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Web watch

Jack Schofield
Thursday March 28, 2002
The Guardian


Kids' stuff
Are you feeling miserable? There4me is ready to offer help and confidential advice, with an Ask Sam column (an agony aunt), a message board, and even some playable Shockwave games. The site was launched yesterday by the NSPCC, and focuses on problems such as abuse, bullying, drugs, and health and family worries.

Sexy
I would certainly score highly in the Dereliction of Duty category: sorry to say that for the nth year running, I forgot all about the Sexiest Geek Alive contest. The pageant was held in Austin, Texas, on March 12, and Chad Briggs carried off the prize. The site's photo gallery has everything you need.

Art links
The Irish Museum of Modern Art now has a well-stocked gallery devoted to net art. They all seem to be external links, so the response times are somewhat variable. So is the quality, which is hardly surprising, because everything submitted was accepted, and works are ordered according to when they arrived. Actually, a lot of net art exhibitions look as though they are produced that way, but this time it's a feature.

Spray time
Is this the world's first online graffiti competition? It is almost certainly the first online graffiti site devoted to promoting a computer game. Hints: you need to log in inside the cabin then go outside to spray. New version of Shockwave probably required.

Mostly bad
Flash 99% Good (a title that seems to be missing a decimal point) is a site developed to promote a book about good web design. It fails right out of the browser. It is no surprise that users cannot vary the size of the type, and setting Internet Explorer's Accessibility Options has no effect at all. Throw in a few stupid tricks - for example, floating pop-up menus that pointlessly repeat text already on the screen, rather than doing the simple thing and underlining links - and you have yet another annoying Flash site, even if it is not as dumb as most. The site's line drawings are a bit of a giveaway: they show people being given urgent medical attention. Instead of patching up bad websites, why not avoid injury by designing them properly in the first place?

Only human
If you happen to bump into a creationist when you don't have Richard Dawkins and a carrier bag of BBC documentaries to hand, you could do worse than point them to Becoming Human. It provides what looks like a comprehensive guide to human evolution, presented by The Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. It's a tricksy Flash 5 website with a slick design of the sort that is eminently suitable for a multimedia CD-Rom. However, a fast Pentium 4 machine with lots of memory and a good broadband internet connection comes close enough to reproducing the same effects as a 27p disc. A smarter operation would just offer the programme as one a huge file so users could download it overnight and burn one themselves.

MS Google
At last, after all this time, Google is finally offering a specialist search service for Microsoft-oriented websites. It has had a Mac-specific search offering for more than two years, and the Linux-specific version goes back to the dawn of time (May 1998). You can find links to the topic-specific search pages at the bottom of the Advanced Search page. Google-doodle collectors should make sure they don't overlook these different designs.


Kids' stuff
http://www.there4me.com/

Sexy
http://www.sexiestgeekalive.com/

Art links
http://www.irishmuseumofmodernart.com/netart_open.htm

Spray time
http://www.3doeurope.com/madtrix

Mostly bad
http://www.flash99good.com/

Only human
http://www.becominghuman.org/

MS Google
www.google.com/microsoft.html
www.google.com/advanced_search

New & noted
Turn up the volume
The next step?
Run a search on George Bush
Rock art
Ground Zero

Six of the best: Easter
Origins
How it works
Hoppy Easter
E-cards
The soft side
Easter Island




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