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VIDEO BLOG: The 9
Each weekday morning, this vlog delivers some of the latest-greatest stuff that can be found online — video clips, movie trailers, online discussions, blog posts, news stories, quirky websites — as a five-minute streaming videocast starring the foxy (if unnaturally tan) host, Maria Sansone. 

ART: Drawn!
This collaborative blog, geared to "anybody who likes to draw," is produced for artists by artists for the purpose of sharing links — mainly sites where you can view individual artists' works — and resources. There's a welcoming vibe, so even if you're not an aspiring Picasso or Pekar, you'll enjoy the illustrations, cartoons, animated video podcasts and other works highlighted here. 

INDIE PICKS: Sundance Splinks
This collection of funky, artsy sites compiled by Sundance Festival staff includes Off the Map, a section of Pbs.org that lets you create your own "backyard paradise" — you select images and flash animations (grouped under Watchamacallits, Doohickies and Wigglies, among other categories) and drag them onto a virtual scene — and the fabulously droll Billy Harvey Music.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Photo Muse
A joint project by the International Center of Photography in New York City and the George Eastman House in Rochester (the world's oldest photography museum), PhotoMuse remains a work in progress. The site's current online database of images is just a fraction of the ultimate goal of 200,000 by the fall, but it's a fine start. Search by photographer — there are two dozen listed in the drop-down menu, including Weegee (109 works) and Gordon Parks (40) — or keyword. Not to miss: Alfred Eisenstaedt's 1963 shot of children at a puppet theater in the Tuileries, Paris. 

HOME MOVIES: Jumpcut
It's an all too common tale: you're capturing fantastic footage at the family barbecue, but by the time you edit it down to a watchable 3-minute clip, your audience has all gone home. You could burn multiple DVDs and drop them in the mail — or you could save yourself the trouble and just upload your masterpiece to Jumpcut.com, add music and visual effects using the site's own editing tools, and then email everybody the link. Give your friends access to your stuff and they can remix it or blend it with their own footage of the same event (What's a little video mashing among friends?). The site recently added original trailer footage from the movie Revenge of the Nerds for users to play with, and promises more licensed material in the months to come. (Users are asked not to upload anything that would be in violation of copyright law.) For straight-up sharing, try ClipShack, which will store up to 50 megabytes worth of media files for you, for free, including stills; video files must be 20 MB or smaller, and in one of the supported formats (.avi, .wmv, .mp2 and others are accepted). Clipshack will also take clips emailed from your cell phone. Think your video warrants wider attention? Post it on YouTube (see below) or Eefoof, a lesser-known site that shares its ad revenue with its contributors (your take depends on how many unique visitors view your work). If you'd rather send your video directly via email, go to Pando. There you can download a neat little peer-to-peer file-transfer application that will make the job faster and easier, essentially by moving it from one computer to another, using Pando's server as a way station (and as a backup; content that you send via Pando remains on the company's server for 14 days). Pando allows you to package up to 1 gigabyte worth of stuff — videos, photos, power-point presentations — at a time.

LONG LIVE ROCK: Wolfgang's Vault
Click "Vault Radio" to stream recordings of live performances of all your favorite rockers from the 1960s and '70s: The Doors, The Stones, Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Costello and lots more. Vault Radio plays selected tracks from these concerts in an FM-quality, 128K digital radio stream. Click "In Rotation" to see what's included in the current stream; it's always changing. (We were lucky enough to catch the Allman Brothers Band's March 12, 1971 performance of "Whipping Post" at the Fillmore East.) The site also sells vintage posters, photographs, T-shirts and all manner of memorabilia. 

PODCASTS
Podcast Pickle
The sheer quantity of podcasts and videocasts now available make the existence of sites like Podcast Pickle a necessity — how else would you keep up? Last we checked, the directory boasted nearly 10,000 casts. Use the advanced search tools or browse the Top 100 list or weekly picks to find something worth loading onto your own portable player, or add your own cast to the mix. The site automatically downloads new feeds as they are posted by the source; register to create a personal page of favorites, and you'll be able to access everything you want in one place. Recently launched by the same outfit: Sportpodcast.com and Churchpodcasts.com; other genre-specific sites, including SciFicaster.com and WallSteetpod.com, are coming soon. 

