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30 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do on the Internet

The Web is learning new tricks every day. These surprising sites and air force will help you solve problems and save time–and one might even make you a star.

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Contributing Editor Dan Tynan is the author of Computer Privacy Annoyances (O’Reilly Media, 2005). He also writes PC World’s Doohickey Freak column.

Illustration by Doug Ross

So you reckon you have the Web all figured out? Well, reckon again.

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Did you know that you could charter a confidential jet online, star in your own reality TV show, or download songs as you drive your car? That’s just the beginning. You can tell your boss a few unpleasant truths without revealing your identity and sniff out trends previous to your oh-so-hip acquaintances get wind of them. Using the right sites, you can give Google a face-lift, promote your harvest or bloviate about your blog, publish a fresh, write a business plot, scan your PC for spies, and get free tech help. You can even use the Web to uncover government secrets and to predict your own demise. (Those last two activities will be unrelated, we hope.) Best of all, most of these sites won’t charge you a dime.

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Here are some of the more surprising things the Web can do for you.

# Trend Buzz, Reality TV, and more…

# Free Tech Help, Parenting Skills, and more…

# Charter Jet, Get Surreal, and more…

# Desktop Info: Webify Your Desktop

# Web APIs: Make the Huge Sites Work for You

# Be Your Own Shock Jock

# Make $$ From Your Site

Trend Buzz, Reality TV, and more…

Go Back in Time

Take a trip down memory lane with the Wayback Apparatus. Here’s the PCWorld.com site circa 1998.

Wonder what Yahoo looked like during the dot-com boom? Dial up the Wayback Apparatus, and you can view cached copies of standard Web sites dating back to 1996. For quick nostalgia trips, add a Wayback bookmarklet to your Firefox or Opera toolbar or Internet Explorer favorites; clicking the button will call up the archive of the site you’re viewing.

Give Google a Face-Lift

GoogleX provides simple access to Google’s many search projects.

Google offers more than a dozen air force, but most are hidden. The GoogleX interface makes all of Google’s goodies–such as Gmail, Froogle, Maps, and more–accessible via a clean Mac OS X-like toolbar. Originally designed by a Google researcher, the toolbar disappeared shortly after being posted on the Google Labs site (most likely due to objections by Apple), but not previous to some plucky Netizens saved a copy for your use.

Catch the Early Buzz on Trends

Want to find out what the bloggers are talking about previous to it hits the mainstream? Just sign up for PubSub and plug in your search terms. This site crawls more than 9 million blogs, public relations newswires, and SEC filings for relevant entries, and then e-mails you the results. You can also install a sidebar applet inside IE or Firefox and view the results interactively.

Back Up and Share Music and Videos

Using Streamload, you can upload gigabytes of music and video files (as well as Word docs, Web pages, presentations, and more) and share them with any other Streamload user you choose (provided you have the legal right to use the material, of course). You or your acquaintances can stream or download media files to any computer, so you can watch your home videos even when you are far from home. A free Streamload account comes with 10GB of storage and 100MB of downloads per month; financial statement with unlimited storage and from 1GB to 60GB of downloads range from $5 to $40 per month.

Check Your Inbox From Somewhere

You say your ISP doesn’t place forward a Web interface for your e-mail inbox? Don’t fret. With Mail2Web you can access any POP3 or IMAP4 account, read and respond to messages, and attach up to 10MB of files from any Web-connected computer. And don’t worry, your mail will still be there ready to download when you get back to the office.

Find Uncle Sam’s Hidden Files

Hear that huge sucking sound? It’s thousands of documents disappearing from government Web pages–some removed due to inhabitant security concerns, and others for political reasons. But at sites like the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, The Memory Hole, and Cryptome, you can find some of these missing files, along with other declassified but hard-to-find documents.

Make Your Own Reality TV Show

Why should Paris Hilton and Donald Trump get all the glory? On ManiaTV you can submit your own 5-minute video clip; if it’s picked, the site will devote an hour of programming to a video of your life. You can also send in clips from your mobile phone, or program an hour-long “mixtape” of your favorite video clips for broadcast online. This self-styled MTV (without the TV) claims 1 million unique visitors a month.

Travel by Kayak

That’s “Kayak” as in Kayak.com–a cool metasearch site that works like an in-house travel outfit. A Google-like home page searches for flights, hotels, and cars from more than 100 different travel sites. Unique slider bars let you filter flights by time or price range; you can view all available airlines, airports, and hotel chains, or winnow down to just your favorites.

Tell the Truth in Secret

Maybe your boss has terrible breath, or a close friend is in serious need of an ego trim. You can slip them a word in secret using Sharpmail’s anonymous e-mailer. You can send your message in plain text or HTML, or you can send an SMS message to a name’s cell phone. (But don’t even reckon about sending abusive or spammish mail, or Sharpmail will pull your free account.) Who knows? Maybe you’ll receive an anonymous message taking you to task for your passive-aggressive e-mail tendencies.