“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer” Plutarch

While this quote is probably false, weep no more, for while you can’t conquer the world, you can explore the world wide web! 

Here are just three sites for you to use as you make the most of the Internet! (Also visit the Vol. I post, where I wrote about Spritzlet, the Wayback Machine, and Five Labs.)

Travel the Web Together- Rabb.it

I honestly don’t know how long this site will stay active, because it seems like it’s just too good to be true. So enjoy it while it lasts!

With rabb.it, you can share your internet travels with friends, families, and strangers (if you’d like!)  It brings together three common online activities:

1. Video Chat

2. Instant Messaging/Chat

3. Browsing/Watching 

You can go to rabb.it and open a viewing room. (You can do it for a single use, but you can also sign up for your own room that you can always go back to.) From there, you will have a browser-window-within-a-browser-window.

You can type in a url to any website you’d like. I have used it for watching Community with my friend Kyle in Florida, but you can watch any online media site– Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, and more.

If you have set up the room, only you can control the inside browser– so if a friend needs to go to the bathroom, they have to wait for you to pause the video.

At the bottom of the screen you have video chat– and what’s nice is that you can turn off the camera and/or mute the microphone, so if you’d rather just talk or just watch the other person’s reactions or see/hear neither, you can do that.

Finally, to the right, you can instant message/chat with your friends. If you are having a bad hair day or just don’t feel like talking, you can just type with the other person.

You can also lock the room, kick people out, mute the video, go full screen, do a self-cast, and at the very top, you can get links to share with others. That’s how you invite them to join you in your viewing room. If you want to keep it wide open, you could post it to Facebook or Twitter. If you’d rather just keep it private between friends, you can copy a link or send an email.

How great is it that you can watch movies with people across the country? You can browse sites with friends far away or just use the video chat functions before or after you’re done watching something. The other day my friend and I chatted for almost an hour after our show. That’s one of the best things about the Internet– it lets you connect with people as if you are in the same room, even if you are miles apart.

Let me know if you want to Rabbit sometime! I’d love to do so!

http://rabb.it/

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Test Your Knowledge and Learn- Sporcle

I have enjoyed the site mentalfloss.com, with a variety of articles, videos (often featuring the Vlog brothers, if you know who they are), quizzes and more. I really enjoyed the quiz interfaces, because some online quizzes are really awkward to use, but the ones at mentalfloss always were interesting and quite easy– easy to use, that is, sometimes the questions were very hard! So I finally noticed their quizzes were “powered by Sporcle.”  What does that mean? And what is a “sporcle”? So I clicked a link, and found my way here:

Sporcle has thousands of quizzes that you can take with info ranging from pop culture to history to geography to music to words to people to random (how fast can you type every letter of the alphabet?) and more.

It’s quite fun to take a quiz and then see the full results– you can see what others got wrong, what questions most people had difficulty answering, and how many questions most people could finish.  [EDIT 5/29/15– It seems they make you connect a social media account or log in now to see full results…]

Even more, you can make your own quizzes! I haven’t tried it yet, so you’ll have to let me know how it goes.

Another one of the best things about the Internet is how it can help us learn. Sometimes I like to take a Sporcle quiz just to get my mind going before getting work done. Sometimes it’s a fun distraction, especially if it’s something simple like “Name these objects beginning with C.” But it’s also fun to take a real hard quiz, where I don’t know the answers and have to wrack my brain and guess– and then the answers that I missed the first time round will be stuck there forever! (Just like how you always remember the times you goofed up around your school crush!)

So check out Sporcle and have fun learning!

http://www.sporcle.com/

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Wander Around- The Bored Button

Just came across this the other day… and it is so fun.

It’s a simple premise. You click the “bored button” when you are bored and it will take you to some random sites. It’s very simple to StumbleUpon, but with less personalization. And almost every site it takes you to is just weird and fun. For example:

(Check out the dance party above here: http://j.mp/1JRpAja)

I could give you the links to the other pages, but then you’d miss out on the fun part– clicking the bored button and seeing what comes up. So go explore. Be bored no more!

http://www.boredbutton.com

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So go!

Go explore the world wide web– perhaps you can’t conquer new worlds, but you can conquer your boredom!