Meh

Did you ever think you made up a word and at one point heard it back through someone else? Then you know that making up a word is the easy part, and making sure you really were the first to use it is the hard bit. By the time the word gets printed on T-shirts you're by all means too late to claim it, and even using it loses its cool. When even The Guardian gets hold of it the word is definitely useless as an indicator you belong to the incrowd, the knowing, the initiated, the, eh, sheep? Meh!

Mandelmania Revisited

Re-reading the book by Arthur C. Clarke, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, made me timetravel back to my university days and my first i386 computer. Why? Because a background story in the novel is about the late 1980s Mandelbrot Fractalmania (see the book cover in the Wikipedia story!). I too have spent countless hours at the computer monitor hypnotized by the colors and endless depths of the Mandelbrot set - a shortlived but severe addiction. An addiction shared by many at the time, fed by the new notion of chaos in math but enabled by the simultaneous availablility of home computing power. Out of curiosity I Googled the name of the most popular piece of Fractal software at the time, Fractint, and to my amazement it is still being developed. Although at version 20 it still runs on DOS...

Saturn Rings Crossing by Cassini

The truly amazing technology behind this photo and accompanying video on the NASA site is of course the Cassini spacecraft far in the outskirts of our solar system. However, without the Internet such motion imagery would only reach its audience if a science minded TV program would be so kind as to air a feature on it. Now, space and science buffs just have to surf to the NASA site - an organization, by the way, who knows how to broadcast its achievements with NASA-TV.

Postsecret

Postsecret is a (snail) mail address, a website and a couple of books. As the name implies it allows anyone to make a public (though usually anonymous) confession to small and sometimes big sins - the author's or someone else's. It would be easy to send in imaginary secrets but still the majority seems genuine enough. Watching the site never fails to touch me - some secrets people carry with them daily! Although the main infrastructure of Postsecret is plain cardboard, stamps and regular mail it wouldn't be as popular and well-known without the Internet. It also shows how one man can rival the suspense and intrigue of big media reality TV shows, because that is what this is - a platform for public confession by the writer and a peephole into people's private space for the viewer. A discrete peephole on anonymous lives though, outclassing any Endemol style show by far. A link to the Hopeline service for people in emotional distress is provided.

Nanobliss

Nanobliss is a website that tries to show the beauty in nanostructures - and in some cases succeeds. It is far from a nanoscale art gallery, and in some cases it is nothing more than a show-off of what one can do with carbon atoms and a scanning electron microscope. A logo section? Come on. The site best succeeds with those pictures that weren't so much engineered for effect, but that do show incidental structures at tiny scale. Still worth a visit.

Cheddar Vision

The first ever online camera was of course the coffeepot at The Trojan Room at the University of Cambridge, even before the World Wide Web made publishing images and creating webcams easy. The original cam got unfortunately switched off at august 22, 2001, but now has a worthy successor in perhaps an even more British endeavour (with even a touch of Monty Python?): A webcam showing a maturing Cheddar. For those of us that find watching grass grow a too exhilarating experience, please browse to the CheddarVision website to see, err, mould grow?

Sellaband

Sellaband is a new website that bypasses the record labels and exposes musicians and their work to web savvy music lovers. Site registrants vote for the artists they love, would like to see succeed in music or who they believe have commercial potential. This voting is done with hard cash to give it extra weight and even more to create a stash of cash for the artist: once the amount reaches $50000 the artist is sent into a studio to record his music professionally. Proceeds of this recording is split between the artist and the supporters, who have now transformed from 'believers' (in Sellaband speak) into investors. This whole site is a wonderful example of how to use the web as a distributed filter for quality, and create a worldwide marketplace for even the longest tail. Of course not everybody is a music expert - it seems as if at least some voting is done on the bands already on the rise just because they are. A surprising number of bands is still exactly $50000 away from fame and fortune. However, some good bands have already been recording, and overall the system appears to work. I'm a believer! Just put $40 on my account and am judging artists as we speak!

Free online Dutch megadictionary

The Dutch recordbreaking "Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal", the largest dictionary in the world, goes online this Saturday. The dictionary is the work of 134 years – started in 1864 only to be finished in 1998. The work covers 5 centuries of Dutch language history and has been released digitally on CD-ROM in 2000, but has never seen the light of the Net before. The dictionary will be available here (in Dutch only) for registrants (free).

Map data wants to be free!

There is this saying from the Free Software community that software wants to be free. Soon some people scanted that Data Wants To Be Free too! So, many volunteers brought us valuable reference knowledge such as Wikipedia and classic books as in the Gutenberg Project. Now a massive fortress of paid data is under siege: Map data. The Open Street Data project has volunteers driving with GPS and camera through the country to collect the data - while at the same time having a lot of fun. I should say driving through many countries, although it seems as if The Netherlands is still a works in progress... hmmm, tempting!

PowerPizza laptop sleeve

Disguise your valuable laptop in one of these... Ordered from this page, but also easily made DIY although it might take a while to get a pizza box delivered that is not full of grease... (the scent might make the disguise more genuine though!).

iPhone

Yikes! I never thought I would post about Apple's new iPhone - that is, until I saw this clip which shows the phone's user interface. How cool! Now if it will keep that responsiveness when it's used a while (and bloated with data) I might be tempted...