VIDEO WORLD: YouTube
By far the most popular video-sharing site on the Web, YouTube catapulted into public consciousness after the posting of a certain cupcake-fueled Saturday Night Live spoof. Although "Lazy Sunday," was eventually removed from the site after NBC complained — the network now posts teaser clips from hit shows like The Office — YouTube's numbers kept growing: by July, less than a year after its public launch, traffic was up to 65,000 new video uploads and 100 million video viewings per day. Often, video quality isn't great, and a lot of the stuff is junk, yet somehow we can't stop digging around in it. Neither can network execs, apparently: a comedy pilot called "Nobody's Watching," written two years ago for the WB but only recently posted on YouTube, was just bought by, yup, NBC. 

Staying Connected
A humming social network, community sing-along, instant-messaging hub, mobile-launched pub-crawls and numbers-crunching by committee

PARTY ON THE FLY: Dodgeball
Let your mobile device improve your social life. Use this service to corral friends for a drink, or to find out where they're already hanging — all you do is text-message the mother ship, and she does the rest (the service locates you, checks which of your buds are nearby, and sends out the appropriate alerts). And the Dodgeball team keeps growing: now at play in 22 cities.

GLOBAL SOCIETY: MySpace
It's the place where Web stars are born, music and film careers are launched and some single people manage to find mates. This exploding social-networking site is now the most popular website in the U.S., boasting some 100 million registered members. In the last year, traffic jumped from 17 million unique visitors per month to 54 million — more than Yahoo gets some weeks. As a member (it's free) you can post all sorts of content — blogs, photos, videos, MP3s — to your profile page; get a few hundred thousand other "friends" to link to it and Bam! you're on the pop-culture map. Marketers may even come calling, hoping to piggyback on the exposure. MySpace's wild popularity has inspired a slew of startups to create features and applications specifically for MySpacers — like Rojo Networks' "Nooz" ticker, which links to the day's top stories, based on how many other members are reading them. In July Web humorist Ze Frank hosted an ugliest MySpace page contest; David Lehre's parody, "MySpace, The Movie," is a YouTube favorite. There's even a mobile phone — the Helio Hero — offering one-button access to MySpace so you can view pages and respond to friends on the go. Think MySpace is too "young" for you? New social network Eons is targeting the 50-plus crowd.

INSTANT MESSAGING: Meebo
In geekspeak, it's an IM unifier. In plain English, it's a one-stop shop for all your instant-messaging needs. Which is to say that Meebo puts all your IM clients — the individual programs that make instant-messaging services incompatible with one another — into one browser window. There's no need to download all the different apps (MSN, AOL/ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber/Gtalk) to your computer to have any and all types of IM conversations. Available in four dozen languages.

KARAOKE CLUB: SingShot
Your friends and family mock, but you don't care: you love karaoke. SingShot makes it easy to find fellow crooners, and share each other's best work — call it YouTube for karaoke. Subscribe to the site (it costs $9.95 per month, or $4.95 per month for an annual subscription) and you can upload your home recordings for others to enjoy; members vote for their favorites. You just need reasonably good PC speakers and a microphone connected to the right jack in the back of your computer; the site streams the lyrics in a video window while the song plays. There's a wide selection — everything from the Beatles to Michelle Branch — and the original recording is your accompaniment (no Muzak here). Fox Interactive's kSolo.com works pretty much the same way, and it's been around longer, so it has more users and a larger library of tunes — but while SingShot is compatible with all browsers, kSolo only works in Internet Explorer.

GROUP PROJECTS: Google Spreadsheets
As the name suggests, this free Web-based application, one of the latest to come out of Google's shop, will help you organize information into a tidy chart, tabs and all. But the best part about the elegant interface is that it encourages collaboration. That is, it allows multiple users, logged in from different computers, to update the same spreadsheet simultaneously while text-chatting in a separate window. (The chart is stored on a Google server, rather than locally on a PC's hard drive.) You can invite others to edit or view your spreadsheet with a quick email without leaving the page. Google, having recently purchased Writely.com is expected to introduce a similar free tool for writers who wish to collaborate in real time.

(to be continued..)