Get your laptop. These are the sites you're going to want to bookmark to make your life in Beijing easier.

We all have our internet addictions: Facebook connects us to friends back home, TMZ keeps us up to date with the latest Hollywood gossip, and Google Maps Street View lets us walk the avenues of former hometowns. It's rare that our online and offline lives intersect at all, so we thought we'd share a few of the websites that aren't yet in everyone's bookmarks that still make living in Beijing a little more rock 'n' roll. So sit back, relax and click.

Art Attack
Despite Beijing’s incredible range of galleries, our city has until recently lacked a quality English-language site to help us navigate the range of art exhibitions and events the city offers. Katie Grubie and Katharine Don of Red Box Studio have risen to the occasion to fill the gap. “The blog is an open platform for people in the art scene to gather our resources for an in-depth look at the art and design scene,” says Don. “Through RedBox Review we have consolidated our picks of useful resources both online and in print, and we provide insightful information in English about the current art and design world related to contemporary culture in China.”

Beijing's Beat
Clubbing culture is growing fast in Beijing, and the city once known for its underground rock scene is increasingly recognized for its above-ground DJs. Jack Zhu launched Clubzone.cn in 2003 and has seen it grow from a niche forum for die hard clubbers into a full blown community of over 200,000 users. Clubzone.cn is now the best site for finding out about clubbing events, sharing photos of parties and reading interviews with the DJs that spin through The Jing. But Beijing is still the city for rock, and we’ve found that the best way to get to know the scene is to plug in our iPods and download the “Pissing on the Bamboo Curtain” podcasts here. In addition to a motherload of local music, podcast hosts Kyle Schaeffer and Ian Sherman share their insight into Beijing’s underground rock scene. “We started it because there’s all this great music in china, lurking online and in demo boxes at record shops, and a lot of laowai are too lazy or scared to look for it,” explains Sherman. “We also needed an excuse to get off our asses and hunt it down for ourselves.”

Maste-rrr-ing Beijing Hua-rrr
We love boosting our Mandarin skills on Chinese Pod, but www.BJShengr.com is the place to master Beijing dialect. It’s not just about adding an “arrr” at the end of every word, which makes us sound like a crew of Chinese pirates. There is a world of slang and innumerable linguistic rules to follow. BJShengr.com explains all in detail with online audio from actors, television and people on the street.

Know Your Pollution
On days when the Beijing smog is so thick we can’t see to the end of the block, we often ask ourselves just how dangerous the air outside actually is. Unfortunately, China’s State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) has the answer at www.sepa.gov.cn/quality/air.php3, where each day’s air pollution index (API) is published. API levels of 151-200 are considered “unhealthy,” and levels above 300 are considered hazardous, meaning that Beijingers should refrain from going outside if possible. One day last year, Beijing’s API surpassed 500, higher than SEPA’s site could measure. It may be time to stock up on pesticide-free food at organicfarm.com.cn and anti-pollution masks at taobao.com.

Beijing Muchies
We all get the munchies in Beijing, but we don’t always know where to satisfy the cravings that the city brings. City Weekend’s website may have the most comprehensive database of foreign restaurants in Beijing, but Dianping.com takes the moon cake for Chinese fare. Edward Long launched Dianping five years ago, giving Beijingers the opportunity to sound off on more than ten thousand of the city’s restaurants. Today, the site has 700,000 users, who review and comment on the city’s eateries, which are organized by location, style of food and rating. Big winners at the first-ever Dianping Food Awards last month include Hai Di Lao Hot Pot, Golden Jaguar and Chuan Ban.

Getting Around
With traffic usually moving at a glacial pace and a dauntingly huge bus system, Beijingers always need hints to help them better understand how they can get around their city. Mapbar.com is unparalleled for maps and directions. Not only is it possible to find every hutong and hole-in-the-wall restaurant (often just by searching by name), but the site computes bus directions to any address in Beijing. To get a better understanding of our city’s transportation infrastructure and all its developments, check out David Feng’s blog (also on City Weekend’s site) and wiki at www.Beijingology.com for daily updates on Beijing’s subways, buses and roads.

