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!

Sparked – Have you ever thought about volunteering but were forced to give it up due to a super busy schedule? Sparked is the perfect micro-volunteering spot for people just like you who want to help out but are simply too busy during the week to do so.

Sparked is the “world’s first microvolunteering network,” offering easy and meaningful online help options to busy moms, dads and young professionals who want to help make a change. Whatever you’re good at, whether it’s graphic design, marketing, web development, copy-writing or brainstorming, Sparked will match you with challenges non-profit organizations need assistance with.

Once you’ve stated your areas of expertise, Sparked will show you a list of open challenges for you to pitch in and help out.

Want to see Sparked in action? Check out the page for the challenge Brainstorm Fun Ideas Re: Govt. Failure to Commit on Climate. At All My Faves we fell in love with this amazing website that is not only beautifully built, but it’s one that also gets the (busy) community engaged.

NoiseTrade – What a sweet music site that offers a helping hand to both artists and music fans! NoiseTrade offers artists a sexy and practical web spot for them to showcase their music, and fans can listen to the music and even download entire albums for free! The sound quality is amazing, which is an added bonus and a valuable part of the NoiseTrade bundle.

Artists are welcome to sign up and set up their page, even create their own widget which can be added to any online venue they may have. Fans don’t sign up -they simply start enjoying the great music on NoiseTrade instantly. Here’s the page of The Vespers, one of the most downloaded artists here on NoiseTrade. Listen to them and you’ll see why!

Grovo – This online video hub is, simply put, an efficient site discovery tool. Intended for the amateur, average and savvy Internet users alike, Grovo offers video lessons that show you the exact how-to when it comes to searching for websites of your needs and areas of interest. How does Grovo produce its content? Their content is “professionally produced, in-house, by our staff of writers, editors and voiceover talent. All content is extensively researched and crafted prior to production; once produced, content is regularly updated to maintain relevancy.”

How does it work? You can dive right into the site’s colossal video lessons section, or you can consult Grovo’s glossary in case you’ve stumbled upon an unfamiliar Web term, and then proceed to see a relevant video. Another option to test your Web knowledge is to explore Grovo’s Quiz section. Grovo is a terrific service, although currently only a part of its video collection is open to free viewing  – there’s a 7-day free trial after which you will have to pick one of their paid subscription tracks (annual, monthly and enterprise) if you wish to have access to all of Grovo’s content.

Despite the payment hindrance (hey, sometimes high quality things will cost you), Grovo is a great Web search aid worth exploring. See this video showing how to block pop-ups for example.

Going – Find cool things to do, see and discover in your city with Going, a one-stop place for cool attractions suiting your going out cup of tea (or beer). Although the beta version of Going starts off with NYC as the default location, there are 30 US cities to choose from.

The great part about Going is that you can search for fun things to do by checking activities and events’ popularity (what people like the most) so you don’t have to start wondering if a certain event is as promising as it seems or if it’s a flop. In addition, the Going platform allows you to meet new people seeking the same activities you are looking for, hence putting together people with the same areas of interest.

Other Going perks include popular places, Going deals (for members only), top searches, browsing by categories (nightlife, music, culture and more), and there’s even a mobile app that comes in handy when you’re out in the street looking for something fun to do. Going will show you what it really means to make the most out of what your city has to offer!

Qwiki – What’s your usual research method online when you want to learn more about something or someone? Google? Wikipedia? These two and other Web search tools will most definitely direct you to relevant resources, but I would like to suggest an innovative website that goes about information consumption with an entirely different approach: Qwiki.

Typing a search word or phrase in Qwiki’s search box prompts a wonderland of visually presented information including photos, maps and data that are accompanied by both vocal narration and text. The end result is an engaging presentation on whatever you’d like to learn more about, be it historical figures, events, monuments, animals, even locations and businesses. Start by searching for your hometown on Qwiki and see what I mean. Another example is the one below of the famous philosopher Aristotle. Click the image below to see it.

Teach Parents Tech – Don’t we all have at least one member in the family who has given up all efforts to learn how to make the most out of the Web? My 86 year-old grandma uses her PC offline to play solitaire, and online to read the news -she visits over 10 major news sites per day!- and receive emails, as long as these are text-only, basic messages without any attachments or links. On numerous different occasions I have tried tempting her to learn the wonders of the Web, but she would always reply with the same aphoristic claim: “Honey, I’m too old for that.”

My relentless efforts of Web-pushing (including creating for my grandma an All My Faves mini user showcasing all the news and health sites she reads obsessively every day) fail to lure my granny into deeper levels of Web exploration and interaction. It seems she’s dead set on keeping it as basic as possible, and even that, she says, is way too much. Seen as my grandma’s case is a familiar one among seniors, baby boomers and individuals with a low-tech life approach, it was wonderful to discover Google’s recent initiative, Teach Parents Tech, helping to eradicate the strong technophobia pandemic among older people.

Beautifully designed and super-easy to use, Teach Parents Tech is a two-part process; first is the form (shown above) you, the experienced Web users fills out, checking the boxes next to the online actions you wish your parents/grandparents/aunts & uncles would learn. Once you hit Preview you will be taken to a new page structured in a letter format including how-to videos corresponding to the issues you checked in the form. Next all you have to do is provide your and the recipient’s email addresses, and you’re good to go.

