Joomla Directory

Joomla is a highly demanded CMS by small to medium sized companies looking to have a professional website but without the professional cost. It makes sense for developers and designers to choose Joomla because there is such a small learning curve for their clients when they take over control of the site and add or change any content. Joomla has a huge ecosystem and markteplace set up to offer professional services, whether they come in the form of templates, extensions, or hosting all of which clients expect the best of. So it makes sense as a developer to find a great amount of the resources in one place and then make an informed decision on which is the best. That is where a site called Joomla Directory is able to show the best template clubs, joomla hosting, and joomla extensions. Everything is voted on and organized by the community for the benefit of all Joomla lovers.

10 Sites that make the web better for everyone

There has been a little hiatus from posting but nevertheless we'll get back on track. The internet is enormous and LikeUmm tries to scale it down to bring the best out of it. Yes Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and so on do that as well but each of those sites is catered toward news in the form of articles, pictures, and videos. We focus on whole websites and then put them into categories to be voted on and reviewed so that a nice organized list evolves out of all the chaos. For example, where does everyone go for their web marketing news or what is the best social network to join for a real estate agent? It's not impossible to answer those questions but it's not easy. Potentially you can just ask Google but then you wouldn't have any clue as far as the popularity. There definitely would be some validation in a search if you knew that 1000 or more other people really like it as well. I love sites that try to bring out the best of something through popularity, community voting, traffic, hits, etc... so I'll name some of my favorites.

1. Likeumm.com I have to give a shout out.

2. IMDB.com It's the number 1 place to find out the ranking of a movie and how it was perceived by the community.

3. Digg.com The most popular social news site.

4. Delicious.com The place for social bookmarking, it's always interesting to see which bookmarks become super popular.

5. Threadless.com You submit a design for a shirt, people vote on it, threadless sells it, you make money.

6. Ratemydrawings.com URL is pretty self explanatory, but people vote on drawings and the best rise to the top.

7. Quantcast.com They estimate web traffic and rank the top million sites based popularity. Nothing is categorized but still is cool and useful.

8. Yelp.com A business review site that ranks restaurants, shops, spas, plumbers, and more allowing people to decide if a business is worthy of their time and money.

9. Hypem.com A cool place to see what songs are popular in the music blogs. You can even filter the music blogs so that you only see songs from the popular blogs. A little double popularity.

10. Weblogawards.org Another great site to find the best blogs on the web as voted by everyone. 

These are 10 great sites that try to make the stuff on the internet a little easier and better for the rest of us.

The new Joost

I wrote about Joost around two months ago and the only way to watch video was to download the software. They then, a few weeks ago, only made you download an add on. This add on made it a little more convenient since you didn't have to exit your browser and fire up the software. But they still made you download something to watch the videos. Just recently they revamped their site, if you want to see whats on Joost, you are able to go to the site and watch the videos without downloading anything. Think of Youtube, Hulu, Veoh, and the rest that are dominating streaming video and TV. Joost has finally caught up to the rest in terms of in browser viewing. And this is definitely for the better.

Streaming Video

Do you like to watch or upload video online?
(I'm guessing you've heard of Youtube.com so we'll skip that one)

1. Veoh.com
Veoh is quite possibly the next best online video service after Youtube. Watch video from across the web all aggregated and organized by Veoh. They essentially search all of the video sites on the web including Youtube and allow you to easily watch it from one central site which is Veoh. If you like producing your own video they also allow you to upload it in a very easy way.

2. Vimeo.com
Vimeo is more of a Youtube than it is a Veoh in that you can only view and upload stuff hosted by Vimeo. But don't take that as a negative thing, they offer a lot of easy to use features and there are tons of people using it and hosting their own videos. The quality of video is the best I've seen out of all the places to upload your videos. It's run by the people that started Collegehumor.com (which is super popular and funny) so you know that they are a young evolving company and will stay on top of the new trends.

3. Liveleak.com
Liveleak is another popular video sharing site similar to Youtube. However they focus on news and current events videos. There is a ton of cool stuff captured by "citizen journalists" who upload cool and fun news related stuff. If you have ever caught some news on your video camera, this site would be a good place to upload it to.

Great comedy from Funnyordie

Everyone is always looking for a good laugh and Will Ferrell and some of his celebrity friends have put together a great site. Funnyordie is what it's called and they jumped way up in visitors after the super funny skit by Ferrell and his "landlord." You may have seen it already but it's absolutely worth watching again. They also allow users to submit their own funny stuff which makes it a worthy competitor to Youtube, at least for funny videos.

Reddit: The Prince...

Reddit is another social news site that is right on par with digg in terms of die hard followers. If there are two social news sites to follow, reddit and digg would be the ones to read. The top stories are sometimes clones but the comments are always different. Reddit, if you don't know, allows users to submit and vote for their favorite stories and the top make it to the front page. It's your classic social news site. I happen to like the community of reddit a little better than digg because the top stories there always seem to be of interest to me. If you have a favorite let me know in the comments. Or rate them on LikeUmm.

Digg: The king of social news

Many people already know of digg and what it is...but it deserves to be recognized because of its unique ability to make the news entertaining. If you don't know, digg is a user controlled news site where "diggs" or votes control what makes it to the front page. The stories vary from tech to politics to bizarre but are always interesting. The best part, in my opinion, are the comments which are often hilarious and there have been many times when I don't even get to the article, I just enjoy reading the comments.