Webware

Now that the winter break is over, college students are inundated with work and need to worry again about classes, studying, and tests. So, of course, they'll spend time on Facebook instead. But there are other useful and entertaining sites worth the student's visit.

This is a brief list of four outstanding resources that can help students in college. No student should miss the opportunity to use these sites.

DormNoise
If Facebook isn't good enough for college students, they can try out DormNoise, which is another social network designed specifically for them.

DormNoise is centered on a calendar system, which provides students with a visual look at upcoming campus events, student group meetings, and personal engagements. That calendar is the central hub for the site and others can see what students are up to at any time. It's a unique way to connect with others and it actually works quite well to simplify that process and keep abreast of campus events.

That said, the site isn't open for anyone to join--users must be between the ages of 18 and 24 and sign up with a ".edu" e-mail address. If the school is not recognized by the system, you can't sign up for the service. In fact, my alma mater isn't supported by DormNoise. DormNoise should eventually support every school. We hope.

Once I finally signed up for DormNoise with a different address, I found it to be a unique service that will help college students manage their lives. But there's one catch that can't be overlooked: the community is small, which means few people find reason to use it instead of a site like Facebook.

Media "discovery" site StumbleUpon announced Tuesday that its video service, Stumble Video, has a host of new content available: content sites College Humor, Funny or Die, and VBS.tv, as well as video-hosting sites Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Veoh.

Stumble Video, which uses past preferences to pick out videos that a member might like--in other words, a nifty procrastination tool--already amasses content from big sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, and Metacafe.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay last year, about six months after it debuted the Stumble Video feature. There's also a specialized version of Stumble Video for Nintendo's Wii console.

Now go ruin your productivity level. As for me, Stumble Video just told me I might want to watch some Daft Punk videos.

It's a well-documented phenomenon: the rise of Web video has fueled a trend of 'bite-size entertainment.' Wired magazine devoted an entire cover story (actually, a set of mini cover stories) to it in its March '07 issue. The attention-deficient Web's appetite for small clips and short blog entries has gotten to the point where MySpace.com has actually condensed classic TV episodes into "minisodes" for its members.

But the latest viral video craze makes those three- to five-minute minisodes seem like Titanic. This is the "Dramatic Chipmunk," a 5-second clip of a chubby rodent making a foreboding face at the camera accompanied by a Snidely Whiplash-worthy musical interlude. (Bonus points if you know who Snidely Whiplash is.) The video proliferated, thanks to YouTube, as well as frat boy hub CollegeHumor, which put a link to the clip on its front page and touted it as "the best 5-second video on the Internet."

You can already tell that, after only a few days (the video was originally uploaded earlier this week), it's reached the gold-medal level of viral videos--somebody made a dance remix.

Here at CNET, we had a little bit of a debate about whether the "Dramatic Chipmunk" footage was actually real. Was it doctored in one way or another to make the chipmunk look more Hitchcock-esque? If it proved real, we wanted to know who the heck managed to capture the moment on video.

An e-mail to CollegeHumor Managing Editor Jeff Rubin answered our question: yup, it's real. The clip comes from a Japanese TV show in which the rodent was put on display for some reason. The priceless 5 seconds appear to have been the result of a very, very lucky camera angle.

CollegeHumor has uploaded the original footage and named it "Undramatic Chipmunk." You can see it here. And the full video also reveals, as zoology buffs had suspected, that the "Dramatic Chipmunk" isn't actually a chipmunk but rather a prairie dog.

UPDATE @ 1 PM PST: Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, CollegeHumor's in-house T-shirt retailer, BustedTees, is now selling a Dramatic Chipmunk t-shirt.