Smart move
Fan clubs, theatre troupes, football teams and similar groups can get organised on the web using the free service at www.SmartGroups.com The main features include a message area, an event calendar, a simple database and a voting system. The service has been developed by Intracus, an intranet and internet consultancy, which hopes to attract 4 million users in two years. That may be a challenge because eGroups and similar offerings are already well established in the US. But SmartGroups may have an edge over here, because it's British.

Insultorama
Annoyed with someone? Send them an anonymous insult by email. The Insulter website lets you pick the victim's "crime" from a set of menus, then set a rudeness level for the insulting email. Unfortunately the rudeness level only goes up to four, where a proper flame would require a rating in double figures. Some of the insult lines are good enough to raise a smile, but if that's the intention, you could email your victim a joke certificate from the Center for the Easily Amused instead. The internet parking ticket, for people who have been sitting in front of their computers for far too long, is at www.amused.com/parking.html

Sound idea
Compaq, the computer manufacturer, is experimenting with a search engine that uses speech recognition software to index the content of popular American radio shows. When a search for a word or phrase is successful, the system fetches an audio clip - a sound file in RealPlayer format. The examples used will probably be of no use and even less interest to British websurfers. However, this kind of system will eventually become hugely important, so it's worth checking progress to date at http://speechbot.research.compaq.com

Film fun
Wallace and Gromit should soon be on the web in all their animated glory. Aardman and AtomFilms have already put Creature Comforts, Morph and Rex the Runt online at www.atomfilms.com and, they say, new content will be added fortnightly. Excerpts from Nick Park's Oscar-winning Wallace and Gromit films will follow. The site also provides details about the films, and links to sites selling Aardman videos and DVDs. Aardman's site is at www.aardman.com

Strange days
Today is National Heroes Day in the Cape Verde Islands and Guinea Bissau, Foundation Day in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Inauguration Day in the USA. Those are not things you'll find in the average pocket diary, but Earth Calendar provides a day-by-day guide that will entertain trivia buffs and might even help tourists and business travellers.

Speed trap
Is your net connection as fast as your modem claims, or as slow as it feels? The depressing answer is almost certainly the latter. Find out with a clever bit of programming on the Microsoft Network, which will measure your connection speed at Microsoft has also launched a test version of its online calendar, but it doesn't yet synch with anything, not even Microsoft's Outlook 2000 personal information management program.

Top links
HotLinks stores people's bookmarks (links to favourite sites) at www.hotlinks.com so they can access them from anywhere with any computer. But there's a twist. Hotlinks has totted up the links from more than 100,000 users to create a small Yahoo-style guide. Sites with small numbers of "votes" may not be much good, but the ones most often linked to must be worth a visit.

Tent city
A monstrous blancmange or the tourist attraction of the millennium? Dome visitors are invited to express their views via the unofficial site at www.domevote.co.uk both in the online chat room and by voting. And if the site takes off, it may even help the undecided.

A dog's life
The first greyhounds have just been born on the web to Nikki Lee, winner of the Northern Oaks and other races. Now the plan is to follow the pups via webcams until they begin racing. You can check out their forms at www.syndicate.co.uk

Dead stupid
Human stupidity knows no bounds, they say. The truth of this adage is shown by the stories of the 1999 Darwin Award Winners, posted at www.DarwinAwards.com Darwins are given posthumously to stupid people who have eliminated themselves from the gene pool.

Moving on
Yahoo, the internet's favourite search site, is now gearing up to support mobile phone and handheld computers. It's starting with 3Com's Palm machines: see the screenshots at http://mobile.yahoo.com/sample.html if you want to know how it looks. For all mobile phone and pager users, the place to start is http://mobile.yahoo.com

Six of the best: Brief lives

Home of the bio
http://biography.com
The Internet Oracle
www.searchgateway.com/
Search for a star
www.celebsites.com
Lives - the links
http://members.home.net/klanxner/lives
Biographical dictionary
www.s9.com/biography
Simple search centre
www.biography-center.com