Google calc
What is half a cup in teaspoons? The answer, according to Google, is 24. You can find this out just by typing in the question, because Google is no longer just a search engine, it's also a calculator. Not only does it do simple arithmetic, such as cube root of 343 and 17.5% of 49.99, it can work out more complicated sums such as 99! and 99 99. The examples quoted include (G * mass of earth) / (radius of earth 2) and e (i * pi). However, while Google will give answers for some measures, such as Btu, the first question here assumes US cups and US teaspoons, so British cooks may not find it so useful. Also, so far, Google does not convert currencies, so you will still need a link to the Universal Currency Converter or a similar site.
www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator
www.xe.com/ucc/
www.alltheweb.com/
Brain feed
One of the few things Google is not so good at is answering plain English questions. That is something lots of people have wanted to automate, but just understanding the questions is hard work for a computer. Start, from MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, has been doing it on the web since 1993, and Ask Jeeves has invited natural language questions without, in my experience, handling them particularly well. Brainboost uses machine learning and natural language processing with variable results. Links from the results allow you to compare its answers with Start, Ask Jeeves, Google and other alternatives.
www.brainboost.com
www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infolab/ailab.html
www.ask.com
Collect Britain
The richness, variety and sheer scale of the Smithsonian Institution web site make it hard to beat. However, Collect Britain - home of the British Library's new lottery-funded digitisation project - is at least a step in the right direction. The site has three sections: Collections, Virtual Exhibitions, and Themed Tours. So far there is only virtual exhibition online, Literary Landscapes, and one themed tour, The Old East End, but both are well worth a visit.
www.collectbritain.co.uk/
www.si.edu/
Pay & play
In what is claimed to be the world's first online music competition, musicians can upload their entries as an MP3 file. All the judges have to do is download them and listen. Members who pay to join the site can also vote in all the competitions, which start with piano, oboe, violin and trumpet. Musicians must be aged between 17 and 27 and have to pay £50 to enter, but the winners get a cash prize of £5,000 and a trip to Cardiff to perform live. These concerts will be webcast, then broadcast later by the BBC World Service - the competition's supporters include the BBC and the Welsh Development Agency. You have to play scales before recording your competition piece, and the organisers reckon their software will reliably weed out any attempts at cheating.
www.worldwebmusicians.com
Blog control
European blogging site 20six has moved to a new platform and now offers new features such as team blogging and access control as well as, finally, RSS syndication. Access control could be very attractive to business users, and it is still free. 20six is run by Azeem Azhar, who used to work on Online. Indeed, he put together the Guardian Online website, which we launched in 1995.
www.20six.co.uk
Golden games
Voting has started to reward the games of the year in the long-running C&VG Golden Joystick awards. Last year, more than 30,000 people voted online. I suspect even more might do so if the website was not so horribly hard to use.
www.goldenjoystick.com
Shorts
Tiscali Entertainment has started streaming short films, starting with Sixth Scent (a comic tale about the laws of karma at work) and The Brixtonian (spoof documentary about a white trustafarian who wants to be black) in RealMedia format. It's hardly competition for Atomfilms but at least Tiscali also has a plain text version of the site.
www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/shortfilms
www.atomfilms.com
