www.alexa.com
On this nifty little site you can type in the URL of any website, and it will tell you what it’s all about, how many global users visit it, its global ranking or in a particular country, and how much it has changed over the past three months. You can even focus on a particular country and check out the top 100 websites people have been viewing. For example, you discover that the much-vaunted www.esplanade.com is only the 1,411th most popular site among Singapore’s users; locals visit mostly business, sex and technology sites. We discovered that the average Singaporean surfer banks at DBS, checks out porn at Megarotic.com and downloads pirated shows at www.mininova.org in between playing computer games and watching a ton of manga, Chinese and Korean shows. We do a fair bit of socialising, too, via Facebook and Adultfriendfinder. 

www.freerice.com  
An Indiana-based philanthropist gives food donation a twist with this website. A word is presented with four meanings, only one of which is correct. If you pick the right definition, you contribute 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. If you get the definition wrong, you get an easier word and the difficulty is slowly ramped up. After ten minutes, you could contribute about 2,000 grains of rice. The site is non-profit and companies whose advertisements flash at the bottom of the screen pay for the rice you win. Since starting in October 2007, the site has donated more than 14 billion grains of rice. Note: keep a dictionary handy. It’s probably the only game where no one cares if you cheat. 

www.threelayercake.com  
Part-website and part-blog, Three Layer Cake interviews movers and shakers in food, lifestyle and design. Articles range from a commentary on London Fashion Week to a philosophical discussion about re-learning how to eat. There’s also an interview with a woman at the forefront of the new ‘meaningful consumption movement’ that advocates pricing a product or a service in accordance to how much emotional, spiritual and psychological benefit a person gets out of it. The recipes and product reviews are far from conventional, and sometimes have a cute back story. Best of all, ‘Kristina’, who manages the whole site, has a passion for photography, so every page is beautifully shot and laid out.