Portent

The title makes it sound like some sort of website for detecting animal droppings! This is a new BBC website for the TV series Earth which will be appearing soon.

The tracking part of the website follows migratory paths of penguins, polar bears, whales etc. This will be particularly invaluable for hunters everywhere (joke!). As you’d expect from the BBC the production values are high with gorgeous photos, though the flash animation about the series crashed my browser – I suspect you need a fast connection to get the most out of this site.

So if you’re in to animals, highly recommended. But if you aren’t or you think the BBC Licence is too high…

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Popularity: 12% [?]

If you write comments on blogs or forums, you’ll often see Avatars. Gravatar, a globally recognized avatar lets you upload or link an Avatar image that is associated to you email address.

Quoting Wikipedia again (I’m getting lazy!) “Although blog comment pages can sometimes act like Internet forums, there is no single way to provide avatar support on blogs. One solution is the “gravatar”, an avatar called from a centralized server at site.gravatar.com and linked to one’s e-mail address. Gravatars are centrally moderated, which allows them to be filtered for family friendliness.”

The image shows me uploading a (pretty rubbish!) icon- I’ll get a better one. You can se it in action on the earlier story about the Click and Point puzzle where I have added a comment. Yes Portent is now gravatar enabled.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved the thought of space and the vast empty spaces between planets and galaxies.

This image shows a map of our Universe with galaxies colour coded to indicate their red shift. The red shift is a manifestation of the Doppler Effect- when a car moves away from you, if you hear its horn, the frequency of the horn drops as it gets further away. The horn’s frequency hasn’t actually changed, just that the sound has further to travel and so sounds lower. The light from an object moving away lowers frequency towards the red end of the spectrum; that’s the red shift.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

A recent phenomena has been instant blogging with Twitter being the main name in this field. People post single messages which pop up on a google map. Personally I’m not too impressed by it- the signal to noise ratio is too low and it comes and goes in a very ephemeral way- there’s little content.

Slightly more interesting is this site Flickrvision which does the same but with photos posted from flickr.com. At the moment the main 2d Google maps view doesn’t seem to work too well but it has a 3D rotating Earth interface which is pretty neat. But ultimately it is something to look at and then move on. Still, as a show case of Web 2.0 with mashups of Flickr and Google Maps/3D world it’s interesting.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

Along with video sites, sites like digg, reddit and now Irin are very popular. Irin though is a little bit different as it’s about bloggers. Just like the other sites you can vote on stories.

The emphasis seems to reflect the blogosphere and Apple/Iphone are amongst the top stories. I noticed that thi site has been a little flaky, so if it’s not there have patience and try later.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

http://boingboing.net has been around well for over five years and is a delightful ‘New Stuff’ blog written by five journalists and writers. It is an outstanding site with a million readers a month, a Google PR of 8 and Alexa of 1136 but that doesn’t mean it can’t be matched or surpassed. It won’t be easy, we might fail but if we don’t try we’ll never know. There are something like 32 million websites in existence with new ones being launched every minute; the amount of new and interesting unfound stuff is comparable to the dark matter in the universe.

So if I were/am doing this how would I improve on BoingBoing? Here’s the plan.

1. Get more than five writers for a wider perspective.
2. Give everyone a revenue share.
3. Commit writers to a minimum of three posts per week.

So are you interested? Can you write blog entries at least three times a week? More details here.

Popularity: 3% [?]