Best of the web: 19 sites you shouldn't be without

5. Open Yale Courses

20 revolutionary websites

You can now study Yale courses from the comfort of your own home. The Open Yale Courses website provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by lecturers and scholars from the university.

The courses cover subjects from evolutionary biology to Spanish and Portuguese, with the course materials available to anyone who wants them.

The courses are available to download in video, audio, and text formats. You can even download them from iTunes.

6. Instapaper

20 revolutionary websites

Increasingly we find ourselves dismissing online text longer than two paragraphs because it takes up too much time to read. Instapaper thinks it has the answer.

This service enables you to save web articles with the click of a 'read later' button, and assembles them into a newspaper-like sheet for you to read when you have time. You can also email links to it, or use it in with Google Reader.

It's rare that we get the chance to appreciate great writing, but with Instapaper's ability to save up to 20 articles in an easy-to-navigate grid format, you can catch up on all the fantastic articles you've been missing out on.

7. Storify

20 revolutionary websites

Currently in beta, Storify is here to enable you to tell stories using social media. You can create a story from any content that is online and publicly available, be it posts, photos or videos.

Storify's search interface enables you to drag and drop media and text to your story, keeping their metadata in the process so you don't need to quote sources. You just order the elements and add text to give background information or context.

You can edit and add to a story after it's published. The results can be quite compelling.

8. WorldWide Science

20 revolutionary websites

WorldWide Science is a search engine that hopes to make sharing scientific knowledge as easy as possible.

Developed by the US Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), WorldWideScience is a simple website that combines national and international scientific databases and portals into a one-stop shop.

It also enables real-time searching and translation of material from all around the globe. This means that any researcher, scientist or curious member of the public can search the site and read it in their native language.

9. Openleaks

20 revolutionary websites

Openleaks is an off shoot of Wikileaks set up by defectors from the original site, but without any political leanings that may colour how the whistle-blowing information is seen by the general media.

It is also not interested in publishing the material itself - it just wants to be a mechanism that enables users to upload documents safely and anonymously so they can be shared by the Openleaks community.

Once a document is uploaded, it's added to a database so it can be shared with organisations such as local support groups, newspapers, NGOs and labour unions, who can publish it themselves.