Hitwise has just released a list of top UK sites for 2007, so I thought I’d ask my colleagues at Berkeley PR which sites they most use – at work and play.

Not surprisingly for a technology PR agency, news sites such as the BBC, Times and FT as well as tech sites such as Silicon and niche ones like SMS Text News scored highly as a means of sourcing up-to-date stories. Combined with our regular morning scan of the papers, this enables us to react quickly to breaking news on behalf of our clients. Several people mentioned content aggregators such as Netvibes and Bloglines. For those that haven’t made this discovery, an aggregator is an excellent way of keeping on top of new content from any site that publishes in RSS format. This includes news from a variety of sources, journalist and client blogs, notification of new mail in Hotmail or Yahoo accounts and even the weather forecast in your area. I personally use Netvibes as my homepage, which means I can see new content as soon as I fire up my browser.

As far as fun stuff goes, most Berkies have fully embraced the social networking phenomenon through Facebook and Bebo. We don’t restrict access to these sites, not least because some of our clients, such as Affiliate Window, are building applications especially for Facebook users.

With fashion, football, film, photography and F1 fans in our midst – we spend out free time visiting Vogue, Handbag, Football365, Internet Movie Database, Flickr and Crash. 

I’m sure we could list hundreds more between us. I’ve lived quite contentedly without a TV for the past five months, but I wouldn’t be without broadband access…

Jo Jamieson