In 1995, when I first launched patrickWeb (then it was ibm.com/patrick), one of my goals was to share links to web sites I had found interesting. There was no Google back then and most people did not know about Yahoo!. Whenever I ran into an a site I thought would be of interest to my friends and colleagues I would add to a list which I called my "favorite places". Initially it was "my top ten links". Then it became my "my top 50". When the list got to 100 I decided it was time to reorganize the approach. Using Lotus Domino made it very easy to create categories and sub-categories. I was able to easily add a new link and put it in multiple categories if appropriate. I recently considered eliminating the "favorite places" section of patrickWeb but nostalgia took over. 

My favorite "places" on the Web contains links that I have found interesting and useful over the years. Some of them are quite old and with the advent of Google and various portals, I seriously considered getting rid of this section of my web site. Some of the links are nearly ten years old so it is a bit of history in a way. I still get emails from people saying they actually use "favorite places", and combining that input with a bit of nostalgia, and I decided to maintain the links. A few hours of sprucing up brought the look and feel up to date and I’ll be pruning and cultivating "favorite places" over time. There are twelve categories and eighty sub-categories. In total there are more than 1,000 links on the sub-category pages. My longer range plan is to create a MySQL database of all the links and build a Coldfusion backend to manage and display them.
Bill Machrone at PC Magazine wrote about patrickWeb some years ago and called "favorite places" a "mini Yahoo". I hope you find the links worthwhile. I tested each of the links before adding them and have deleted or updated many but, as you know, things on the Web sometimes get moved around or even expire! I apologize in advance if you run into a dead link, but if you do, please let me know. Enjoy!
You may also want to check out some other kinds of favorites or take a look at the patrickWeb blog.