The Guardian’s 100 top sites for 2009

Two years after we last picked the web’s cream of the crop, our latest selection finds that location-based services, work-anywhere collaboration and video are prominentThe online world has changed dramatically even since we last drew up a list of 100 useful sites in December 2006. In the interim, there has been a revival of the browser wars – with Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari making surprising inroads into the Windows monopoly, and offering a new vision of what browsing can be like.Many of the sites listed here were not available when we did our last list; although longevity is a mark of pride online, it is difficult for companies set up in the 1990s to reinvent themselves quickly enough to take advantage of new technologies. Although of course rapid change brings casualties too: it’s possible that with all the economic turbulence going on that some of the sites here won’t be around in a year from now, or that their now free services will have become paid-for. That doesn’t diminish their usefulness, though; it just underlines their determination to survive.The biggest changes since 2006 have been in the fields of collaborative online services that let people in different locations work simultaneously on projects. Collaboration in 2006 was very much focused on words, but now you can create presentations that look as though they were made with expensive packages. And then you can share those presentations, or look at other work that people have done – and even download them. You can convert files without needing expensive systems. Collaborative working has never been easier, even across different platorms. The web really is becoming the operating system, as the rise of the “netbooks” (aka ultraportables, aka Liliputers) emphasises.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/18/internet-websites