The World Wide Web is a large and strange place. There are many sites that don’t get as much publicity or as many shots in the limelight as Facebook or Twitter, but are just as interesting. The Oracle staff put together its favorite, less well known Web sites.

Mixingbowl.com
Finally, a social networking site for foodies.Mixingbowl.com lets users create profiles and join groups devoted to different cooking interests, such as “I only eat sweets” for those who enjoy their meals coated in chocolate and sprinkled with sugar, or “Dinners anyone can make” for the culinary-impaired.

Each group featuresuser-submitted recipes fitting the section’s theme, and members can rate dishes on a scale of one to five spoons. The highest-rated, most-shared and most-recent recipes are featured on the front page.

It’s a great way to end those “What do you want for dinner?” debates, especially when the leftover pizza’s gone stale and you’ve eaten too many packages of Ramen noodles to ever want to touch them again.

— Candace Braun

ted.com
The Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference is a yearly meeting of innovators, philanthropists and scientific revolutionaries. Founded in 1984, its current goal is to promote “ideas worth spreading” — and spread them it does. All of the talks from the conference in recent years have been recorded, edited and uploaded for viewing by anyone with a decent Internet connection. Topics range from quantum theory to comedy. Regardless of one’s interests, the site is sure to offer something sure to captivate — or at the very least inspire.

At the most recent conference, Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitoes on the audience in an effort to promote malaria awareness.

“There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience,” he said.

— Daniel Dunn

fark.com
Having trouble finding all of the planet’s obscure news? Fark.com may not feature the headlines the average Joe expects to see on CNN or FOX, but it is homes to ones that will make him laugh.

Like newspaper, Fark is split up into sections like news, sports, business and politics — and even a special section for “Florida,” because of the state’s propensity for producing odd news. The only difference is it contains the substance of an hour of surfing through hilarious YouTube videos.

Fark doesn’t make this stuff up, though. All featured articles are drawn from reputable news sources, including major networks like CNBC and NPR.

An article from Tuesday’s “Not News” section was about a police department in Japan that is using a life-sized cardboard cut-out of a murder suspect — complete with a voice recording — to scare passersby.

It doesn’t get any more real than that!

— Matt Ferrara

fmylife.com
Everyone has bad days. However, instead of wallowing in pity, people can feel better by reading posts about other people’s bad days. FMyLife has thousands of stories about everything from cheating significant others to people just having bad luck.

Visitors can either agree that the poster’s life is worthy of the Web site’s title or if they think deserved what they got. A post from Tuesday tells the story of a person who left their wallet at home because he didn’t want it to get stolen when he went to a concert. However, when he returned home, he found his house had been broken into and his wallet stolen.

— Candace Kaw

Showbizjobs.com
Get your 15 minutes of fame at showbizjobs.com. The site includes listings of jobs and internships from accounting to graphic art, Search for job openings by region, company, industry or job category. You can also network through Facebook’s Showbizjobs.com application, Twitter and Linkedin, a Web site that sends your contact information to
employers.

Showbizjobs.com also helps you build a resume and professionals will respond with feedback within 72 hours. Job openings also include advertising, engineering, finance, public relations and marketing.

— Kelli Polson

Geekologie.com
For nerdy news, entertainment and even some great product reviews, there is no better blog than Geekologie. Updated daily, and usually with several entries, every article is full of sarcasm, wit and the pointing out of humor in everyday news stories.

The site is organized with weekly archives and is full of fun pictures, videos and links. There is also a discussion board after each post, which usually provides some entertainment of its own.

Geekologie has something for everyone, even people who don’t want to know the latest about Japanese robots or learn how to hack into an LED road sign. The site is a good place to unleash one’s inner nerd, find a new fun product or hear the latest on criminals turning into goats.

— Emily Handy

umbrellatoday.com
Sometimes, sifting through The Weather Channel’s Web site to find out the day’s rain outlook can take too much time, especially for a student hurrying to class or campus.

Want to know whether it will rain? Umbrella Today, which proclaims itself “like totally the simplest weather report ever,” gives users one answer: YES or NO.

Type in a ZIP code or city name, and the Web site advises whether to lug your umbrella around or leave it home.

— Hannah Feig

heavens-above.com
Though Tampa’s skies aren’t the best for stargazing, finding out what heavenly bodies are visible can make a night more interesting — especially since the International Space Station, satellites and planets are often only visible from dark places.

Heavens Above shows what is visible in the sky for a specific time and location — so specific it can even be set to reflect what the sky would look like from an apartment room.

The Web site provides basic astronomy information and other interesting facts, such as where in the solar system one would find spacecraft, and is useful for finding constellations.

— Hannah Feig