Check out these examples of how the Web is evolving to present information in new ways
Call them Web 2.0 sites or mashups — or come up with your own trendy term. Whatever you call them, there are sites popping up all over the Web that process information in new ways rather than just present it.
Some of them work with information you supply, letting you manipulate, track and share data, such as your schedule or your to-do list. Others, so-called mashups, draw data from different sites and reassemble it to make something new. They're all part of how the Web is evolving beyond just a bunch of point sources for information. Here are 11 examples that show what the new Web can do, from helping you organize your life to adding some personalized fun to it.
You can use GrandCentral to sort and filter incoming calls and direct them to ring some or all (or none) of your phones.Click to view larger image. 
Ever wish you could exercise the same control over incoming phone calls as you do over e-mail? GrandCentral — now a Google operation — gives you a new phone number and forwards incoming calls to any other number or numbers you specify.
Depending on who the call is from, you can have it ring through to your work phone, home phone, cell or all at once. You can also direct some calls right to voice mail — with different greetings for different callers — and retrieve your voice mail via any browser. Perhaps best of all, you can permanently block calls from anyone you don't want to hear from ever again.
Ever wish you could exercise the same control over incoming phone calls as you do over e-mail? GrandCentral — now a Google operation — gives you a new phone number and forwards incoming calls to any other number or numbers you specify.
Depending on who the call is from, you can have it ring through to your work phone, home phone, cell or all at once. You can also direct some calls right to voice mail — with different greetings for different callers — and retrieve your voice mail via any browser. Perhaps best of all, you can permanently block calls from anyone you don't want to hear from ever again.
Highrise keeps track of your relationship with your customers, providing a place to track and share their contact information, background notes and records of interactions.Click to view larger image.Highrise is an online CRM tool. Basically, it's an easy-to-use database for contacts, reminders and notes. Because it's online, you can share it across your company or team anywhere there is access to a browser.
Highrise offers a free account for up to two users that can store 250 contacts, a Max account at $149 per month for unlimited users and 50,000 contacts, and several levels in between. You can even forward e-mails to a drop box associated with your account, and Highrise adds it as a note on the sender's or recipient's contact page, along with any attached files.
Use your mobile phone to call in a reminder — for instance, that you need to pick somebody up after school — and Jott will send you an e-mail reminder, plus display it on your Jott home page.Click to view larger image.Jott is for those times when you're away from your computer — but not from your phone — and you think of something you need to do the next day or want to be reminded of next week. You just call Jott and dictate your message. Jott translates your message to text and e-mails it to you or anyone else whose name and address you've registered.
If the event is in the future, you can tell Jott to send you an e-mail or text message as a reminder. You can also use Jott to post to your blog or to Twitter, or to add tasks to your to-do lists on Remember the Milk (see below) and other such sites.
Remember the Milk
Remember the Milk keeps your to-do list organized and sends you reminders in your choice of formats.Click to view larger image.Remember the Milk is an online to-do list manager with a clean, straightforward interface that raises it above some of its competitors.
As with any desktop calendar program, you create a list of tasks and set due dates — which you can do with natural-language modifiers such as "tomorrow" or "in two weeks" — and, if you want, set them to repeat according to a regular schedule. You can add tasks by entering them in your browser or by e-mailing them to Remember the Milk.
Where Remember the Milk beats most desktop programs is its ability to send you a reminder via e-mail, SMS or instant messenger. You can also share your lists with family or team members and let them add tasks too, something impossible with a desktop program outside a server environment.
Information visualizers
Pageflakes
You know those portal pages that you can customize with different information sources, such as a Yahoo start page or iGoogle? Pageflakes is the most customizable portal page you can imagine.
The "flakes" on your page can contain almost anything, from the familiar news, weather and sports sites to RSS feeds and blogs, to podcasts, to a Facebook notifier — there are more than 200,000 available flakes at the moment.
You can also load special-interest pages created by other users and publish as Pagecasts, such as the one set up for tracking the recent March Madness basketball tournament.
With Pageflakes, you can customize a personal Web page to follow the news, find new recipes, keep track of your Facebook Pokes and lots more.Click to view larger image.
The fact that there's no user-controlled way to delete your account will be a deal-breaker for some, and understandably so. Hopefully, the developers will take note of what happened to Facebook and build that capability in. But if you like the idea of a personal Web start page, Pageflakes is the best way to get one.
