeb.
One of many HTML colour code pages. I just quite like the layout on this one.
A guide to HTML that looks reasonably simple and thorough to my (admittedly ignorant) eyes. Another one is here.
Tim's Guide To Downloading (from binaries groups).
The web pages for irssi, the IRC client I use these days.
SVP Communications - cheap CD-Rs.
A handy webpage for decoding geek-code.
Bittorrent links. And some more.
The obvious places to start are Nature, New Scientist, and Science. For the populist angle, Wired, Discovery News and SciObs are occasionally interesting. Sensawunda junkies should check out space.com.
Tom Anderson has constructed a nifty list of online journals here. The two most useful databases are Web of Science and MedLine. If within Oxford, the Bodley eJournals List is very handy.
See my list of online references for the Oxford University biochemisty course. On a vaguely related note, here's the login for the bioch-2002 mailing list that I admin.
The Cell Signalling Technology website actually has a lot of information about signalling pathways on it.
The places to check are Media Guardian, Nature Jobs, and New Scientist Jobs.
The psci-com email list; see here for more information.
Stempra - the Science, Technology, Engineering and Medical PR Association.
AlphaGalileo, the european PR site for scientists.
The US equivalent, Eurekalert.
The Institute of Public Relations (IPR) runs career days.
A New Scientist article about science journalism.
Some information about Science Year.
See also oxtrust.
No list of links is complete without a mention of the Onion.
Blogs: Wil Wheaton, Peter David, interconnected, and Not So Soft. Surf the blogosphere via RootBloog.
NTK, BoingBoing and memepool are well worth a read, as well.
As are the various Zeppotron sites, and The Brunching Shuttlecocks. Oh, and Temple Ov Thee Lemur. Oh, and stop by here to make your South Park alter-ego.
A random Eddie Izzard quote generator. Genius! Now if only he'll come back and do more standup...
What colour are you? Apparently I'm yellow, which means "You are very perceptive and smart. You are clear and to the point and have a great sense of humor. You are always learning and searching for understanding." So there you go.
A pair relationships calculator, courtesy of Tom Anderson. A tackier (and more limited) version can be found here. In a similar vein: The technological marvel that is The Magic 8-Ball. It speaks the truth!
Brickfilms - Lego films.
Find out just how much you're really worth at Human For Sale.
The Spark - renowned for its various tests. See also the purity tests at The Armory.
Don't ask. Just...don't.
Various "If I were an..." lists, including "If I were an Evil Overlord", and "If I were an Innocent Bystander...".
The William Shatner simulator. Just what the world didn't need...
You haven't lived until you've played 3D Pong. Trust me.
Along similar lines, try this football game.
Or, indeed, this golf game.
Pegball also rocks the hizzay.
The New Dictionary Of Science. Worryingly accurate.
Some amusing IRC logs and disturbing search requests.
The Lord Of The Rings as you've never seen it before: In Lego!
Ulysses for Dummies - now you too can understand what the hell he was on about.
"I am Jack's younger self" - the secret connections between Calvin and Hobbes and Fight Club revealed!
Plugins for the irony-impaired.
A list of copy-protected CDs.
Property sites: RightMove, Asserta home, Where's my property?, FindAProperty and Fish4.
