Both of the two sites that I’m going to recommend here have been around the net for some time now, and neither actually produce any original content of their own. Even though they’re nothing to do with the Quantocks they’re so good I’ve had them buried away at the bottom of the links page of Quantock Online since 2000.

Whilst doing a bit of research for this article I discovered that the first is in PC Magazine’s top 100 web sites this year. In fact it was their first ever ’site of the week’ back in 2003. Apparently The Observer once called Arts & Letters Daily ‘The best site on the web’.

So, what’s so great about them if they don’t actually write anything? Well, both Arts & Letters Daily and its sister site SciTech Daily link to some of the best articles from around the Internet. Both are updated about 6 times a week with links to new articles which have been selected by the editorial team. Each site just shows about a 20 word ‘teaser’ from articles together with a direct link to its source. It’s rather like scanning newspaper headings and grabbing the stories that take your fancy - with the added bonus of leading you to discover other good sites. As you can gather from their titles one focuses on Arts and the other on Science. They both follow the same four column format; Links, Articles, Books and Opinion, both have archives going back to 1998 - and both are written in small print!

          

I’m sure there used to be an ‘about’ page on Arts & Letters Daily, but it doesn’t seem to be there now so I can only offer this.

Arts & Letters Daily was the first of the two sites to be launched and was started in 1998 by Denis Dutton, an American who is now a professor of philosophy in New Zealand. He is still editor together with Tran Huu Dung, an American professor of economics. The site was purchased by the magazine Lingua Franca, which subsequently went bust. Fortunately the site was bought by the Chronicle of Higher Education and continues today.