This one’s relaxing. It’s like a breezy stroll through central park, but not at night, so you don’t have to worry about being mugged or anything. Ziipa gives you a visual list of some pretty nifty new stuff, what they call the Web 2.0 generation of fancy shmancy stops on the web. And for those of you who have trouble seeing two consecutive “i”s in a row, Ziipa has two “i”s in a row. So keep that in mine. Here’s an example:

As you can see, you search for a topic of interest. In this case it was photos. Ziipa gave me an array of screenshots, and I clicked on the one that looked interesting – phone photos. It gives me a profile on the bottom of what the site does, links me to it, I can check it out, I can go to the next one. I can read about the site before I go to it, which saves me some time. Here’s another:

This one was sort of like an organic search engine. I type in a product, and gives me the scoop on how it is produced, what it affects, its environmental grading etc.

What this is good for is just simply finding out what cool niche stuff is out there and giving it a runthrough. They’ve got several thousand Web 2.0 sites that could be worth your time. Either check out the cloud on the right and click on a term, type in a search term, or just sift through their site. Who knows what you can find and what you’ll become addicted to next. It’s especially good when you’re bored and what to explore, but you don’t want to buy a ticket to New Zealand or go ice-climbing with penguins in the South Pole, the only place that is cooling down despite global warming. That’s comforting, but not so much.