5K tops
Shockwave Flash may blight the web with skippable intros and stupid animations, but it is clearly not all Macromedia's fault. The annual 5K competition, for web pages that take up 5K or less, has just been won by a Shockwave page, Frutiger Toy. It may be utterly pointless, but it does not use more than 5K of memory, which is less than Google's logo. The top 10 includes other Flash designs, too, but this kind of cleverness has finally rendered the competition a waste of time. Most web pages are badly written and ludicrously bloated, so it should be a stimulating challenge to produce pages in 5K or less. But the idea of producing pointless software toys in 5K doesn't just miss the point, it's boring. www.the5k.org
Who's tops?
Who is the greater artist, William Shakespeare or Britney Spears? If that is too hard, how about comparing Mozart and Kurt Cobain, or Michelangelo and Miles Davis? You can pick any two of 10 at The Philosophers' Review site, which is trying to answer the question: What makes a good work of art? So far, more than 16,000 visitors have submitted answers, and you can find out who is ahead by taking the test. www.philosophers.co.uk/games/britney1.htm
Remember it
All kinds of important documents appear in the news or on the web, and then either disappear or are forgotten. Russ Kick has had the bright idea of stashing them away in The Memory Hole. Examples range from government files and court documents to videos and sound recordings, but "the emphasis is on material that exposes things that we're not supposed to know (or that we're supposed to forget)". The current focus is on American documents but it could develop into an important global resource. www.thememoryhole.org
Touched up
One of the most obvious things to do with the world wide web is to try to present the network graphically, preferably in three dimensions. In theory, this should be easier to grasp than a list where you have to examine each entry separately. Visualthesaurus was a useful example of this idea, and the ability to extract sets directly from Google has now given the idea-mapping idea a new impetus. (See Google Lab's sets feature.) TouchGraph's GoogleBrowser is one of the better efforts at visualisation, and the same technology lets you browse Amazon's "also bought" links. The zoom facility is great, but my brief experience is that it quickly becomes more confusing than a raw list. Well, how many of those who looked at the cartoony KartOO (Web watch, June 6) are actually using it? www.Visualthesaurus.com
http://labs.google.com/sets
www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html www.pmbrowser.info/amazon.html
www.kartoo.com
Keys to go
Another welcome idea being developed at Google Labs is the facility to search using keyboard shortcuts, instead of the mouse. TLH (TryLooking Here) is already using it. http://labs.google.com/keys
www.trylookinghere.com/
DIY Wap
Having a website no longer buys any street cred, but Wizman hopes that having your own Wap page will become "the ultimate personal assistant for fully fledged socialites". It has launched a site where you can build a home page for your mobile phone or PDA. Even if you don't, the site still offers free games, an email service and a place to keep Wap bookmarks. It also provides instructions for setting up your phone - or, if you have a Nokia or Ericsson model, does it for you. To register, enter your mobile number in UK format; calls are charged at the 0870 rate. www.wizman.com
DEC aid
If you do have a website, the Disasters Emergency Committee would like you to carry its banner. DEC has launched a campaign to raise money for starving people in southern Africa, and visitors to the site can also use a credit card to make a donation online. www.dec.org.uk
Beat this Bobby, one of the most interesting sites on the web, has just been taken over by Watchfire Corporation, which will integrate the technology into its site management software. The company says it will keep the free version online at its new address. Bobby checks any URLs you enter to see if the pages meet the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the US government's section 508, intended to help make the web accessible to the disabled. Sadly, almost none of them do.
http://bobby.watchfire.com
New & noted
· BT Openworld's new subscription travel club that offers discounts on flights: www.btopenworld.com/travelclub
· Help build the world's biggest digital sculpture: www.iconobloc.com
· A web-based spelling checker: www.spellcheck.net
· Classic (American) clips: www.retromedia.tv
· For webmasters, an open source defence against spiders: www.robotcop.org
· Something like Cheerios?: www.cropcirclecereal.com
