Now this is quite lovely I must say. NewsMap, developed by Marcos Weskamp, is a bright and breezy Flash news displayer, which aggregates news from Google News sources. Here’s the official blurb:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

The concept is admirable, and very interesting, and even if you just want to see some news presented in a different way, it’s a good visit.

NewsMap

I’m sure you’ve visited this site before, but if you haven’t, then that’s the exact reason I’m posting this. Because you should do.

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

20,000 live music recordings, 40 billion web pages (look, it’s the BBC site in ‘97), almost 20,000 movies of one sort or another, and over 20,000 audio recordings.

Plus it’s had a nice little redesign by the looks of it.

Apologies for the lack of posts recently, but to tempt you back here’s a list by John Camm of today’s modern rules of advertising, where we apparently live in a world of fictional cliches.

1. Men are obsessed with sex but will forego sex in order to watch football or drink beer.
2. Women are locked in a constant battle with their weight/body shape/hairstyle.
3. Career success is entirely based on your ability to impress your boss.
4. Mums are often harassed but NEVER depressed/unable to cope.
5. Any act of male stupidity (e.g. walking across a clean floor in muddy boots, putting the dog in the dishwasher, etc.) will be met with a wry smile, not genuine annoyance/anger.
6. Married men will flirt with other, younger women but NEVER act upon it.
7. Anyone with a scientific career will have a bad haircut and dreadful clothes.
8. If you work for the emergency services, you are a better person than the general population.
9. Elderly relatives NEVER suffer from senile dementia.
10. Scandinavians are, without exception, blonde and beautiful.
11. Women have jobs they never do in real life, e.g. dockworker (who looks like a model).
12. Children will not eat fruit or vegetables. Ever.
13. Both men and women find driving deeply pleasurable, never boring or stressful.
14. Men are inherently lazy/slobbish; women are the reverse.
15. Chocolate, however, will cause women to immediately fall into the languor of the opium eater.
16. High Street bank staff are (A) friends of the customers, and (B) of slightly above-average attractiveness (only if female).
17. Modern men own a cat.
18. Hot beverages have miraculous rejuvenating effects.
19. Professional people have strangely trivial preoccupations, e.g. a female barrister who is morbidly obsessed with finding a healthy snack bar.
20. All women (except stay-at-home housewives) have interesting and enjoyable careers.
21. Any over-the-counter medical product will work instantly and 100% effectively.
22. Children know more than adults.
23. Women never merely hop in and out of the shower, instead preferring to act out some sort of soapy Dance of the Seven Veils.
24. School is a happy experience for all children.
25. Tortilla chips are the most exciting experience any group of young people can experience.
26. Playing bingo is THE number one pastime among 18-25 year old British women.

(via BBC)

OK, here’s a really clever idea for you: how many people do you think search for “rand theft auto san andreas” on eBay? It’s either not many at all, and the world is partially sane, or loads, and life is not worth living any more.

Fat Fingers is a service which automatically finds spelling mistakes of the search term you enter, and redirects you to a page containing mis-spelt eBay results.

You can find some real bargains, as mis-typed items are obviously going to have less traffic. Or they did until now.

Fat Fingers (cheers to Lifehacker)

Here’s where I become Mr. Nitpicky again, because I love stuff like this.

It’s beck and call, not beckon call, schitzophrenic does NOT mean split personalities, it means split from reality, and Xmas isn’t an attempt to remove Christ from Christmas, X is the Greek letter for chi.

Study up, so that you can always be right in those grammatical arguments.

Common Errors in English

Matt Campbell and friends decided to find out the answer to that very question, and last week managed to try it out for real, by putting a tiny camcorder in a model rocket, looking down at Earth.

The results are rather nice - shooting away from Earth, you don’t expect the speed to be quite that.. well, speedy.

Campbell has posted videos of their exploits on the Camcorder Rocket Project homepage, where you can also read about events leading up to the tests. The group also had a second day of launches just two days ago.

The project was also the ‘Video of the Week’ on CamcorderInfo.com, where there’s also an interview with Mr Campbell.

Interesting? Sure. Crazy? Definitely.

CVS Camcorder Rocket Project (cheers to Make Blog)

Can anyone living in the city verify that the New Yorkers really are this bad at parking? Or were the car park attendants just majorly wasted when they marked out the spaces?

I found this example of automobile wizardry while exploring the Empire State on Google Earth, which I’ve referred to many times before on this here part of the Interweb.

I also stumbled upon the Japanese way of bridge building, which to them means turning a small, usually ugly, construction into something surprisingly beautiful. Here’s how to really do roads properly:

Yes, that little park seems to be built into the bridge, with the road travelling underneath. If only everyone was as creative with such small spaces.

Initial Dawn have a list of tweaks and tips for Google Talk, including a lot of stuff I hadn’t read anywhere else.

The secrets include how to edit the system tray menu to include extra commands, tweak registry settings and change text size.

Google Talk Secrets! (via Oishii)

Did you know that one of the most common ways a spammer will get your email address is through your signature on messageboards, and your ‘email me’ link on your website? Direct links to your email address are often scalped by the spammer’s software and sold on.

Well, the email icon generator can create little image icons instead for you - for loads of the common webmail services such as GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc.

This means that spammers won’t be able to directly read the text, therefore rendering your email address private.

Email icon generator

FLHurricane.com has a Google Map tracking the exploits of hurricane Katrina across Florida right now. It seems to update every two hours, and shows the wind speed and other measurements in the pointer pop-ups.

FLHurricane.com (via Google Maps Mania)