People sometimes ask me; "Sam, what are some good websites I should be wasting my time at work on?" For those people, and for the rest of you who have thought about asking but haven't, this list is for you.

I have 112 website feeds in my feed reader, and I use bloglines to read them all. I would recommend you do the same. This list is not comprehensive, but only includes the websites that I would expect you to know when I reference them in casual conversation.

Boing Boing.

Boing Boing is a blog that covers just about anything. One of my favorite authors, Cory Doctorow writes on there regularly, as well as some other hip people. As with any time you get a little bit of everything, you get some good stuff, some bad stuff, and some plain weird stuff.

Lifehacker

Lifehacker is a personal productivity blog. They cover all sorts of ways to stay more organized, be a more awesome person, and GTD (get things done). They also cover cool software. Sound boring? It's more exciting and informative than it sounds, trust me.

Slickdeals

Slickdeals isn't so much a news site as just a list of the latest hot deals from around the net. Most of it is technology related (like right now there is a free router and a $1 pack of DVDs), but they cover just about anything if the deal is good enough.

Slashdot

Slashdot is the first blog I ever started reading regularly. They state their site is "news for nerds," and they accomplish this task. All stories are user submitted and admin approved, so they are slower to get some of the bigger stories. The best thing about Slashdot though isn't the stories, but the comments. You can always read the user comments to get more useful information and opinions on any given story.

Engadget and Gizmodo

I put these two together because they are essentially the same thing. These blogs cover the latest gadgets from around the world. They also cover gadget rumors. This is cool stuff to look at and then tell your friends ("Hey, did you know the japanese have a lifelike sex robot!?")

TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

TUAW covers news related to Apple computers. If you're into that kind of thing, TUAW is a good site because they only cover the more serious rumors, interesting apple news, etc. They're not flooded with crap, in other words. This is the only mac blog I read (but I do watch freemacware.com for the free software pick of the day).

Neatorama

Neatorama is a lot like Boing Boing, but less political and more just about finding interesting things. This is another one of those ones that brings up cool things to talk about with friends.

World Watch

Not a blog, per se, but still an interesting place to visit. This is the online home of Orson Scott Card's weekly political essays that are published in his local newspaper, The Rhinoceros Times. Card is a conservative democrat (I think that means "Republican") and always has a very insightful take on current events and various other issues. These essays are highly recommended!

Snide Remarks

Snide Remarks is Eric Snider's weekly humor column. It used to appear in BYU's Daily Uni-farce, then in the city paper, and then only online. For a long period of time the articles were available only to paying subscribers (i.e. hardly anybody), but they have recently been made available for free to the public once again. I actually found Eric Snider because Orson Scott Card once said that Snider was his favorite columnist, or online writer, or something like that.

I think that's about it. There are several more blogs I read regularly but don't have so much mass appeal as the ones I listed here. I also read a lot of personal blogs, but none of them are updated enough to warrant a mention.