The Top 10 Free Online Flash Games: Best of 2011

Who doesn’t love a quick, free online game? We definitely do in the All My Faves HQ; in fact, we scour the depths of the internet every week to bring you the absolute best free, online games! Perfect for anyone of any age; you have Brain-Trainers, Word Games, Arcade Classics like Super Mario and Pacman, and addictive Coffee Break games like Bubbleshooter. Everything the secret game lover in you could ever want.

And in even better news, we’ve asked our users to help us find the 10 absolute best free games of 2011… And they’re in a nice easy to access list for you below! Just click on the pics below to get playing
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The Top 10 Coolest Websites: Best of 2011

Well folks, happy new year. In a blaze of fireworks and e-greetings, 2012 has finally arrived. And as we stride over the finishing line of a tumultuous year for the internet, All My Faves – your one stop easy guide to the Web – has decided to look past Facebook and Twitter to find 2011’s most unique and interesting sites. We selected the 10 coolest sites in categories like music, travel and education; and then handed the job of picking the absolute best in each category down to you, allowing you to vote on your favorites. And here they are. Ladies and gents, never mind Facebook, here’s our review of the Best of the Web in 2011.

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The Top Sites and Apps of 2011? You Decide!

See & Vote for the nominees for Site, App and Game of the Year 2011 here…

Well folks, the nominees have been announced. Amid a flurry of elbowing, scheming and shadowy wealthy donors (not really, that was an attempt at a joke), the candidates have jumped every hurdle and secured enough votes in the primaries to make it onto the Official Longlist for the 5th Annual All My Faves Site of the Year Awards.

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Top 10 Cool Gadgets: Christmas 2011

Well folks, it’s that time again. Yes, good old Black Friday is here, the deals extravaganza launching us into our annual Christmas shopping frenzy. And I’ve decided to take you (almost) directly to a select group of gadgets that really are the dog’s bollocks (pardon my French). Enjoy, and let us know what you think you think!

1. Kindle Fire

This isn’t an iPad. It looks a lot like an iPad, works a lot like one, and most importantly, is under half the price of an iPad! Ladies and gents, this is the Kindle Fire: the MUST HAVE gadget of Christmas 2011. It’s a simple, well-crafted tablet PC that lets you read books, newspapers and magazines; watch videos; play games; and browse apps, all in the palm of your hand. It’s sharp display, intuitive touchscreen and beautiful user interface are just amazing for a price of $199.

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Business Man’s Best Friend: Getting Organized at Work

In today’s high-speed, multitasking life the Web is becoming an ever-present part of our life, a fact which entails benefits but also downsides. One of the most obvious examples of the latter is the wealth of information generated from different resources. The chaotic nature of dispersed resources can lead to confusion and disorientation rather than productivity. Business professionals, already having their hands (and minds) full with to-do’s, deadlines and company budgets, could use a single, easy to use venue where they can find all of the information they require or are interested in.

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Why All My Faves really is the easiest way to explore the web…

In today’s digital world, automation is for the most part a good thing, even great, since it means that less time and effort are required to achieve the desired result. But when it comes to Web navigation and content consumption (whether in text, video or other media form) at work, at home or anywhere else, automation in the name of productivity can be a deterrent.

Search fatigue is becoming a widespread downside to the world of online search, and SEO-savvy spammers and marketing freeloaders try to grab your attention on that very first results page, under the pretense of offering valid and useful content…

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All My Faves is Proud to Present: AMF Argentina

All My Faves Argentina – We’re psyched about our most recent country homepage for Argentina! This, along with All My Faves’ country pages for Brazil and Mexico pushes the visual search concept deeper into Latin America. Argentina, a country well known for its meat, its yummy Alfajores cookies and the FC Barcelona soccer legend Lionel Messi, is the newest addition to the All My Faves family.

The Argentinian homepage includes a visual showcase of the top online resources for Argentinian citizens, and as always, our team of human editors worked very hard to make sure only the best websites are listed for easy web navigation. So please give a big warm welcome to allmyfaves.com.ar – Vamos!

AllMyFaves.ru – Offering the Best Homepage to Russian Users

All My Faves Russia – It took us a lot of work and research, but the Russian homepage we’ve been working on is now live! As with our other non-US homepages, the allmyfaves.ru serves as the ultimate homepage for Russian users, both domestic and international.

The page includes the most popular categories Russian users look for and visit on a daily basis. These include the obvious email, video, news and entertainment categories, but also interesting categories such as Books, Finance and Travel, just to name a few. All My Faves’ homepage for Russia marks a special milestone in our country-specific homepages list and we’re very pleased to be able to offer the best of the Web to the Russian community worldwide!

Introducing AMF’s NPO Page. Because Helping Out Should be Easy

All My Faves NPO – We are excited to announce the launch of All My Faves’ brand new Non-Profit Organization page (NPO). There is nothing quite like it on the Web and our team of editors had painstakingly reviewed and filtered out the most reliable and effective NPOs out there to create this special page.

