Tag: Website
Top 5 awesomely informative sites to track the February blizzards online
Four inches? Five? Twelve? I’m talking about the snow, you filthy individual. You might have noticed the white stuff accumulating outside at an alarming rate today – at the time of writing it’s still coming down in North London – and you’re probably starting to worry if it’s ever going to stop.
I can assure you, it will. As for when – well, it’ll probably be sunnier tomorrow, but then go back to sleety snow for the majority of the week. But you want more detail, right? Right. Well, here’s my top five places where you can track this week’s snowfall online in-depth. Click over the jump to begin.
Encyclopaedia Britannica admits defeat – allows users to add content
Encyclopaedia Britannica has for years resisted pressure to join Wikipedia in allowing just anyone to submit content – relying instead on 100 full-time editors and 4,000 ‘expert contributors’. As a result, it’s slow to react to events and studies have shown that it’s comparably error-ridden .
In the next 24 hours, however, the Encyclopaedia’s website will begin accepting user-generated content. However, it still won’t be as free as Wikipedia – any changes or additions will have to be vetted by the site’s “experts”, and any would-be editors will have to register their real name and address(!) before being allowed to contribute.
Still, any changes made will eventually appear in the printed version of the Encylopaedia, which only gets reprinted every two years. I’ll stick with editing Wikipedia, thanks, and take my chances with the spammer police, endless bureaucracy and edit wars.
Japan launches 'smell map' website
You’ve got to love the Japanese. They’ve created a website which maps smells across the globe. 200 so-called ‘smellists’ have joined the “Nioi-bu”, or Smell Club, and registered scents on a Google map.
The scents listed range from “A toasty odour of cow dung” to “used socks in the summer”. It’s unclear whether any of the smells are actually pleasant. If you speak Japanese, then go check it out and let us know in the comments.
Nioi-bu (via AP)
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Google changes favicon again – much nicer than the lowercase purple g
It seems like only yesterday that Google shifted its favicon from an uppercase G to a purple lowercase g. Well, although the little purple g is still in place, on my computer at least, at the moment, a post on the Official Google Blog suggests that it’s about to change again, to the icon over to the right.
The new icon is a reinterpretation of a submission sent in by a user, one André Resende – a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil. The lucky chap, along with the rest of us, get to see a modified version of his creation (left) twenty thousand times a day as we destroy the planet. What do you think of the new logo? I’m quite a fan…
Related posts: Google changes its favicon from uppercase white ‘G’ to lowercase purple ‘G’ – thoughts? | Google searches causing global warming? Err… no.
Facebook hits another milestone – 150 million users
This afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on the site’s blog that the social networking behemoth has passed 150 million users, and half of those check the site every single day. That’s crazy, and made even more crazy by Zuckerberg pointing that if Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.
Other than that announcement, there might be a clue in Zuckerberg’s closing paragraph, where he says: “we look forward to offering even more ways for you to connect with the people who matter most”. Facebook Connect hasn’t been explosive in its popularity, so perhaps the company has something different in the works…
Related posts: Facebook Connect to help claim more internet real estate | Facebook is… the nation’s most popular thing-to-do on Christmas Day
Soundcloud makes sharing music files easy peasy
Do you work in, or closely with, music? Do you regularly find yourself trying to send music files to people, and having difficulty due to the multi-MB nature of most music files? Yeah, I know, email sucks – but so does linking someone to a MySpace, especially if it’s a file that you don’t necessarily want on public release.
Or perhaps you’re a DJ, and you want to share mixes with people you know. Not publicly, just to close friends, or people on a mailing list. In either case, what you need is a recently-launched site called Soundcloud.
Sony launches "revolutionary new VAIO" teaser site
Sony are joining Dell in launching a teaser site for some sort of new product (likely to be announced at CES in January). Sony is promising a ‘revolutionary new VAIO’ on January 9th, which tells us two things – firstly, it’ll not be that revolutionary, and secondly, it’ll be very expensive. Still, my rampant cynicism aside, we’ll have the all details from our CES correspondents come 9th Jan. Stay tuned.
Sony Teaser (via Engadget)
Related posts: Sony launches VAIO TT Blu-ray notebook and new customisation service in UK | Sony launches limited edition Bond Z-Series Vaio – Facebook stalk people like 007
Blog of the week: Fuck You, Penguin
Do you know an animal that needs a good talking to? Fuck You Penguin does just that. Quoting from the strapline, it’s “A blog where I tell cute animals what’s what.”
There’s quite a bit of swearing, but it’s wonderful to see someone so apoplectic with rage at the concept of a beaver wearing a shirt, or calling Mooses dorky. My favourite though? That’ll be this one.
Fuck You, Penguin (via @laurent_fintoni)
Related posts: Pomi: the smelly, emotional robot penguin from Korea | Be the king of the jungle with Jac Zagoory’s animal staplers
Bopaboo – selling second-hand MP3s. This has got to be a joke, right?
A site has just launched called Bopaboo. It claims to be a marketplace that allows you to resell unwanted MP3s to other people. There are only two valid conclusions to be had here – either it’s a joke, or it’s been set up by some people who haven’t got the faintest idea about how digital music works.
At the moment it’s still in private beta, but if you can track down an invite code (I found one on Google in less than 30 seconds) then you can try it out. You upload songs, and then others can download them at a price, at which point you get some cash, and the site takes 20%. No word on how much of that 20% goes back to the record labels.
Slicethepie.com updates website, still awesome
Quick recap for those of you not familiar with Slicethepie: it’s a site where you can invest in bands. Artists upload tracks, reviewers get paid to review them, and the highest-rated artists go through to a ‘showcase’ where anyone can ‘invest’ in the band.
When the investment reaches a certain level, the band go to a studio and make an album. In return for investing in an artist, you get free tracks, as well as a share of their album’s commercial success. It’s a simple concept, and a great alternative to the traditional ‘try and get signed’ approach for bands.
