Portent

This is a bit different. Microsoft have a website PhotoSynth which lets you view places from different angles. The idea being to take lots of different photos (viewpoints/angles etc) and let you view them.

Well this is a lower budget attempt to do the same thing. Click on a place on the left and move your mouse over the photo; you can see the different transitions highlighted. When you click on a photo at the bottom (of the same thing), it transitions in a pseudo 3D way to the new photo. Cleverly done.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

I’ve seen this effect used recently in an advert in a newspaper or magazine so I expect to see it happen more over the next 12-18 months before it becomes a clche and advertising agencies look for something else new and fresh.

That said, it’s still pretty clever and must take a fair bit of time, tweaking and adjusting to get just the right shadow you want.
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Popularity: 22% [?]

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.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

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!

Link

Popularity: 4% [?]