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New Game Categories on All My Faves: Kids, Physics and More

Our games team is constantly hard at work to test and pick out the very best online games for you. Now, more than ever our games page offers lots of cool game categories to choose from with five brand new addicting game themes. The first is the revamped Kids category focusing on fun games that bolster skill and creativity development to keep the little ones happy and engaged (suitable for elementary school ages and up).

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Knowledge on the Web Takes a Visual Turn

The following is a guest post I wrote on behalf of All My Faves for Synapses, an insightful blog by the lovely Dan Fonseca.

In recent years, as the World Wide Web became mankind’s main communication channel, there has been an interesting shift in the predominance of textual content. More specifically, textual content in mainstream media has been increasingly gravitating towards a more visualized direction. This is not to say textual content or words are a dying breed. Rather, the visual evolution of content -in the form of animated videos, interactive maps and infographics- is emerging primarily in circumstances where complicated knowledge or data need to be understood in a fast and clear manner.

Below I will present several examples of recent visual content forms on the Web, showing how graphic based information achieves immediate understanding and internalization of ideas and processes. These exclude common practical iconizations used for daily routine efficiencies (signs, conventional maps, etc).

1. Visualizing Bloodtests

This example is a knock-out in terms of both aesthetics and functionality. Created by the talented team over at Information is Beautiful, Visualizing Bloodtests is the ultimate data-into-info example, and there’s no wonder why this visualization scored the 1st place in Wired Mag’s re-envisioning medical data design competition.
The original piece of content is a standard bloodtest data document. Doctors can make out what it means, but what about the patient whose blood was tested? It’s virtually impossible to comprehend what’s going on there, and this concerns someones’ life!

Now see the magic of infographics (thanks to Information is Beautiful), turning the incomprehensible document above into an easy to digest content:

2. GapMinder World’s Health & Wealth of Nations Interactive Graph

This interactive graph was created by GapMinder so as to “unveil the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics.” The Health & Wealth of Nations shows the changes in humanity’s lifespan and lifetime earnings over time, starting in 1800. It’s an amazing visualization that takes dry numbers of data and turns them into an engaging presentation that laypersons like you and me can understand easily. By the way, GapMinder’s software Trendalyzer  is so amazing that Google acquired it in 2007.
Click the screen shot below to go to the interactive graph’s page and hit Play.

3. Web Search – AllMyFaves.com

What does the phrase ‘Web search’ make you think of? Probably Google, right? There’s no doubt the search giant is excellent at what it does, and its efficient search algorithms had enabled the company to enter an already inundated Web search market back in 2000 and take it by storm. However, at the end of the day Google’s search service, however sophisticated it may be, is based on word indexes. You must type in key words to find what you are looking for, and then you must read each result entry to identify its relevancy to your search. The byproduct of this process is what has come to be known as “search fatigue.” Another byproduct is spam and malware hot spots, disguised as credible search results.

AllMyFaves.com has identified the shortcomings of standard Web search and offers an innovative alternative: icon-based gateway to Web navigation and site discovery. The AllMyFaves.com homepage lists all the most popular and practical categories relevant to most users, and each category displays the top 10 websites of that field in the form of the site or company’s logo. Based on the same premise of the infogrpahic, allmyfaves.com delivers quick access to information and services provided by familiar sources and brands, immediately recognizable by their logos.

In addition to the homepage you will also find AllMyFaves’ designated pages for Blogs, Business, Education, Entertainment, Games, Kids, Shopping and Travel. AllMyFaves’ recent tool, the Mini Faves, is a personalization tool inviting users to create their very own visual homepage that includes all of their bookmarks and favorites. Here’s my personal Mini Faves page as an example.

If you would like to create your own Mini Faves page and have all your bookmarks and favorites in one easy page, join AllMyFaves now.

To wrap things up, I think you will agree; visual information is taking a strong hold over the Web and for a good reason. In an era when information flows to and fro at incredible speed, we are bombarded with RSS feeds, news articles, emails and many other content forms on a daily basis. Thanks to visual aids such as infographics, interactive graphs and many other forms of content with a visual approach, making sense of the world just got a whole lot easier.

*Recommended links and sources: Cool Infographics, AllMyFaves.com, Infographics Mini page,
“Conventional Data is Boring. Make Way for the Infographic,” AllMyFaves Blog. Jan 20, 2011.

New Academics MiniFaves and a Spotlight on Top Gossip Sites

We’ve got a brand new Academics MiniFaves page I’d like to share with you, and you can find it on our Education page – simply click on the Academics faveline title. This new addition offers an expanded collection of academic-related resources, from universities admission info and college-level writing aids to citing how-to’s, video classes, scholarly journal resources, and lots of other useful sites in-between.

So now that we’ve studied hard, it’s time to take a break and do a 180 turn to celebrity gossip. Although this isn’t a newly added page, it’s possible you haven’t come across our Gossip MiniFaves page yet. Think People and Perez Hilton are the only sites worth checking out to keep up with the stars? Think again. In this MiniFaves page you will find more than 30 different top sites packed with celebrity photos, fashion trends and yes, hookup updates. In short, all the juicy details worth knowing about Hollywood’s young and beautiful people.