I am pretty proud of how optimized I am for web surfing these days.  If anything in my life is organized, it’s the way I browse the web every morning.   I guess I shouldn’t brag about it, but it did take some planning and prioritizing.  Not only do I have my iGoogle homepage tricked out with RSS from my favorite sites (divided into 5 categories) and my daily to-do list (which, ahem, RARELY gets done),  but I have an addition list of Google Reader RSS feeds of trashy celebrity sites, fantasy review sites, technology sites, weird news sites…all the sites I put in the “if I have time to waste I’ll read this crap” category.   All tagged neatly as well. 😉 After my homepage browsing I always start at popurls.com and open tabs on any articles I think look interesting.  The time drain spirals out of control until I can blast myself out of my chair a few hours later.   It’s a daily ritual that I’ve settled into, and it’s rare that I add new sites to my daily regiment because I try to at least be a little considerate with my own time. 🙂

But tonight, I got a few more!  I found this great article from PC Magazine.  They just came out with a list of top 100 “unknown” websites.   Drool!  Now, I don’t mean to brag, but I knew about a bunch of these, ’cause I’m incredibly cool…er, incredibly chained to my computer…but there were some really neat ones I came across that are worth a look.    One of the most interesting to me was www.kiva.org.  It’s a place where you can loan money to real people for micro loans, say, to buy land or buy chickens for them to raise.  I’ve heard/read stories on the emergence of the micro-loan and how it’s really helped third world people, especially women, avoid borrowing from loan sharks and I think this is a really cool idea.    It really touched me to see that there’s a way to help a real person directly rather than giving a ton of money to an organization who spends money on sending me BACK address labels and cups and hideous old lady T-shirts (I’m talking to you, Humane Society!  I don’t need a stationery set, thanks!  Just save some dogs for me!)

There are a bunch more I bookmarked while looking through the list, but I REALLY got excited by Good Reads.  It’s a social networking site for book lovers.  You list all the books you’ve read, share shelves with people, be a member of groups dedicated to subjects, write reviews about what books you’re reading…some people have like, 3000 books listed!  You can also post your own writing, which is neat.  This might be a social networking site I could get into!  Oh great, that’s all I need,  another site to check messages for 🙂  But, this one might be one I’m actually interested in updating and posting to.  I’ll see if it sticks!