25 Super sites to wile away your time, productively

Last day, at a seminar,  I was about to give a presentation on SEO, and to break the ice, I asked a question – “Which is the one website that you can’t afford to visit a day.” As obvious, I was expecting someone to answer – Google. But he came up with an answer that stunned me. I’ll never ask that question again. :D

What happens when you overdo things? You reach the dead end. Sometimes you get stuck just because you have too many ideas in your head, sometimes because you just had too much of what you were doing. All of us need a break at times, from blogging, from researching, from calculating and coding. Luckily, there are lot of junk sites available on the net, that will help you wile away your time, just like the guy who answered me.

Just managed to create a list of those sites which will help you get a break from your chores and at the same time give you that extra juice to be more productive at work. Whenever I face a readers block, I visit these sites and all the time, I manage to get an idea or two to blog from each of them.

	Windows Live Search Now this could come as a surprise right? The reason why I select Windows live search is that it throws up weird results unlike Google, so it’s kind of fun to play around with it. Type in whatever comes to your mind, hit search and it will give you the weirdest results.
	Digg It’s interesting to see the top stories on Digg. What I personally like is to study the pattern of the top dugg stories. Doing a search to find the top stories dugg, and the top stories buried itself will give you great insights on how to create popular articles on your blog.
	Go Daddy This guy is my favorite. When I search for a particular domain, it throws me the synonyms, the antonyms and everything in between. Most of the times, just to see the results, I do a interesting domain name search.
	Seth Godin Of course you know what the man is all about. But what I admire at his blog is his writing style and how he manages to inspire you with his outstanding persona. Read a few posts from his yester years and you’ll get some awesome ideas to blog.
	Smashing Magazine These guys rock! If you ever wanted to learn what “Digg oriented stories” are, you better learn from them. They have enormous list of the coolest stuff on the internet, that you can’t deny bookmarking them. A reference point anytime.
	Mashable Pete Cashmore, does it best! One of the top websites in the world, with a traffic any website will envy for. They have all the upcoming web 2.0 stuff with them and no one misses their radar. One stop shop for all the trendy and coolest stuff online.
	ProBlogger Everybody knows him. What I’m more interested in the site is it’s archives. A read at the archives provides you with insights on how to write articles the popular way! Reading the archives is like taking a tonic !
	Gizmodo Ever felt guilty of not being able to track the latest arrivals in the technology front? Just visit gizmodo and the next day you’ll be the winner at office chats and discussion boards. Valuable information, every first time. all the time!
	Stumble Upon Another favorite of mine,perfect to wile away your time, if you are running out of creative juices. One look and a few stumbles can rejuvenate you just like an ayurvedic massage !
	Flickr We all know this guys cool ! What I’m personally interested in is browsing the flickr collection through the flock browser. If possible I favorite a couple of pictures that I could use on the blog. Good one to wile away time, productively!
	Blogging pro Everything for wordpress is here, widgets,themes,plugins,tweaks,hacks and what not? Blogging pro has links to all the resources here, perfect for bloggers, who want to spice up their template every single day.
	Lifehacker Tips, tweaks and news on technology. Gina manages to put in every information possible, on the above updated daily. Perfect if you’d like to learn how to write a technology blog.
	Digital Point forums Got a domain to sell? Have doubt on installing a software, Got Adsense doubts? There are guys here waiting to answer you. It’s like the song by The Eagles – You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!
	Yahoo Answers A great place to check your proficiency in any selected category. People ask questions there, if you take the role of an advisor, people rank you for the quality of answers you provide. A great place for knowledge sharing!
	Deviant Art Great place to rejuvenate yourselves with some art. Got loads and loads of stuff you can stare at and feel the awe! If you had enough reading text stuff, this is the place to be. A visual treat for your eyes.
	Ouch My Toe Another personal favorite of mine. This guy knows what’s comedy to you and what’s not. I can bet that he’ll make you laugh in the very first read. A good place to start your day or  escape from that stressful day.
	Google Blog Search Another great place to find interesting blogs. If you’d like to read a bit more on your niche topic and see what the competition is like, you better go here and search for related stuff. No no technorati here!
	Wordpress plugins database If you are on wordpress, you’d want to visit this place too often. Because this is the official place for all the plugins and latest arrivals. If you love to tweak your template too often and play around installing new plugins, go for it!
	A list apart No idea what’s CSS? Bad design skills? Then it’s high time you visited this site. You don’t need to know CSS deeply, but this guy will help you get a taste about it the standard way. Can get a bit boring after a few visits, but worth a visit in a while.
	Web master world One of the oldest forums around. They have both amateurs and professionals as members so you might want to indulge in. What I like personally is the conflicts and debates there. You gain yourself some knowledge being involved in it.
	Lorelle on Wordpress If you are looking for quality articles on blogging then this is the place to be for some inspiration. There could be some repetition here and there, but overall a great place to be when running out of ideas to blog.
	Facebook My favorite social networking site. With it’s rich applications and great network of members, it’s a great place to network with professionals. Yes, there are lot of junk applications available but if you know how to maintain a professional and serious profile, this is the place to be.
	Top youtube videos If you’re looking for some fun, this site is the best choice. It lists the top videos on Youtube, under various categories and it’s updated regularly.
	Download Squad This is a blog about computer related stuff. There are lot of software review and download sites available but this one stands out because of it’s quality. A visit will give you access to some cool softwares and tools which you will miss otherwise.
	Webware This is a great site for updating yourself on web 2.0 application and it’s tweaks. If you don’t want to be lost out on the web 2.0 front, you better grab these guys feed. If you are running out of ideas to do review applications, this guy can help you.

Possibly related SEO & Social Media Articles

• 10 Awesome WordPress RSS plugins to super charge your RSS feeds !
  Its a fact that a major chunk of your blog visitors are on RSS readers. And no, this post is not about making them visit your site, nor this is a post about increasing your RSS subscribers. Since most of your (our) readers are on RSS feed readers, I thought it would make sense to [...]...
• Bookmark to multiple social bookmarking sites with one click
  That sounds too good to be true right ? But there’s this cool new tool that will help us do just that. Bookmark to multiple social bookmarking sites with just one click. OnlyWire is a new social bookmarking tool with a difference. Its not a social bookmarking site but a tool (they call it a button) [...]...
• Quick SEO Tips – Can linking to other sites harm my Page Rank?
  Overheard this question at a discussion – “What happens when I link to many sites from my site? Does it affect my Page Rank? I have a looong blogroll, you know.” Indeed a very authentic doubt. Fortunately there’s nothing to fret about. Let me take an example now. Let’s assume we have four sites. Site A – And [...]...
• Create social bookmarking links without a plugin on blogger, wordpress or any CMS
  There are quite a lot of social bookmarking sites and equal number of plugins available these days. Every new blog has a list of social bookmarks by the side. One question that came to mind is , how many of them do you really use? There is magnolia,blink bits, blink list, buddy marks,citeulike,connotea,del.icio.us,digg it,feed me links, [...]...
• Remove other sites from the Google search results
  Google has a new option for webmasters – that enables us to remove a particular information on a website from it’s search results. Vanessa Fox today released the Webpage removal tool that will enable users to delete off indexed pages from your site on Google’s index and also information/pages on other sites. The latter [...]...