Pick a band or a movie, and Liveplasma displays related artists. Did you know Herman's Hermits were only two degrees of separation from Donna Summer?Click to view larger image.Opening a Liveplasma map is like entering a solar system of related musical acts or movies. After you enter the name of a band, for example, Liveplasma generates a field of spheres with your band in the center and other similar bands sprinkled around it.
The size of the sphere relates to the popularity of the artist, and its color conveys how similar it is to your target band. Lines connecting the spheres let you track the connections.
The sorting process is a little opaque, and the database has some holes — entering "Lily Allen" got me a map based on Woody Allen, for example. But it's an amusing way to explore similarities between artists and a visually stunning example of a new way to display information.
WeatherBonk
WeatherBonk will tell you everything you need to know about the weather in Pittsburgh — or anywhere else — including pictures.Click to view larger image.WeatherBonk, on the other hand, is far from visually stunning, but it'll satisfy anyone who really wants to know what's going on weatherwise.
WeatherBonk pulls data from national weather services such as Weather Underground and the National Weather Service, as well as from numerous personal weather stations run from homes and schools. It displays a screen showing the current forecast, a Google map with temperature data and streams from webcams in your target region. You can even overlay radar and cloud information and animate it. The result ain't pretty, but measured by information per square inch, it's a winner.
Maps mashups
CommunityWalk
You know those little tabs you see when you search in Google Maps for something like "pizza near 90210"? CommunityWalk lets you make your own map with tabs you set by entering addresses or by just clicking on the map.
You can also enter a label and notes for each location. I've used it to make a map of where the members of a local Internet forum live and to plot the locations of a bunch of open houses I wanted to hit one weekend. You can categorize the locations and choose a different icon — basic or silly — for each category. And you can make the map Private; Shared, so that anyone you send the URL to can see it; or Public, which lists it on the site and makes it available to search engines.
With CommunityWalk, you can create your own custom Google map and, if you want, share it with the world. Here jpiehowski shows us where they're biting in Minnesota.Click to view larger image.
Gmaps Pedometer
Want to know how far that walk you took today was? Curious about the distance of your regular morning run? Just go to this site, bring up the Google map of where you do your perambulating and start clicking to place points along your route.Trace out the route of your morning jog on a Google map, and the Gmaps Pedometer will tell you how much ground you covered and how many calories you burned.Click to view larger image.
The Gmaps Pedometer will calculate the total distance and, if you enter your weight, even give you an estimation of the number of calories you've burned. That's what it's for, but you can use it to measure any distance. I compared the length of the northern and southern borders of Wyoming (they're not the same, you know) by "walking" the length of them on the map.
HousingMaps
HousingMaps combines Craigslist For Rent data with Google maps to help you find a place to live in the perfect neighborhood.Click to view larger image.So where are all those apartments on Craigslist, anyway? Go to housingmaps.com, choose a city served by Craigslist from the drop-down menu, enter a price range, number of bedrooms and other sorting criteria that Craigslist offers, and you've got a map showing where all the matching listings are located.
You also get a list of all the postings along the side of the map. Click on the icon next to any post to get a pop-up on the map showing title and address, or click on the listing title to go right to Craigslist. It's helpful if you're planning to move to a new house or apartment, but it's also a great way to pass the time dreaming about moving to a whole new city.
Just for fun
Fly your little biplane over Nôtre Dame de Paris — or any of several other scenic locations — with the Google Maps plus Flash mashup Goggles.Click to view larger image.
Load the map of your hometown or someplace you just feel like visiting and fly your little Flash-animated biplane around to your heart's content. You can even strafe old workplaces or other locations you have a grudge against.
If you get lost, just dive until you crash into the ground and start over. Goggles opens with a list of 22 locations to start from, including New York and Los Angeles; Helsinki, Finland; Heraklion, Crete; and Mars and the Moon (though I couldn't get maps for the latter two.) There's also a way to set your own start location, though it's a complicated, multistep process. But if you can't find the location you want, just fly there.
Load the map of your hometown or someplace you just feel like visiting and fly your little Flash-animated biplane around to your heart's content. You can even strafe old workplaces or other locations you have a grudge against.
If you get lost, just dive until you crash into the ground and start over. Goggles opens with a list of 22 locations to start from, including New York and Los Angeles; Helsinki, Finland; Heraklion, Crete; and Mars and the Moon (though I couldn't get maps for the latter two.) There's also a way to set your own start location, though it's a complicated, multistep process. But if you can't find the location you want, just fly there.
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