Create your own online content
One reason why the internet has been such a success is that anyone can build a website. In the early days, only geeks knew how easy it was, but now the web is wide open, and anyone can get themselves online. You just need to know where to look.
Have a life? Get a blog
Blogging used to be cutting edge, but now everyone and their gran has a blog to call their own. There's a reason for that, though: blogs can come in useful. Weblogs are really online diaries, which were around long before anyone thought up the terms 'weblog' or 'blog'. If you want a blog, getting one couldn't be easier.
Loads of places offer free weblogs. All you have to do is sign up and start typing. The easiest to use is Blogger. You can create a brand new, nice-looking weblog of your own in five minutes flat. LiveJournal and Vox are also great starting points, both of them also free and simple to join. Both are lively places, as much about their communities of bloggers as they are about the blogs themselves.
For a more professional approach you can try TypePad or Wordpress.com. TypePad costs money but is a good choice if you want a bit more control. Wordpress is probably the most advanced system around at the moment, and offers some very stylish templates plus lots of features.
You can use a blog for anything. A journal, a way of keeping in touch with people, a portfolio of creative work; anything you like. There are no rules.
Share your digital pics
Sure, your phone's got a camera in it, but what do you do with all the pictures you take? Don't keep them to yourself, share them with the world (or just with the people you care about).
If your phone can send emails, it can send pictures straight to Flickr. A basic Flickr account is free, but will only let you store 200 photos. Upgrading to a pro account is pretty cheap, though. Flickr is an online community where people share and discuss their pictures. There are 'Groups' where users gather together photos with themes: animals wearing hats; birthday parties; sexy gadgets; you name it. Pictures are given keywords (known on Flickr as 'tags') which make searching easier. Search for the 'London' tag and you'll see how it works.
Another option is Zooomr, which looks and feels very similar to Flickr. It has some nice extra features, like the ability to add audio notes alongside photos. It's missing a decent search function, though.
If you'd prefer to publish old-fashioned style photo albums, sites like PhotoBox and PhotoBucket can help. Each of them gives you a certain amount of free storage space where you can keep albums of images. PhotoBox gives you control over who can view your pictures. You can add passwords to albums if you like. PhotoBucket is good for storing pictures you might like to use in other web pages, such as photos of things you're flogging off on eBay.
Google's Picasa web albums is another excellent place to store photos. The storage space is limited to a gigabyte of space per user, which means a few hundred photos. It works particularly well with Google's free photo editing software, Picasa.
Creating social bookmarks
The more time you spend on the web, the more great sites you're going to discover and want to re-visit. Trouble is, if you're using more than one computer (one at home, one at the library, one at college, one at work, perhaps your parents' computer at Christmas), old-fashioned bookmarks won't help much because they get stored on a single machine.
Now there are a bunch of useful free services for storing your bookmarks online. You can reach them (and add to them) from any machine you might be using. The oldest and best of these link stores is Delicious. Don't be put off by its simplistic design - there's a load of great features buried inside it. Like Flickr, Delicious uses tags to sort and describe links. You can give each link you keep a description and whatever tags you want. Finding stuff is as simple as trying different tags (or tag combos) or using the built-in search system. Adding things is even easier.
There's a similar sort of feel at Furl, which stores complete copies of entire web pages for you. It's almost like having a searchable file of photocopies that you can keep for future reference. Comes in handy when researching one subject in detail, and there's plenty of storage space for each user.
Cutting-edge extras
- Get yourself a tumblelog (like a blog, but smaller and quicker to use) at Tumblr.com;
- Create your own web applications with just a few clicks at ning.com; start by cloning something you like, and tweak it until you're happy. Choose from blogs, photo albums, interactive toys, all sorts of fun stuff. Start at confess.ning.com for a laugh;
- Want to upload videos too? YouTube is one option, but Vimeo offers better quality video, more features and a much friendlier community;
- Stay in touch with your mates by text, web page and instant message, or all three at once, using Twitter;
- Protopage is amazing, like having smart sticky notes in your web browser. Keep your notes and reminders there, and you'll always be able to reach them from any computer you happen to be using.
- Jotcloud.com has similar features, but without the flashy interface.
Tips on how to take it a step further
- There's some good advice in the List Apart article How to write a better weblog (including "Don't take yourself too seriously");
- Some people think there's money to be made from having a weblog - but beware, only a handful of blogs ever attract enough interest to turn a profit;
- Using online community services like Flickr and Vimeo means getting involved with the community itself, if you want to. Join some groups, explore new stuff, get to know some other people.
