Where do you go when you are online?

Today, I will share with you some of my Internet hangouts. You can compare mine to yours.

Of course, the No. 1 place I go is the AlbertLeaTribune.com. That’s not just a plug; it’s part of being the editor of the paper. Even though I have read many of the stories at work, I also peruse them online. I make minor changes behind the scenes, such as insert a few links or change the featured items. I peruse the comments to read what people are saying but also to police them for policy violations. I watch the neat video our talented photographer Brie Cohen makes.

I visit an array of newspaper Web sites regularly: Austin Daily Herald, Fergus Falls Daily Journal, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mason City Globe-Gazette, The Free Press of Mankato, The Tribune of Ames, Iowa, Ellensburg (Wash.) Daily Record, Natchez (Miss.) Democrat, Shelby County (Ala.) Reporter and the New York Times.

Other news media sites I visit are Minnesota Public Radio, CNN, Newsweek, KIMT, KAAL, CBS Sportsline. There is a site members of the Associated Press use to have access to the news the wire service offers. I go there a lot as part of my jobs

It seems like anyone who goes on the Internet at all is on Facebook. I presently have 152 friends. It’s so easy to stay in touch with new and old friends. Many people who live in Minnesota are in the Minneapolis/St. Paul network. You have to be a friend or in my network to see my Facebook site.

Google is still my primary search engine. I don’t think it performs as well as it used to. Sometimes, when I want to find an answer, such as the population of a small town in 1980, I find only a flood of sites trying to sell me stuff or inform me of the wrong information. Avoiding that problem was once what made Google great. Perhaps becoming a publicly traded stock has changed some of Google’s modus operendi. Even so, Google still tops any other search out there. And I use Google Maps and Google News a lot, too.

But sometimes I use Dogpile. It’s a Web site that uses Google, Yahoo, Ask and Live.

And sometimes I use Yahoo. That’s because I use Yahoo for Web-based e-mail. I know Google has that feature, too, but my bicycle group and my extended family use Yahoo for Yahoo Groups. It’s convenient to use the e-mail aspect in connection with the groups feature.

And Yahoo owns Flickr.

Flickr is an online community for people who like photography. It is for photo management and photo sharing. I upload photos, add captions and add key search words called “tags.” I map where I shot each photo. I group photos in categories such as “Wisconsin” or “Forrest.” People, especially relatives, seeking cute pics of my son can do so by going to my Flickr site. You might even find a photo of me riding a horse. I enjoy looking through photos of friends. There are some photographers I have made friends online through Flickr.

When I need to find weather information right away, I go to the National Weather Service’a Web site. I know the ins and outs of this site. It helps us cover the weather for AlbertLeaTribune.com.

There are various places I go to stay sharp on hyper text markup language. One is www.w3schools.com, first suggested to me by friend Jeshua Erickson.

Dexknows.com is the online phone book. Don’t have the phone book for Lake Mills, Iowa? Let Dex find the number you seek. This is the Qwest site.

YouTube is the place to look at videos. Forrest, who turns 2 in February, likes to watch videos of things like lions, tigers, bears, elephants, whales, trains, trucks and tractors. We watch them together.

Military.com lets me keep connected to people who served with the 82nd Signal Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Until the snow settled in, I liked to improve my disc golf skills by watching various instructional videos found online. Most are connected to Discraft or Innova sites. I buy some of my discs locally, but some aren’t available locally. For those, I go to DiscGolfCenter.com. It offers free shipping.

I have my sports sites: Minnesota Vikings, Iowa State Cyclones, I also have favorite musical performers. Recently, I discovered Trampled by Turtles.

And of course there are the sites we all cross in the course of using the Internet: Wikipedia, Web MD, Amazon, Mapquest, sites in Albert Lea for city, county, chamber, economic development, convention and visitors bureau. There are various state-run sites I go to, such as Minnesota Department of Transportation, Minnesota State Patrol and Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. I go to the bankruptcy court for Minnesota. I go to Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. I go to Census.gov a lot for various statistics.

The list goes on. This is the tip of an iceberg.

Tribune Managing Editor Tim Engstrom’s column appears every Tuesday.