Rabbit rabbit
Freeserve keeps adding more services on its way to becoming the UK's leading "portal" or internet gateway, and now it has launched a Chat Channel at www.freeserve.net Later this year it plans to offer 3-D chat in a virtual world using the Worlds Away system that many will remember from CompuServe. Start dusting off your avatars now...
Riffage
Riffage is a new and "hip" music site which is notable because it has been opened by Ken Wirt, who launched the Rio portable MP3 player when he worked for Diamond Multimedia. Riffage is aimed at catering for the burgeoning market for MP3 sound files. It provides a way for consumers to find indie and niche music they won't find in traditional shops, and offers bands a way to reach an audience in return for 15% of revenues instead of 50% or so. And if you you might also try the somewhat similar www.reify.org
Minimalist
Just how much can you pack into a box only 45 pixels square? The answer is much more than you probably expect. PixelTime offers some delightful miniature art in its galleries at
Translation?
Transparent Language, which sells LanguageNow translation programs for PCs, is offering a free text translation service at www.FreeTranslation.com Type in or copy/paste your text into the box supplied and you can, for example, translate English into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. The new Transcend RT technology seems to work fairly well.
RIP
The Loved Ones, which opened on Monday, is "the first serious attempt by a British company to offer a long lasting and professional virtual memorial facility on the internet". It's also a commercial operation: erecting a virtual headstone online at www.TheLovedOnes.com costs at least £8 ($12) a year with a minimum of five years. (Is that "long lasting" in Internet terms?) As it happens there's already a highly-regarded free alternative: the Virtual Memorial Garden run by Lindsay Marshall at http:// catless.ncl.ac.uk/vmg/ since 1995. The VMG site is tastefully done, has room for both people and pets, and the memorials are often moving, and even for passers-by, sometimes heartbreaking.
Lovebytes
Victoria and David in Love, the world's leading website devoted to the Posh/Becks romance, hasn't received any snaps of The Wedding, and hasn't been updated for a month. Online readers who attended this tasteful function should consider sending info to Denise Buzolin Cruz, the 15 year old schoolgirl in S o Paulo, Brazil, who runs http://move.to/VictoriaAndDavid (or www.geocities.com/Paris/ Arc/9191). Denise supports Sao Paulo FC but thinks Man United's players are "cuter".
Yureka
Yureka is billed as the internet's first "find engine", which means it reduces searches - which are actually performed by MetaCrawler and well-known search engines like AltaVista - to a manageable number of likely results. It's not exactly clear what it does, apart from reduce duplicaton. However, the search box provides a quick way to enter intelligent search strings, so http://yureka.com is worth at least a trial visit.
Safety PIN
Saflink could be the first company to open a website protected by a "biometric" - a measurable characteristic that uniquely identifies an individual, such a fingerprint, voiceprint, iris scan or whatever. The American company has put up a pretend financial site that uses speech recognition at www.safbank.com so anyone can try it. The problem is that by the time they've downloaded all the necessary software (and probably restarted their Windows PCs) and registered, most visitors could well have lost interest and gone somewhere else
Wise words
Sun Tzu's ancient handbook The Art Of War has been posted on the web in the original Chinese. But clicking on any character brings up a dictionary, and there is also an English translation. If your pinyin is pretty snappy you can even chat online at http://zhongwen.com/bingfa.htm
Tune up
Throw away that air guitar: Songplayer plans to launch a new version of its music tuition software next week at www.songplayer.com The (downloadable) software helps you play along with tracks from your CD collection on guitar or keyboards.
Help welcome
The National Mobility Centre is opening a website with information for the disabled. The site has been created by volunteers, and more would be welcome.
Swing king
Grab a vine and swing over to the Tarzan website at www.tarzan.com for details of Disney's next big animated feature. Not sure if it's a "must-see", but with voices supplied by the likes of Nigel Hawthorne and Brian Blessed, it's a must-listen.
Six of the best
Finding who, what and where
The world's phone books www.teldir.com
Who is or was who www.biography.com
Street guide to Britain http://uk.multimap.com
The ultimate word hoard www.onelook.com
UK and European trains http://bahn.hafas.de
Internet Movie DataBase www.imdb.com
