Portent

This takes a few seconds so have patience! Spore is a newly launched game by veteran game designer Will Wright- famous for Sim City and of course the Sims.

Spore is his latest and possibly greatest game in which you sort of play God! Starting with a tiny single cell critter, you evolve it to a bigger critter then move into land, form a tribe conquer the world and then go into space. What makes it so compelling is that you get to select the path of evolution by choosing all sorts of legs, fins, flippers, tentacles; a massive collection of parts which the game is able to animate. that’s the really clever part. And it gets better- you can share your critter or use others and the Sporepedia (pictured) now have over 8.2 million.

Earlier today it had 8.1 million so that’s over 100,000 added today. As the game is being launched thats probably to be expected but still quite remarkable! I have ordered a copy of Spore so the Portentaurus when I have created it might yet grace these pages…

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Popularity: 2% [?]

You can use this as a bit of fun or more serious.

What I liked about the site was just how well it works and how well thought out it is. If I needed surveys, I reckon this would easily be worth $20 a month. As an example, heres a survey I created with it. Only the first 100 respondents can fill it in (limitation of free). As an example of a good Web 2.0 site, I reckon SurveyMonkey.com is up there with the rest.
Click Here to take survey

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Popularity: 7% [?]

The thing I like about art websites (which I loosely classify this as ), is that they are the visual equivalent of bakery shops. Instead of the freshly made bread smell, you get hit by a visual treat. I recognise my lack of artistic ability of course so my admiration for good design is almost if not quite boundless.

ColourLovers is a community type website with one simple aim. Submitting good colour palettes for others to share. There are rules on how colours work together; search for colour wheel on the web to see what I mean. But design goes further than that. Some colours are in or out each yet, and combinations can have associations with subjects. Well I find it fascinating anyway! If you like colour, you will I’m sure join the growing ranks of colour lovers.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Maps, especially online have always been restrictive in what you can do with them due to copyright etc. But there has been an international movement dedicated to providing unrestricted alternatives and as you can see, this map of my part of London is pretty good. I’ve put a blue rectangle around the area in the top map which the bottom map shows.

Like Google Maps you can zoom in and out and drag the map. No satellite data of course!

Not all streets are currently labelled- mine isn’t, but I could sign up and add it in. As more and more people sign up this becomes more and more valuable. One danger is of course that people will be lazy and copy data from commercial or copyright maps and that could be a problem. It’s not unknown for cartographers to introduce fake streets etc to try and spot when people copy their work.

So if you have a spare moment or two, why not help this map by signing up (no costs) and adding your local information.
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Popularity: 16% [?]

This is still in alpha so expect bugs, new features etc but it’s interesting. I love the name- it shows a bit of edginess as freebasing is a drugs term (not that I’m an expert!).

Put simply, it’s the web 2.0 Wikipedia. Using clever searching etc to enhance the user interface. I think Wikipedia is big enough to take competition and it might spur them on, although I love Wikipedia the interface is a little dull and searching is not great. Freebase uses its own API (Application Programming Interface) so users who are developers can create their own applications. This is what Facebook, Flickr etc (what is it with websites starting with the letter F?) do.

So an interesting one to watch. What will Wikipedia do in reaction? (If any).
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Popularity: 10% [?]

This is just a reminder that NaNoWriMo is back on again, growing year on year. I covered this last year in Portent so there’s not much to say except to mention the other stuff that is done by NaNoWriMo such as the encouragement of Young Writers- take a look at their programs.

Others have picked up their idea as well, well sort of- it’s much easier to read a novel in 30 days than write it- DefectiveYeti (Remember the Cliche rotation project) have done this with NaNoReMo 2007- where they’re reading Catch-22.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Something a little different. You are shown image after image and have to rate them for life likeness, on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is most like a face like and 0 isn’t anything like a face.

I suspect this is some variation of a genetic algorithm. This is a way of trying to solve a problem that doesn’t lend itself to normal computation by using a process akin to genetic selection. Interesting.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

Wikipedia is tremendous though occasionally it gets a bit of a mauling because of errors, quality etc. It has now over 2 million english language articles and by any criteria has been wildly successful.

