Portent

What can you say about the works of Shakespeare? I wasn’t that keen at school, having Macbeth and the Merchant of Venice forced down my throat but over time have come to appreciate the cultural contribution and story telling that his plays brought.

For instance these words were first seen in his plays, though that doesn’t mean he invented them, just used them.

1. Eyeball
2. puking
3. skim milk
4. Obscene
5. Hot-Blooded
6. The Game is Afoot
7. Epileptic
8. Wormhole

None of which is relevant to this review! That said, it’s elegant, fast and lets you view all of the plays act by act. And it’s free. If you like Shakespeare and you have an iPhone then it is a no brainer. It was released in early September.

Link (to Shakespeare in the App Store)

Popularity: 5% [?]

This is a very clever bit of Flash programming. In fact the whole thing is pretty good. Normally when you look for books online you search rather than browse. It’s a way of life- Amazon have a couple of million books so how could you possibly browse them?

Well Canadian Chris Thiessen has worked out how, though at present there are only 21,000 books in his (I’d guess) Amazon affiliate store. The top one of the three screen shots show the whole bookstore at the top, each square is a rack. You can zoom in to see the individual racks (the middle shows one rack zoomed in) and clearly see the book covers. It always amazes me that it is book covers that attract people but it is.

The racks are laid out like in a conventional bookstore, but at least here you don’t have to worry about books in the wrong racks or trying to get to a book with people standing in the way! Just click on a cover and you get the cover plus details (shown in the bottom screenshot) with a link to buy from Amazon. I suspect the 21,000 selected for Zoomii are the top sellers which makes sense.

It’s a fast interface and works very well with a mouse wheel button for quick zoom in and out. I wonder if someone like Amazon would pick up this and use it. Could it be improved? Possibly. How about a pop-up that appears and vanishes (without clicking) giving a summary as you move over the book cover? That might eat up a lot of bandwidth of course! This site is highly recommended for being innovative.

Link

Popularity: 3% [?]

The most commonly occurring letter in English is the letter e, followed I think by a and t or possibly t then a. Writing anything major, i.e. a novel of some 50,000 words without using the letter e is I imagine an arduous (see below!) but not impossible task as the author, one Ernest Vincent Wright has demonstrated.

Strictly you’d describe this as an exercise in lipogramy. According to Wikipedia Every word in Gadsby was properly spelled and all narration was grammatically correct. However, the stress of writing such a novel was apparently too much for Wright, who died at the age of 66 on the day Gadsby was published.

Link

Popularity: 9% [?]

This is probably one of the oldest as it originated back in my 2nd year at school in 1971. Michael Hart was given a lot of free (and very expensive back then) computer time and decided to try and store everything that could be stored electronically (and out of copyright).

So the concept pre-dates the web by 20 years and was there almost from the inception of the internet. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books. Of course the book have to be proof read so that is why there are currently 20,000 titles available for download and 100,000 titles amongst all the partners of Project Gutenberg. If this is your kind of thing they are always looking for volunteers.

The website is of course a more recent addition to the project and is a Wiki.

Interesting the five most popular authors over the last 30 days.

1. Twain, Mark (56676)
2. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir (25434)
3. Ralph, Lester (24461)
4. Shakespeare, William (24378)
5. Dickens, Charles (23915)

Link

Popularity: 6% [?]

Enid Blyton was a very popular author whose work attracted a bit of controversy in the 50s and 60s but despite that she is ranked as the 5th most prolific author worldwide- she wrote over 800 books at an average daily speed of 10,000 words. Her work has many fans today and of course she created Noddy who continues to this day. As a kid I read many of her books but I was still astonished to find out just how many she had written.

I wonder if some of the appeal is because her works harken back to the 50s which is perceived as better in some ways than now. Plus her books always had a moral background- the heroes and heroines did the right thing and baddies got their comeuppance.

This website sells her books but is more than that- it’s a kind of tribute by Keith Robinson (the owner) and several others around the world- see the About page. It’s nicely designed and any Enid Blyton fan will find lots here, including some fanfic.

Link

Popularity: 6% [?]

30 Years ago, a Golden Record was created and put on The Voyager 1 and 2 Probes. These are now a very long way away from Earth- a shade under 10 billion miles which is a pretty long way.

The Voyager Golden Record is a phonograph record that contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. It is intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or far future humans, that may find it.

On this website you can hear the music and view the 116 images. It’s not a very welcoming website but the content makes it of interest. You can find out more background information from Wikipedia.

Link

Popularity: 7% [?]

Kunst-Formen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), by Ernst Haeckel, 1898 is now in the public domain (probably has been for a long time) .

This is a wonderful book, which features all sorts of illustrations of the natural world. If you’re doing some research for organic shapes, this book is a nice place to start. There are 397 pages in total, or if you like very big PDF files you can download it from Eric Gjerde’s website. He posted this on Flickr.com, the photo sharing site.

Link

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you like writing but don’t want to spend years writing novels etc, why not have a go at ficlets? A ficlet is a very short story, between 64 and 1024 characters long. It’s collaborative in that anyone else can add a prequel or sequel so you’ll probably never know where it starts or ends.

It’s an interesting idea and very popular judging by the number of stories which if the numbering is anything to go by is several thousands!

Link

Popularity: 3% [?]