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CNN Sunday Morning

Interview with Lance Ulanoff

Aired February 10, 2002 - 08:17   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: When it comes to Web sites, we all know what's number one for news: CNN.com. How's that for a bit of self-serving copy for you? But, anyway, why not? What about some of the more obscure Web sites, though? There are millions of those, of course. And to sort the winners from the want to be's, the editors of "PC Magazine" went to work. That is PC as in personal computer, not politically correct, so far as we know. For more, we turn to Lance Ulanoff, who is the online editor at "PC Magazine." Lance, good to have you with us.

LANCE ULANOFF, "PC MAGAZINE": Nice to be here.

O'BRIEN: It's easy to tell that Lance is working for "PC Magazine" because of that thing on his sweater there, that PC there. Anyway, Lance, first of all, how did you get the idea to do this?

ULANOFF: We do it every year. We pull together the best Web sites around the Internet. The difference this year is that we have actually 200, not just 100. Two different lists, the obscure list, which is I think is the most interesting one; and the classics list, which kind of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) more to the style that we've done in previous years.

O'BRIEN: All right, folks, take out a pen and paper or your palm pilot or something and follow along as we browse. First of all, the first place to go, of course, as Lance would tell us, and certainly his bosses would confirm that, is "PC Magazine's" site, PCMag.com, where you'll find this list of the 100 sites -- actually, 200 -- 100 obscure, 100 not so obscure. And then you can go into these various places. For example, BookFinder.com.

Now there was a Web site called biliofind (ph), which Amazon bought.

ULANOFF: Right.

O'BRIEN: And so you can get used books on Amazon, but this is a little more obscure. And I believe what it does is it links book stores all across the country, which is kind of cool...

ULANOFF: Right.

O'BRIEN: ... because it keeps independent bookstores going. And I plugged in one of my favorite books I'm a space guy -- Valentin Lebedev, "Diary of a Cosmonaut," very obscure title, and I found it in six places around the country. Pretty cool.

ULANOFF: Right. And what's nice about this is that like a lot of our obscure sites, it's not particularly attractive, but it's very useful. Four hundred book sellers in there that you're searching against. There's also another site in our list called Alabus (ph), which also helps you find obscure text. You know the range of sites go from the curious to the sublime. We have TheOnion.com, which is, of course, one of the most hilarious laugh out loud sites on the web.

O'BRIEN: Yeah.

ULANOFF: A recent headline said that the unemployed workers are not doing enough to help the economy. It's just completely bizarre.

O'BRIEN: Check this one out -- AirSafe.com. This is another one that I tend to frequent. I'm sort of betraying here my interests, but AirSafe.com, this is a great place to find out the real story on airline safety. In a sense, you read it and you sort of get the sense if it's a misnomer I guess, huh?

ULANOFF: Right. It's a little -- I mean it's probably a little bit more than you want to know about air safety, but it does go into detail about crashes with particular, you know, airlines and the air -- and the airlines that have had more crashes than others. It's, you know, a pretty rich site on air safety or lack of.

O'BRIEN: All right. Now here's a great site. I use this all the time, I don't know if you use it. It is Dictionary.com. It is -- it's like a -- I guess it's a compilation of dictionaries. It accesses various databases, right?

ULANOFF: Right. And I use it every single day, whether to double check a meaning or a spelling or to -- to look for a synonym. It's fast, it's no frills, and if you want you can subscribe to word of the day and have a new word delivered to you daily.

O'BRIEN: I highly recommend that. I'm a subscriber; it's kind of fun. It's kind of a fun thing. All right, let's move along, once again revealing my interests here. Human space flight, NASA, these NASA sites are -- they're not -- they're (UNINTELLIGIBLE) like NASA is. They're 10 centers, and so it's kind of hard to pull it all together, but this Spaceflight.NASA.gov is great. Here's one of the coolest things. That is real-time telemetry information of exactly where the space station -- and in this case, the Hubble space telescope is, because there's a shuttle mission going up to the Hubble soon. There's an awful lot of data out there in the NASA sites, isn't there?

ULANOFF: Right. And this is -- you know, this is all about human space flights. So it's manned space flight, the space shuttle, the space station. You've got to take the VR (ph) tour of the space station on there. You can find large documents about technical details on the space shuttle. And you really could spend hours on that site. It's really one of my personal favorites.

O'BRIEN: Yeah. All right, here's another one that -- for those of us in the journalism business are filled with this, UselessKnowledge.com. And this is -- you know, if you want to know trivia, this is the place to go. It has a fact of the day, surveys, polls, quizzes, all kinds of stuff. It's very cool.

ULANOFF: Right. How much does the Empire State Building weigh? I'm not sure what you can do with this information, but there's a lot of it.

O'BRIEN: Impress your friends. You know -- hey, listen, I've got a 9-year-old boy who asks questions like that, so it's good to have -- good to know where to go. And, finally, a quick site (UNINTELLIGIBLE) stop at NPR, you can get streaming news broadcasts. And, finally, in the interest of looking self-serving one more time -- I hate to do this -- but, cartoonnetwork.com, which I had up and I can't find right now. I believe it was there. That's -- yeah, Jonny Quest, there it is.

ULANOFF: Yeah, that's a very...

O'BRIEN: Great games. Great online games.

ULANOFF: Yeah.

O'BRIEN: You know we've got broadband on home, so you can play the games fairly well. And my -- my little boy spends an awful lot of time playing there.

ULANOFF: Truly inventive. And, you know, if you want -- if you want to peruse these sites on your own, you can download favorite files and (UNINTELLIGIBLE) the lists at our Web site at www.pcmag.com/top100websites.

O'BRIEN: All right. Thank you very much, Lance Ulanoff, for a view of the less well known, but very useful and interesting sites that are out there on the Web. We appreciate you joining us this morning on CNN SUNDAY MORNING.

ULANOFF: Thanks.

O'BRIEN: All right. Of course, one of our favorite sites here at CNN is CNN.com. So while you're checking out some of these sites, stop by, why don't you. That AOL keyword is CNN. It's a great place to stay abreast with current events.

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