The great thing about selecting your 50 "coolest" Web sites is that "cool" does not require any rational justification. They don't have to be any good. They don't have to be chosen for quality of information, ease of use, speed or any of the other things real people care about.
From this point of view, Time's selection for 2006 does not disappoint. For example, it includes YouTube and MySpace, which are about as cool as one of those "animals do the darndest things" shows -- which, if you insert "human", they very much resemble. It includes the Human Clock, which is amusing, and which was cool for about a month in 2001. It even includes Google Spreadsheets, which would struggle to be cool even if you accessed it from the planet Pluto.
I can't even mention gossip site TMZ, which is so cool it's running a survey: "Do you think Mariah's tour outfits are too revealing?"
The really amazing thing is that Time's list does include at least one really cool site: Pandora. Perhaps it was a mistake....
