Other sites

Some web sites to browse

For the spanish versions, click here.

Suck is one of my first stops on the web. Entertaining, irreverent, and obnoxious (check out the recent "Dave Weiner" piece), with the occassional bomb and the occassional gem, Suck totally, er, sucks.
Even if their server push is horribly annoying while sharing a 512kbps link with the rest of the country.

Suck itself is a clone-slash-homage-slash-spinoff-slash-whatever of Flux, Ned Brainard's HotWired column, which remains solid. As if inspired by Picasso's maxim, their success at accumulating hit counts has spawned a host of imitators, some more shameless than others. Worthy of note are Joshua Quittner's Netly News, which from a rough start marred by an overly cute name, lack-o-clue security and, um, borrowing and ain't-my-friends-cool articles has been recently finding its pace and the suitably named Blow, started as a flat-out shameless Suck parody.
Can Bite be far behind?

Recent potshots taken by the Netly News and Blow notwithstanding, Salon remains one of the best new offerings on the web, a web-magazine with a faint scent of Harper's in its design. Talking about new media mimicking old, the annoying "next page" interface mars an otherwise excellent site.
Conversely, should Salon taste a tad too paté-and-wine to you, there's always WORD, FEED, Traffic, Urban Desires, or any number of quality webzines.

Though his recent career tango from Interactive Week to his Muckraker column in HotWired has seemingly left him less time for self-publishing, Brock Meeks' Cyberwire Dispatches remain a must read.

Finding what you're looking for on the net is often half the trouble, and search engines keep popping up continuously. My current favorite is DEC's AltaVista "super-spider." I love AltaVista.

When someone who like me suffers from serious geek-news addiction leaves the U.S., the web is there with a slew of offerings to keep even the hungriest news addict up to date, between c|net, ZDnet, and Web Review. The non-geek-news are reasonably covered by dead-tree-based media and by PathFinder.

There's been a battle brewing on the net for the past year between the Church of Scientology and its online critics, a battle with potentially ominous implications towards freedom of speech on the net involving early-morning raids, worldwide conflict from LA to Amsterdam to South Africa, and massive anonymous postings of ultra-double-plus-top-secret-confidential-secret-sacred-scriptures by someone known only as SCAMIZDAT. By far the best overview of the battle is Ron Newman's "The Church of Scientology vs. the Net". Another solid overview is Wendy Grossman's alt.scientology.war article in the 3.12 issue of WIRED. The actual battle takes place on the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology.

It is a sign of the times that The American School of Lima, my old high school in Perú is now on the web; while still under construction, it should turn into a reasonably cool site once school starts again and the content fills up - in a laudable unExonian policy of freedom of speech, the site will be mostly student-run. While there, also check out Red Científica Peruana, my link to cyberspace while here in Lima.