You can get lost in this for hours, should you have the spare time. You have programming topics like supercolliding a PHP array, Java coding tips, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python and various code topics. The bottom line is that this is a very useful site for anyone tech oriented or interested in tech topics as a beginner, but it has appeal for many others as well. This pulls together a wide audience and shares the most important thing that can be shared: information.

As far as the kids are concerned, there are a variety of online education topics and tutorials to help with both basic and complex academic subjects. This is an excellent way for your kids (or if you are a kid) to be introduced to intellectually relevant topics. You can build a fundamental understanding of many technical topics and delve into more important current news topics in addition to news humor. After sweating away a few hours of coding or tinkering with your operating system, you can enjoy some Anime or other fun videos.

This is not your average site by any stretch of the imagination and just about any user can find something on JimmyR.com to occupy some brain space for awhile. Should you care to understand certain coding topics more, that is one of the best features. For example, if you are struggling to understand algebraic data types, you can get a nice breakdown of the topic. Fledgling programmers and more inquisitive children can gain much from this.

Here you have part of a chart explaining algebraic data types, compliments of the site. It is quite different from the site you are reading this at now. However, every good user likes to browse dozens of sites on a regular basis. For the technically oriented, JimmyR.com will give you plenty of time-consuming reading. This is not a bad thing at all.

Finally, the site is not stuffed with ads and it is open to user posts for blogs, pictures and just about anything else relevant to the theme of the site. It is uncertain whether anyone who is not interested in the tech side would find the content interesting. At the very least, the average user can start to become more of a power-user with much of the information here and grow their brains in many other ways. Have fun!

It was one of the first blogs that I added to Netvibes, my first RSS reading and management service, and was carried over to Google Reader, the Firefox extension Brief and my current RSS reader RSSOwl.

For the past year or so I have read less and less posts on Lifehacker. I usually only look at the headlines and mark the articles as read. It is not because the authors at Lifehacker produce less content, quite the contrary.

The core reason is my impression that Lifehacker has reduced the tech article output. Now, this may be my impression and I have no idea if this is true or not. What I do see is an increase in mobile and cell phone related contents which seem to have replaced much of the old tech related articles on Lifehacker.

Even worse in my opinion; The tech articles that get posted are often old news, at least for me and users who follow other tech news sites. Lifehacker is not the site anymore that discovers new and exciting applications for desktop operating systems.

Those tech articles are usually rehashes of other site’s findings, often no longer than 150 or so words long.

Maybe that’s life, that the mobile crowd has exploded and that apps and stuff are the new tech news. Don’t get me wrong. There is certainly a market for mobile apps and news, but it is unfortunately not something that I’m interested in.

As a consequence, I have made the decision to remove Lifehacker from my RSS feed. I will still stop by the site occasionally to see what’s going on. Important or interesting tech news on Lifehacker are covered by many sites that I’m subscribed to in my RSS reader, which means that I will still be able to read them.

For me personally, Lifehacker feels a lot like Digg. A site that I once used on a daily basis turned into something that I have little or no interest in anymore.

Are you a Lifehacker regular? What’s your impression then?

Download Squad concentrated more on tech and less on non-tech related news like Lifehacker does. The blog was on my daily reading schedule and I came to enjoy the posts of many of the blog’s regular authors.

It was also often an interesting race to get the news out before they did, which I more often than not did not succeed in.

But it is not only the Download Squad website that will be discontinued, Switched.com will be discontinued as well. The site has an Alexa rank of sub 4000 which is an indicator for lots and lots of traffic.

You may remember that AOL moved the Download Squad from their original domain name to a Switched.com subdomain. That move in itself felt strange at that time but it was better than losing the site completely.

It is not clear why the sites have been closed, the post over at the Download Squad does not reveal a single reason.

The most likely reason is that the advertising revenue of the sites did not match the exceptions of the shareholders.
Could also have something to do with a change in management after the Huffington Post aquisition. But those are just guesses, no one knows and it is likely staying that way.

What stands is that this is a sad day for tech interested users like me, and many of you. Goodbye Download Squad, many of us will miss you in the year’s to come.

Newspond uses a sophisticated algorithm to compute news popularity which will determine if an article will make the frontpage or not. Popularity goes up and down and this is considered in the algorithm, each article has a popularity trend that goes either up, down or stagnates.

Users can comment on stories and the comment function looks a lot nicer than that of Digg. Comments are threaded and the comment section uses Ajax to display everything without reloading the page. Nice and clean.

Talking about design. This site does look fantastic and it uses the latest technologies to increase usability. I’m not that of a design freak because I think that content is far more important but this design sticks out.

A major feature that I wanted to see implemented at Digg for a long time is the bundling of sources for a news story. If something important happens in the world you see dozens of stories at Digg that are all related to the same subject. Newspond lists all those sources under one story headline which is far cleaner and better. Some stories have more than 50 sources and users can really read some or even all of them to inform themselves.

The only thing that I would criticize at the moment is the lack of information. The about page is not really revealing lots of information about the algorithm, how articles are found, how and which websites are used as sources and the like. More information would be crucial for success. Oh, and I was not able to register. It told me that I would receive a confirmation email but I did not receive on until now.