Why The Internet is Awesome

I will be the first to admit that the internet has a negative side. Mind-numbing games, no-brain-cells-required social networking, and easy-to-access TV shows can combine to stupefy the viewer until their liquified brains start dripping out their nose and ears. And of course, there's also the threat of online predators.

But there are also good things about the internet. It can help you keep up on what's going on, it can help you organize your own life, and there's a wealth of information right at your fingertips. The key is in knowing how to utilize it. Here's a list of everything I love about the internet.

1. If you're an avid reader, sites like Shelfari help you organize your books and find new ones. You can search a book by author, subject, popularity, and genre. Your virtual shelf is sorted by three categories: books you've read, books you're reading now, and books you plan to read.

2. How-to sites, like Instructables and Wikihow, teach you new things and allow you to learn from  and interact with a community. I learned how to tat and make mug brownies from Instructables, and Wikihow inspired my mask obsession when it featured an article on making masks out of foil and tape. So useful! I even once found an article of building a secret door behind a bookshelf (not that I've done that, of course...). Youtube is also good for finding how-to videos if you need a visual on something. It's also a good place to find lectures on, say, physics.

3. If there's something you're intensely interested in, it's almost a guarantee that there's a forum somewhere dedicated to it. Forums are a great place to discuss things with other people who are interested in the same things as you.

4. Free music! If you don't have an ipod or can't afford to buy a ton of songs to fill it up with, sites like Pandora and playlist.com can be great. Pandora is sort of like an online radio station in that you don't exactly get to pick what songs are played, but on playlist.com you can put together your own list of songs (unfortunately for me, playlist.com won't work on my dying laptop anymore).

5. Google. Yes, google is taking over the world, but for good reason. It's just so convenient. It's got everything you could possibly ever need: gmail, google calendar, search engines, online books, maps, and of course, blogs! Which leads us to...

6. Blogs! Blogs are awesome. For one thing, you're reading a blog right now. Blogs allow for us to see the world through the eyes of many different people. They allow us to see several sides to an issue, also. I love reading about what other people are doing and looking at the way they think about and analyze a situation.

That's all for now, but I know there must be much more. What do you love about the internet?