I just saw Time Magazine’s list of 50 Best Websites 2007, and love looking at these lists to see how their research (or preferences?) match or differ from my own. I wish they would explain their methodology for selecting them, but it is a popular magazine, not an academic one, so their processes may not be as rigorous (based on traffic, a large survey, focus groups, etc.) as one may like (or even care).

While I use some of the ones they list, including LinkedIn and Twitter (both of these links go to my information on their sites), most of them I have never heard of. I am by no means going to set myself out as an expert on websites (popular or otherwise), but I wonder how they separated the 50 Best from the 25
Sites We Can’t Live Without. These are the bigger players (including Amazon, del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati - once again, with links to my own pages), and while there are also a few sites here I do not use, I wish they could have organized these into a handy single-page
chart as well.

One last thing that is so important for keeping current online that Time seems to have forgotten — date stamp all lists and pages! With information being created at an unheard-of speed, it is vital people can easily determine how current information is. Blog programs do this for us automatically. Outlook dates and time stamps emails. Document management systems, credit card processors, and even Google all follow suit. Seems somewhat ironic, I think, given Time’s own name, they neglected
this.  

Technorati Tags: Amazon, del.icio.us, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Technorati, Time Magazine