Tripod is one of the pioneers in offering free space for hosting personal web pages. If I remember correctly, they started with 2 MB and today they are providing up to 50 MB. Tripod is now part of Lycos Network and my site is hosted here in tripod.com!

The advantage with Tripod is you don't get annoying banner ads in your pages. There are some very easy to use features for building the pages and uploading. 

During the earliest days of web, this was the only door to this confusing world and that was Yahoo!. It was just a plain simple search engine then. The best feature of Yahoo! is the organization of sites in a hierarchical directory format.

Today it is one of the leading portals, offering among others, Auctions, Autos, Classifieds, Shopping, Travel, Yellow Pgs, Maps, News, Sports, Stock Quotes, Movies, Radio, TV, Weather, Careers, Chat, Games, GeoCities, Greetings, Invites, Mail and Messenger.

The recent addition is an Indian Portal. Yahoo! India.

Another pioneer in its category. This site was started as a small forum to share cricket match results among the enthusiasts around the world, particularly when there wasn't any Indian news site around. From those humble beginnings it has has gone on to become an online encyclopedia of cricket.

When I read Linda Goodman's books, "Sun Signs" and "Love Signs", I was very impressed. This is her official site, which provides information on these and all her other books. There are also daily, birthday and monthly forecasts for the different signs.

We would have come across many situations where we get lost with meanings and spellings of words. That has happened a lot with me and I used to rely on MS-Word. I used to wish that there is a dictionary handy.  And today there is this great site. It also has the world's best thesaurus, Roget's thesaurus online.

Don't be fooled by the name; they are not calling the visitors, fools! Check out their site itself for interesting information on the origin of their name.

This site educates the visitors on topics such as stock market, car buying, personal finance, taxes etc. Almost all of this will be relevant only for the folks in the US.

This site lets you store login information of various sites and lets you automatically login to them from here. The type of sites include, email, banks, credit cards, stock, jobs etc.

I use this to manage multiple e-mail accounts.

This is my favorite music site for Tamil and Hindi film songs. This site also has Telugu songs. Interesting features in this site include song search and son grouping based on actors, singers etc.

Vikatan.com is the site from the house of Vikatan, a leading Tamil magazine. This site provides some exclusive stuff for the Net.

News is organized as National, Business, Sports, World, World Business, World Sports and Tech. There are links to many regional news sites and many other Indian sites. The popular feature of this site is the Top 25 news articles, based on the number of hits.

THE HINDU

The online version of my favorite new paper, The Hindu. Unlike some of the other Indian news paper sites, this is a well designed, well maintained and a faster site. Has the online version of the day's news paper and news update service exclusive to the web. Has links to its other publications like Business Line, Frontline and the Sportstar.

I came to know about this site when they published the examination results, for SSLC, HSC, professional entrance etc. Apart from the results, this site offers lot of info about my city, Chennai and its surroundings.

Government of Tamil Nadu

This is the Tamil Nadu government's web site. It gives lot of information about my state's government. I am really proud that my state is one of the first in the country to launch a site of their own.

Chennai Telephones

This is the web site of Chennai Telephones. The useful things offered here include STD/ISD codes and Directory Lookup service, where you can search for phone numbers in Chennai.

Indian Railways are the largest rail network in Asia and the world’s second largest under one management.

This site provides all the information that you need about the large Indian Rail network.