For my grandma I picked the two how-to videos below (how to copy & paste, and how to change the PC’s desktop background, respectively). The Teach Parents Tech project is outstanding in both its concept and execution, and I highly recommend using it for the technophobes in your family. This is a keeper!

I wonder how long it would take for my grandma to learn how to use Google Reader. On second thought, I think I’ll just take it one baby step at a time…

Google eBookstore – Although this new feature by the search giant still exhibits some major hiccups (specialty book lists are lacking content, such as the NY Bestsellers list, perhaps due to location constraints), this new service by Google is a commendable effort.

Despite the eBookstore’s limited availability of free books compared to its large number of paid books offered, the cherry on top of Google’s library/bookstore  is the eBook reader interface. This makes the reading of any book virtually as enjoyable as reading the actual physical copy on an indulgently soft armchair by a warm fireplace. The screen shot below shows the ‘Best Free’ eBook list, and the lower screen shot displays the reader platform in action using Jane Austen’s globally renowned Pride and Prejudice. Obviously, this service’s magnitude connects us, the users with pretty much every book ever written. I only wonder what Amazon.com has to say about Google’s eBookstore…

Historvius – Some travelers strive to be the antithesis to traditional tourists, seeking rarely visited, off the beaten path sites around the world, avoiding famous sites and the crowds at all costs. But that doesn’t mean famous sites have become overrated. On the contrary, international tourist sites such as Egypt’s pyramids or the huge man-shaped statues of Easter Island are still on my to-visit list, and the fact that many people flock these places each year is not about to deter me from doing so.

Historvius is a wonderful information place on mainstream (and less known) tourist sites worldwide, offering a super cool platform for learning more on your next sought-after site (note that you won’t be able to find info on cities per se, rather only on attraction sites). Start your site search by selecting your vacation destination, or choose a time period you are interested in as a filter, or, if yo wish, search by historical figure. There is also an open search for those interested. I had a specific site in mind I wanted to learn more about when I gave Historvius a try, and I enjoyed it tremendously. The photo below is a hint. Click it to get to the site’s page.

blekko – This new search engine is boldly going where other search giants have gone before, with the mission of delivering a spam-free search experience. How do they do it? With slashtags. These slashtags are essentially your search’s focus keyword by which blekko organizes the accurate relevant results, all from trusted sources while leaving out all the irrelevant (and malware) ones. As TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington had written in his review on blekko back in July 2010, slashtags “like /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs, or any combination, make it very simple to quickly filter results to what you are looking for.”

In addition, users are invited to create their own slashtags and make these public so that, similarly to the ‘everyone’s-an-editor’ concept of Wikipedia, other users can later make use of these public slashtags for their own searches, and get curated, high quality results. See the video below to learn more.

I’ve included a screen shot of a blekko search I performed using the slashtags: /science /date to get a filtered list of relevant results, organized by date (from most recent to latest). This, for example, is a search you can’t do on Google. I invite you to try and search blekko using the ‘reday-made’ slashtags to begin with, and then if you’re interested, create your own user and slashtags for future searches by users.

Another feature blekko offers that is worth mentioning is their transparency graphs related to inbound traffic, SEO and other interesting analytical data that has always been free and open, but blekko is the first to make it all easily accessible in one page. Simply click on of the light gray words under each search result and a world of information will open before your eyes. See below the interview by Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch TV, talking to blekko CEO Rich Skrenta, to learn more.

Google Beat – If you’re already familiar with Google Trends then Google Beat should seem like a natural extension. If you don’t know what Google Trends is, check it out and learn what are the hottest topics and keywords in Google search at any given moment, based on searches people make all over the country.

So now that we’ve established the concept of Google Trends, step it up with Google Beat; a short weekly video presenting the past week’s hottest trends online created by curious people using Google search. Think of it as our society’s cultural analysis, brought to us in weekly bite size as a time. To see an example, see Google Beat’s presenter, Anne Espiritu, covering Labor Day’s week (Sep 10). It’s fascinating to learn what people are searching for!

Kngine – A new Web 3.0 search engine “designed to provide meaningful search results,” Kngine tries to offer a search engine with an added value. Yours truly took the search engine for a test drive using the keyword phrase ‘BP oil spill,’ and compared the results with the same search on Google. The screen shots below show Kngine’s results compared to Google’s.

As you can see (if the screen shots aren’t clear enough, click on them for the respective results page), the Web search results for the chosen keyword phrase are for the most part identical. No real innovation there. Where Kngine really shines though, is in their additional search themes such as Kngine Movies, Music and my favorite, Kngine Stats. This last feature offers great graph based statistical information on an array of topics ranging from energy and economics to culture, food and education. See the screen shot below of the Kngine Stats search I did for Exports of goods and services in different countries. It’s great stuff!

The Google giant indeed offers amazing free products, and the one that let them break into the market was their flagship service, Web search. However, it has yet to offer the innovative perks Kngine does. I strongly suggest that you take the time to explore Kngine and the various services it offers. It’s refreshing, extremely user friendly and engaging.