However the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger decided that he wanted to go back to the roots and create a Wikipedia that was written purely by experts to guarantee the quality. According to Wikipedia (oh the irony!)

“The project aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by requiring all contributors to do so with their real names, by strictly moderating the project for unprofessional behaviours, and by providing what it calls “gentle expert oversight” of everyday contributors. A main feature of the project is its “approved articles”, which have each undergone a form of peer-review by credentialed topic-experts and are closed to real-time editing.”

In other words it’s closer to a traditional encyclopedia albeit online, possibly something like maybe Encarta. It has nearly 3,000 article since it launched in March 2007. More choice is a good thing!

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Popularity: 7% [?]

This site is apparently 27,282.45 cm long (except it’s stretched vertically not width wise). I’ve snipped three pages into one to give you an idea of what it looks like. It takes a while to download and then scroll down.

Like Mr Wong’s Soup apartments I imagine it must be a very expensive site for all the graphics that are downloaded. That’s the price of art!

Anyone can upload a section and add a link to themselves free. It has to be 300 pixels width, 700 pixels height at a resolution of 72 dpi and the the visual must be your inspiration, with a file size maximum 75 K.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

If you have ever read the book “Wisdom of Crowds” by James Suriewicki, this might give you an idea of what vosnap is about.

Its an easy way, using social networking to ask others what their opinion of something you are planning to do or thinking about. E.g. Someone asked ““Should I get drunk on my flight to MIA tomorrow?”” - the results were “Duh”, “yes” and “never”? You have to register to use this site.

It’s a novel concept though having one website for this, something which could probably easily be incorporated into other social networking sites seems a bit limiting.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

I’ve often thought that if you take song lyrics too literally you are just banging your head on a wall.

Nevertheless with over 30,000 artists, over 350,000 lyrics and nearly a million comments from over 300,000 site members, it’s clear that discussing what song lyrics are about is very popular. That’s what this site does. As you’d imagine with so many people, there’s a bit of dissent at times in what the lyrics mean.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

There are some tasks that humans are generally better than computers though clever software techniques mean that computers are catching up. For example trying to spot a lost human on a map, post reviews, or devise new quiz questions.

Amazon, the popular online bookstore (and also the people behind a9.com- the search engine) have set up their “Mechanical Turk” (named after a chess playing automaton that had a hidden human inside) so that people can complete tasks and earn small amounts of money, typically 5 to 20 cents per task.

Amazon themselves seem to be using their service to find UPC codes for various manufacturers which makes sense. Some of this work is dull and repetitive but if you need cash, you know that this isn’t a scam.

Some of the tasks require qualifications for example being able to do a Java test (which has none qualified) or take photos in the Seattle area. (14 qualified for that).

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Sometimes you see something so amazingly well done that you can’t but stare. This is one.

It’s a video, just over seven and a half minutes long of a couple of thousand dancers who are effectively human pixels. They have different colour clothes on I’d guess and turn to face the camera at pretty precise times. Through the seven and a half minutes they move about, change colour and act in a totally coordinated way. It must have taken months of setting up, choreographing and designing it. Amazing!

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Popularity: 10% [?]

This is interesting. A research project to try and work out jokes that match your sense of humour. As they say “Jester uses a collaborative filtering algorithm called Eigentaste to recommend jokes to you based on your ratings of previous jokes.”

Of course I’m not sure quite how they classify humour or rate a joke for a match but the jokes provided I found above average so they must be doing something right.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

Social Wallpapering is a public effort to classify, rank, and distribute high-resolution images for use as desktop backgrounds. Supported resolutions include 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, and all other background variations with a minimum width and height of 1280×720 pixels.

Technically this is a pretty advanced website- animated menus, using the latest Web 2.0 Ajax techniques. You can upload your own wallpapers, as well as rate others and share with your friends. There are even torrents for bittracker so you can downloads packs of wallpapers. Very clever stuff!

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Popularity: 4% [?]