Go girl!
With a cheeky nod to Nintendo's iconic handheld console, GameGirlAdvance (GGA) is a sassy games blog for girls that has established a reputation as one of the most intelligent spaces on gaming since its launch in September last year.
GGA treats games as if they were part of serious culture without ever being overtly academic or po-faced about it. The site, edited by Jane Pinckard, self-confessed devotee of computer games and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, has just added a quarterly "zine", a kind of literary journal dedicated to computer games. The first issue features articles on subjects such as how to break into the games industry and brilliant essays such as why Matthew Barney's surreal, six-hour Cremaster cycle is actually based on a game of Donkey Kong.
www.gamegirladvance.com
www.gamegirladvance.com/zine
www.umamitsunami.com
Who's the cat?
He might never have been a real doctor, but Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr Seuss, cured innumerable ailments with his tonic of laughter. More than 30 years after his death, a Hollywood movie of the Cat in the Hat, starring Mike Myers' and directed by Bo Welch (of Primary Colours and Men in Black II fame) is released in the US next week and in the UK next year. There's an official site with the usual mix of trailers and cast information (with lots more clever things promised), but real fans of Dr Seuss should head down to Seussville, a lovely, content rich site, full of colourful animations and sharp witticisms. www.catinthehat.com
<A HREF="http://www.seussville.com"<"TARGET=_NEW>www.seussville.com
Payfinder general
Does your boss pay you the going rate? Payfinder.com is a confidential web-based service that allows you to compare your salary with other workers in your chosen field. The service is free, anonymous, and once you have registered, it breaks down the information by region, age group and job title. What's more, it also includes records for all FTSE-100 executives, including bonuses and share options. Time, perhaps, to find out how much you are really worth. www.payfinder.com
Rising stock
Seyed Razavi, an Iranian-born graduate of Manchester's Umist, thinks that the blogosphere is so much like a giant stock market that he has set up a virtual index so that bloggers can become traders in the "attention economy". BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs where players get to invest a fictional $500 to buy stocks in any of 40,000 featured blogs. Information is refreshed every hour and there are over 5,000 traders already active.
<A HREF="http://www.blogshares.com"" TARGET="_NEW">www.blogshares.com
Love letters
Joan Bakewell recently wrote in G2 that today's younger generation will find it harder to remember their halcyon days because they are losing the art of letter writing. Maybe so, but today's tender hearts are finding new ways of remembering that fit in with their faster lives. Treasuremytext is a new site that allows you to store SMS from your mobile phone on the web. You must register, but the service is free, save for the price of the text message. You can even set up groups so you can shared your treasured texts with your friends or loved ones.
www.treasuremytext.com
Art blog
It as only a matter of time, but blogging has made it into the art world. A new online exhibition, curated by Pierre Coinde and Gary O'Dwyer of the Centre of Attention art gallery in east London, celebrates the art of blogging with a site that lies halfway between an exhibition and an online diary. So far the contributors range from Meredith Etherington-Smith, editor-in-chief of the Art Review, to Amir Ali Ghasemi, who studies at the Art & Architecture at the Azad University in Tehran. But the nicest thing about it is that anyone can submit to the site.
www.thecentreofattention.org/blog.html
New & noted
Vintage tech
More questions than answers
www.matrix-explained.com
The US primaries true colours
The boy Fitz Hammond
