Time tips the best sites of 2006

By Steve Malone

Posted on 16 Aug 2006 at 11:51

The Time.com web site has published its annual list of rising stars on the Internet for the past four years and has tipped some established stars such as eBay, Hotmail, Paypal, Google along the way.

The 2006 list includes a healthy slice of so-called Web 2.0 social networking sites which have made a splash - and not inconsiderable sums for their founders - in the past year or so.

Among the more expected nominees are the much-discussed MySpace with its 100 million users and its ability to make stars of its members along with the equally successful and much imitated YouTube.

Also included is the news site Digg where stories are recommended, discussed and voted for by the visitors which has also seen its stock rise in 2006.

There are also a number of obscurities which the judges felt showed great promise such as Pandora, which will allow you customise your own Internet radio playlist. For the baby boomers Wolfgang's Vault will stream live performances you were too stoned to remember from the 1960s and '70s including The Doors, The Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and Bob Marley. Finally, Podcast Pickle indexes around 10,000 assorted podcasts to let listeners make sense of the wave of casts now produced daily.