SingShot
Your friends and family mock, but you don't care: you love karaoke. SingShot makes it easy to find fellow crooners, and share each other's best work — call it YouTube for karaoke. Subscribe to the site (it costs $9.95 per month, or $4.95 per month for an annual subscription) and you can upload your home recordings for others to enjoy; members vote for their favorites. You just need reasonably good PC speakers and a microphone connected to the right jack in the back of your computer; the site streams the lyrics in a video window while the song plays. There's a wide selection — everything from the Beatles to Michelle Branch — and the original recording is your accompaniment (no Muzak here). Fox Interactive's kSolo.com works pretty much the same way, and it's been around longer, so it has more users and a larger library of tunes — but while SingShot is compatible with all browsers, kSolo only works in Internet Explorer.