The Olympic Year
As great as the official Olympic site (En.Beijing2008.cn) and Sports Illustrated’s FanNation blog are for keeping us up to date with the latest news about the Olympic venues and events, but Reuters’ China blog has taken a specific focus on our Olympic year and is proving to be the go-to site for understanding how the Games will affect our lives in the capital.

The Reach Around
If we were interested in learning more about Olympic history or how SEPA calculates Beijing's Air Pollution Index, we’d probably start at Wikipedia.com, one of those sites that for some mysterious reason never works in Beijing. Many users have discovered that anonymouse.org and other proxies will allow them to view these hard-to-access sites. Since anonymouse.org is slow and requires long URLs, TOR is our reach around of choice. There's even a Firefox add-on for TOR, so that we’re always one click away from unfettered internet access.

Find Me a Home
Real estate is no joke during this Olympic year. Tenants are seeing their rents raised by more than 50 percent in some cases, and greedy landlords are cutting off leases the month before the Olympics in hopes of renting out apartments for as much as RMB10,000 per night. To find an affordable apartment without paying an agent fee, the sites to use are rent.soufun.com and the Craig’s List clone, zhantai.com.

Brain Food
Beijing is a complex, multi-faceted city at the epicenter of Chinese culture and politics. How can we start to wrap our heads around the capital of the most populous nation on Earth? Good places to start are a few excellent blogs by Beijing expats: imagethief.com, danwei.org and beijingnewspeak.com. For a quirky look at local culture in Beijing, download Su Fei’s Sexy Beijing videos at SexyBeijing.tv.

SkypeIn/SkypeOut
Most expats know Skype allows international calls for about one jiao a minute, but too few of us have mastered the magic of SkypeIn. With SkypeIn, we can buy a phone number anywhere in the world for US $25, then either receive the call on Skype or have it forwarded to our cell here in Beijing via SkypeOut. Get the details at skype.com/go/skypein.

CW Super Users

The City Weekend website is made up of people exchanging information about the ins and outs of life in Beijing. The top City Weekend online posters tell us why they spread their wisdom to the masses on www.cityweekend.com.cn

CW's Top Event Uploader
Nadja (aka "club_obiwan")
Events Uploaded: 137
Next Event: "Movement" on Friday, Feb. 29 at Club Obiwan
CW Rocks Because: "No matter if it's a spontanueus change from indie rock to tech-house, special guest MCs that should be announced or an additional networking night squeezed in, with cityweekend we have the flexibility to still get the info out to the party people and create the necessary buzz!"

CW's Top Blogger
Jenn Wong (aka "jennwong")
Most comments on a post: 48. Jenn took on some of the nastier That's BJ's forum threads with her contentious "This Is Just Wrong” post.
CW Rocks Because: "Beijing's listings, blog entries, petty cat fights, reviews, articles and events are all found in one comprehensive, user-friendly database."

CW's Top Reviewer
Duncan Smith (aka "duncanshaunsmith")
Reviews Posted: 39
Review style: Duncan took advantage of CW's scoring system to rack up points galore by posting several "First to Review" blurbs. He's currently in a race with user "Xigor" for the #1 user on the BJ site.
CW Rocks Because: “If my family and I are looking for somewhere new to eat, it’s very easy to look in the food category, see the location, and then check the 'vibe' the place is getting via the comments."

CW's Power Player
Adhiyanto Goen (aka "adidasxk" and "icprexecutive")
Events and Reviews Posted: 92
What makes him special?: Intercontinental got their money worth when they hired this marketing exec. After his 80th review, we asked Adhi to create a personal account, as the site was littered with more hotel logos than you could shake a stick at. We await his skills as user "adidasxh".
CW Rocks Because: “I found the website EXTREMELY easy to use and provides great information. User comments show what’s great and what’s not in Beijing. Search and you shall find it."

Blake Stone-Banks and Sienna Parulis-Cook.