Portent

If you’ve ever wondered how much people get paid at small, medium or large companies then this is the site for you and it’s completely free. You can view companies (over 11,000) generally or enter your own and see a lot more.

What is quite surprising for example that at JP Morgan Chase a personal banker is paid between $30K and $48K with an average of $35K. That’s from 41 submissions. Not everyone who works in a bank gets paid well! It’s an interesting site but as it depends upon people submitting details, so you will get back more if you submit yours. Just be careful not to submit too much or you might accidentally provide enough for your employer to identify you!

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This is an interesting site, it’s collecting public domain symbols to create a universal pictorial language. They all have to be free, easy to understand and cross culture.

You see similar symbols at airports, ports, anywhere that the public visits. This is expanding on the set that’s currently in use. If you’re interested in symbols then symbols.com is another interesting place to visit.

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Tube Status Screenshot

I bought an iPhone six days ago and this was one of the first applications to go on it. It’s what you’d call a “Does what it says on the tin” application.

If you travel on the London Underground (The Tube as we call it) and have an iPhone this is a must. It shows you the current status of all the London Underground lines and by clicking on the icons you can see what the problem is. You could use the Safari browser on the iPhone and get this info from London Underground but this packages it up nicely. Highly recommended.

There’s a similar paid app but I haven’t tried that yet.

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(Note: Links go to UK Apple App Store)

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This is an article that compares the monthly lists of the 100 most visited Wikipedia pages for the period of September 2006 to January 2007.

A software package called searchCrystal is used to visualize the overlap between the five monthly Top 100 lists to show which pages are highly visited in all five months; which pages in four of the five months and so on. Almost 40 percent of a month’s top 100 pages are visited in all five months, with 25 percent highly visited only in a single month.

I’m into visualsations- part of me is fascinated by the way extra insights can be gained just by viewing figures in different ways. This shows the data in three different ways- you may find the writing a little “dusty” that’s academics for you! But the three graphics are interesting.
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This is not a website to recommend to those of a monotheistic outlook on life (“One God”). But if you’re into pantheism or just interested this has lots of information on Gods from many cultures- American Indian, Chinese and many more, 154 gods in total, 316 with their alternative names.

There’s also a lot of related stuff such as 578 Saintans and their alternative names, ancient numerology, even Lego Gods. It’s very well done.

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There are a lot of dodgy websites out there. Not dodgy as in my spelling but sites that are likely to try and infect your computer.

This site (mywot.com) provides a browser plug-in for Firefox that shows a green or yellow circle against websites found in searches. Wot is short for Web of Trust. Green are good guys, red are bad. for instance I was spammed by someone about a site called grouply.com. Mywot.com gives a warning about dodgy sites and lets you see comments from users. Out of 21 million websites covered, over a million are considered dodgy. This is what Firefox says about Grouply.com when I try to go there.

As you can see from the little badge in the top right hand corner, I’m happy to let the world know about Mywot.com. It was foundered two years ago by two Finnish students.

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Sometimes it doesn't seem it, but Members of Parliament are elected to do your bidding. Theyworkforyou is a website that lets you check up on your MP, find out how they're voting or whatever. The site has been doing that for the last 5 years and has recently added an API so external developers can access the information.

My MP ("Are you listening Harry Cohen?" ( Lab))  in a reply to me five years ago said he was strongly against ID cards, he now votes strongly in their favour. He will definitely not get my vote!

If you want a free list of MPs you can even get that here- to get it elsewhere would cost nearly £100. This is a truly excellent site for making Parliament more accessible.

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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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This is a bit of a gimmick and it shows in Dollars or Euros only (what about £ Sterling!). Enter your salary in and it shows how much you earn each second or minute etc.

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This is an interesting idea. Authors (in the UK, USA, Australian and Canada) who are doing a book tour to promote their books can connect with audiences via this free site. Likewise the audiences can find out- it’s not the easiest thing to find out- where do you look for information about forth coming book tours?

The site itself is well done, though restricting search to zip codes is perhaps a little limiting (hey guys- we use Postcodes!), so perhaps the majority of stuff there is US based but with provision for the other countries. But a good idea nonetheless. You can also read about some of the worst tours from the authors themselves!

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Despite the web-comic approach, this is a website for those who want to understand how things work. In this case it’s making a reader/write for sim cards and also how to wire up a pay-phone so you can use it for VOIP type calls.

there’s plenty of such information on the web but the web-comic approach makes it look good and easier to digest in bite sized pages. The culture of diy electrical projects seems to have declined in recent years as digital electronics moved into the integrated circuit era. there are no doubt some who regard dabbling in this sort of thing as a bit beyond the pale but not me.

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Government websites don’t usually show up here but I think this one on vehicle recalls warrants coverage. (It’s UK) – a database of all vehicle recalls that you can query to see if your vehicle has had anything wrong with it.

It used to be you had to phone or call in a dealer to find out vehicle recalls information- I had to once with a Ford Orion that needed the jockey wheel replaced. This is a vitally important wheel that was originally plastic in the 1.8 Diesel engines and could break. If that went you lost your timing belt and most likely turned the engine into a pile of useless scrap metal. Ford issued a replacement metal wheel.

So if you buy a 2nd hand car you know where to look, to check for vehicle recalls.

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No, I’m not linking to a very dodgy porn site! (Oh dear, I bet I’ve started a new meme!). Siz|Easy lets you enter the dimensions of common objects and then shows them rendered using Flash with multiple views.

In the example show the objects are mobile phones and a pack of playing cards. The purple is the iPhone, the green a pack of cards and here are three other phones there including two Blackberries. it’s an interesting site and very well implemented though not a site I can see myself using that often!

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The Norwegian Met Office has been in business for 70 years and have produced an excellent website in English as well as Norwegian that gives weather forecasts for seven million places around the world. They even provide the weather data free in XML.

However they are Norwegian tax payer funded so they’re hoping not too many people will use/abuse the service as traffic of course costs money. I think the EU should contribute funding for this excellent service.

Not only do you get a forecast up to a week ahead, you also get flash animations for the couple of days ahead. It’s easier to read and understand than the UK taxpayer funded site on the BBC and they don’t try to ram climate change down your throat!

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It’s not unknown for people to put their name into Google and to search on it; nothing like vanity and a touch of narcism. This isn’t the first site to do it, googlism has been around for donkeys years.

This though, originally was an art project and has become a website. It generates a sort of digital DNA of your profile on the web, but unlike real DNA of course can alter. It’s quite colourful and could I’m sure be expanded further. I’d love to see category links so I can find out what the illegal links are!

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