Cyberslacking

Please check out the links posted on the righthand column of this Web site to keep up on the commerce we and our friends are making careers out of -- but if you want to waste time and have some fun, visit these. Also, if you want me to link your biz site to my links, let me know!

www.engrish.com
www.mycathatesme.com
www.elfyourself.com

There are some great face-morphing sites I pulled off the wire at work -- I'll add those later.

Here's McClatchy Tribune's top picks for 2006:

Web Search: Best of 2006 online
By Randy A. Salas
McClatchy Newspapers

As another year draws to a close, various Web sites have started posting their "best of 2006" selections. Some of these sample lists don't cover typical subjects, but, hey, this is Web Search.

TOP BABY NAMES If it's Aidan or rhymes with it, BabyNames.com (www.babynames.com) likes it for a boy's name. The site's more than 1 million members listed Aidan (Aiden, Aden) as their favorite boy's name. Their top boys' names of 2006 also included Caden (Kaden) at No. 2, Braden (Brayden, Braeden) at No. 3, Jaden (Jayden) at No. 4, and Hayden at No. 11. Ethan was No. 5. For girls, Ava was tops, followed by, in order, Abigail, Cailyn (Kaelyn), Madison and Emma.

WORD OF THE YEAR "Truthiness," coined by Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," was picked by visitors to Merriam-Webster's Web site (www.m-w.com/info/06words.htm) by a 5-1 majority vote as the word of the year. Colbert said it means "truth that comes from the gut, not books." The American Dialect Society formally defined it later as meaning "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true." The rest of the top five: "google," "decider," "war," and "insurgent."

TOP NATURE VIDEO National Geographic News (news.nationalgeographic.com) recently announced its biggest stories of 2006 (www.startribune.com/a2069), a list topped by the revealing of the Gospel of Judas. But more interesting, certainly from a visceral standpoint, is National Geographic's best videos of 2006 (www.startribune.com/a2068), topped by amazing footage of a giant Pacific octopus battling a spiny dogfish shark in an aquarium.

TOP SCAM The Consumer Affairs Web site (www.consumeraffairs.com) says that after evaluating the 50,000 consumer complaints it received in 2006, its top scam of the year is a growing scheme in which victims are told they have won a lottery in Canada or Europe and must pay various fees to collect it. One Kansas man lost $300,000. "You can't win a contest that you didn't enter," one official reminded consumers.

FUNNIEST POLITICAL QUOTE Politics are a funny business to pundit Howard Mortman, aka Extreme Mortman, so it's only natural that he compile his list of the funniest political quotes of 2006 for his blog (www.extrememortman.com). Sen. Ted Stevens' comment that the Internet is "a series of tubes" seemed like a shoo-in when he uttered it in June. But then Sen. John Kerry came up with his much-publicized zinger to top Mortman's list: "If you make the most of (education), you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." Kerry later said that he was trying to make a joke, but that it came out wrong. "We'll believe him," Mortman said in explaining his choice. "But not without a price."

BEST VIRAL VIDEO Forget the top movies of 2006. IFILM has weighed in with its best viral videos of the year (www.ifilm.com/collection/18220) _ the kind of clips that are passed around by e-mail and posted on blogs and other sites. Top candidates included comedian Michael Richards' racist tirade during a show, news personality Connie Chung massacring "Thanks for the Memories" and comedian Judson Laipply performing seemingly every dance move of the past 50 years in six minutes. But the winner was "Brokeback to the Future," a hilarious faux movie trailer using existing footage to suggest that Marty McFly and Doc Brown had a more personal relationship in the "Back to the Future" films.

TYPO OF THE YEAR The must-read site Regret the Error (www.regrettheerror.com), which tracks mistakes in the media, honors Reuters for creating the typographical error of the year in a story about a recall of "beef panties" (www.startribune.com/a2072). What kind of buns go with those?

(Randy A. Salas is a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Do you have a favorite Web site or a question about how to find something on the Internet? E-mail websearch@startribune.com or go to his blog, www.startribune.com/websearch.)