Can do
ICan, the new BBCi community website aimed at helping grassroots political activism, launches on Monday. You can find support for local campaigns as well as practical advice on a range of subjects, such as how to deal with nuisance neighbours, or challenge being struck off by your GP. The Beeb says it will use iCan to keep its ear to the ground and combat what it sees as a rising tide of political apathy. The site, which requires registration, has been in beta test for the past six months. www.bbc.co.uk/ican
Big List
After the successful launch of ABCtales.com - a site dedicated to amateur storytelling, with 32,413 stories and poems online - Jonn Bird MBE, pioneer of the Big Issue, is back with a new site based on lists. It offers, in PDF format, more than 100 essential lists, ranging from things to do before you go on holiday to how to apply for a job, with tips for further reading. The site has lively discussion forums and lets you suggest topics for future lists. The first 10 lists are free, the remainder cost between £1 and £3 each. Half the money raised goes directly to help homeless people via the Big Issue Foundation. www.bigissuelists.co.uk
www.abctales.com
www.bigissue.com
Go underground
As Bill Bryson once observed, an out-of-town visitor using Harry Beck's famous London tube map to get from, say, Bank station to Mansion House would "quite understandably board a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, transfer to the Circle Line and continue for another five stops to Mansion House and emerge 200 yards down the street from where he started." A geographically based map, showing the stations where they really are, was produced by Simon Clarke in December 2000, but it has only been available on the web. You can download his fascinating interpretation at the fan site listed below.
Meanwhile, London Underground's customer charter states you are entitled to a full refund if your journey is delayed by 15 minutes or more when it is their fault. But, says Paul Hatcher, a software consultant and frustrated Central Line commuter, "they do not make it easy to claim, resulting in only one in 10 forms taken by passengers actually being handed in". So Hatcher set up a simple website to make it easier. First you send a text message. Within minutes you get an email with a link to the claim form.
www.tuberefund.co.uk
http://tube.tfl.gov.uk/content
http://rodcorp.typepad.com
Mapping media
Measuring media bias by recording how much attention major news organisations give to different parts of the world has been a staple since Noam Chomsky took a ruler to the columns of the Washington Post. The global attention profiles (Gap) website is an attempt to take the ideas a stage further and present a live update of exactly where the news media attention lies. The site, the work of Ethan Zuckerman, a graduate of Harvard Law School, performs more than 1,700 daily web searches tracking the countries each story mentions. It then compares its findings with a range of statistics, including national GDP and population, and presents the results in a colour map.
The site's major flaw is that it does not include the US. However, Zuckerman notes that the BBC demonstrated radically different attention patterns from its US counterparts, as the BBC's attention is closely correlated to the size of a nation's population and not its GDP. He also notes that violent conflict draws attention to a nation, but less than might be expected.
http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ ezuckerman
www.zmag.org/chomsky
World tour
Tito Dupret is a multimedia photographer travelling the world with his Nikon 4500, Macintosh PowerBook, and a daily budget of $12. He has set himself the task of producing virtual reality movies (using the QuickTime plug-in) of all the world's heritage sites. In all, 52 World Heritage sites - or 7% - have been covered. The results are breathtaking examples of how good such movies can be. www.world-heritage-tour.org
And finally...
What to say to boss when caught reading Web watch at work: www.adminprof.com/howto/caughtsurfing.htm
New & noted
Resources on hermits and solitude
Time to confess
How pencils are made
www.pencilpages.com/articles/make.htm
Six of the best: Halloween
The Simpsons Halloween episode guide
www.sprynge-fielde.co.uk
Safe sites for kids
www.links4kids.co.uk/halloween.htm
Don't Panic!
www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A175385
Jesus-O-Lantern
www.christiancrafters.com/craft_jesus_lantern.html
The pagan festival
www.witchvox.com/holidays/xsamhain.html
The day of the dead
www.azcentral.com/ent/dead
