Witch's web
Blair Witch is back this week with a three day webfest (See www.blairwitchwebfest.com) of events, many involving the cast of the new movie, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. The sequel is being released in the US on October 27, just before Halloween, and has taken over the official site at www.blairwitch.com . For independent info, see Upcomingmovies.com/blairwitch2.html and the Internet Movie Database.

Cracked it
A Swedish team has broken all 10 of the codes set as a £10,000 challenge in Simon Singh's The Code Book ( www.4thestate.co.uk/cipherchallenge, a history of codes and code-breaking published almost a decade ago. The team, led by Fredrik Almgren of Across Wireless, explains how they did it at http://codebook.org/codebook_solution.html. The cracking of the final 256-bit code was well timed, coming before the end of Channel 4's current series, The Science Of Secrecy.

Simon Singh has a website at www.simonsingh.com

Your song
Old webheads will remember Ringo, an MIT Media Lab site that used "collaborative filtering" to recommend music you might enjoy. If you told Ringo what you liked, it would tell you about other music highly rated by other people who liked the same things as you. Ringo morphed into Firefly and HOMR (Helpful Online Music Recommendation Service) before finally being snapped up by Microsoft and never heard of again.

Now SongExplorer offers the same sort of service via a somewhat overweight space-themed website. SongExplorer is backed by Edison Media Research, which supplies music-preference research to the radio industry "to help determine what gets played".

If you want to learn about the background technology, you can read Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating "Word Of Mouth" by the Media Labs' Upendra Shardanand and Pattie Maes.

Fold@Home
Now you can put your PC's wasted processing power to use to help unravel the mystery of how proteins put themselves together. The Fold@Home project) has been launched by researchers at Stanford University, California, with software for PCs and Linux. It follows the popularity of Berkeley's SETI@Home project, where home computers are being used in Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the Golem Project.

Reality bites
AllTrue.com has started to assemble the world's biggest collection of "reality-video clips", and encouraging the creation of clips of the sort that fuel downmarket TV channels. But even sleaze does not come cheap. The start-up is backed by $8m in venture capital and the site design can bring an ADSL connection to its knees.

Talksearch
Looking for a soundbite? Compaq researchers are developing SpeechBot, a search engine for audio and video content hosted on the web. SpeechBot is still a text-based search engine, but it operates on transcripts produced automatically using speech recognition technology. This approach will become increasingly important as more and more web content comes in multimedia formats. So far, almost 8,000 hours of programming can be searched at http://speechbot.research.compaq.com.

Alien sale
The movie had a huge impact when it was launched in 1979, so there could be a healthy market for props and other souvenirs such as alien feet and arms, and the flame-thrower used by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). The props are being auctioned on the web by a company run by Mick Fleetwood, drummer with Fleetwood Mac, and memorabilia salesman Ted Owen. More celebrity auctions are promised. See www.fleetwoodowen.com

Mystery
Halloween always stimulates a flurry of activity in the US-centric parts of the web, and this year's offerings include an online whodunit. Suspicion Of Murder works like a commercial game, but it is online, and free, at www.suspicion-of-murder.com.

Streets seen
Maporama SA claims to be the European market leader in online mapping: it covers all French towns with more than 30,000 inhabitants and offers door-to-door itinerary capabilities.

Now the company is launching in the UK with coverage of all British towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants, providing some healthy competition for www.multimap.com and www.mapquest.com. Maporama's site is localised in eight languages.

New and noted
• The World Football Foundation has been launched in Shelby Township, US, and Reykjavik, Iceland, to develop soccer worldwide. Seewww.worldfootball.org.
• Writer and reviewer AA Gill has a website to publish work by travel journalists at www.travelintelligence.net
• Japanese toys are reviewed at www.cooljapanesetoys.com
• Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: www.runnymedetrust.org/meb/TheReport.htm
• Send chocolate printed with personalised messages: www.groovychocolate.com
• Fashion flop Boo.com will return to the fray at www.boo.com on October 30.

Six of the best Words

Microsoft Dictionary
http://dictionary.msn.co.uk/
Language portal
www.dictionary.com
A Word A Day
www.wordsmith.org/awad
Anagram Server
www.wordsmith.org/anagram
Fowler (1908)
www.bartleby.com/116
Michael Quinion
www.worldwidewords.org/