Learn Something Every Day

Learn Something Every Day is a submission-fuelled website that illustrates trivia in thick black line drawings set to monochromatic bright colors. (Though sometimes they use white on black).

They ask for submissions (fact@learnsomethingeveryday.co.uk) and the best fact is be made into a super special poster at the beginning of each month, with the winner getting a free poster. The site runs on Cargo (web publishing and community-building platform.)

(From Peggy Feed)

Mental Floss

Mental Floss is a website dedicated to Trivia Facts.  It is a web version of their magazine.

They describe themselves as smart, but not too smart: 

"For the record: mental_floss magazine is an intelligent read, but not too intelligent. We're the sort of intelligent that you hang out with for a while, enjoy our company, laugh a little, smile a lot and then we part ways. Great times. And you only realize how much you learned from us after a little while. Like a couple days later when you're impressing your friends with all these intriguing facts and things you picked up from us, and they ask you how you know so much, and you think back on that great afternoon you spent with us and you smile.

And then you lie and say you read a lot."

Bonus points for tamping down the smug factor.

My favorite part of this site is the Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets page. CPCS are condensed forms of the same interesting facts you hear over and over. An excellent study tool for all your trivia competition needs. 

Ken Jennings Interviews Jeopardy!'s Carlo Panno

Ken Jennings interviewed old-school Jeopardy! writer Carlo Panno for his trivia nerd blog, Confessions of a Trivial Mind. Ken is of course, known for winning Jeopardy! a record 74 times in a row, taking home over $3 million in prize money.

The three-part email interview was conducted in 2006, but Ken lost his emails and only now posted the full transcript. In the first part, Carlo calls Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes a "teetotalin’ bitch."

In Part 2 Carlo discusses quotas, secrecy, and sacking contestants.

In Part 3 Carlo discusses in-jokes, last-minute changes, and how he met his wife. I especially loved this piece of nerd gold, because one of my favorite trivia facts back in high school was that Pepys is actually pronounced Peepz (I shamefully admit to re-titling an AIM buddy-list category because of this):

Once for Rhyme Time we asked for “THE HENS OF A GREAT BRITISH AUTHOR,” looking for “What are Dickens’ chickens?”

[The] contestant said “What are Pepys’ cheeps?” We took it.

Overall, this page has great content in an average site-design context. Ken gets minus half a grade for misplacing his interview materials for two whole years. A-, internets.

...
Runner up:
Retro-interwebs is totally in vogue. Creators of old, defunct browsers had the "Today On The Interwebs" idea back in 1993. Check out What's New! Keep in mind this was way back when it was almost actually plausible to catalog every new entry on the interwebs. (Almost.) The sincerity and blind naïveté is heart-crushing.

The site explains its own premise: "New information is available every day on the Internet -- how do you find out about it? One way is to start here." The links are mostly broken or dead, which probably improves this page 99%. Don't tell the green dragon though — you just can't argue with a green dragon who is getting pelted with an apple.

(From Metafilter and Kottke)