Live line
Live Your Life, an online reality game show, was launched yesterday on MSN. In a cross between Big Brother and Luke Rhinehart's the Dice Man, five ordinary people have given control of part of their lives to an internet audience for 15 days. Each contestant is contractually bound to accept one decision a day decided by a potential audience of millions, although each has one "joker" to use if things get too sticky.
What kind of decisions are the contestants devolving? Nothing too serious, says MSN. Just small things such as whether the contestants should ditch their partners, move house, sell their car and so on. At stake: a £10,000 prize awarded to the most popular contestant.
Jodi
Belgium's pioneering net.artists Jodi - Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans - have just launched their new work, Untitled Game. It is a homage to John Romero, the game guru of Id Software, who helped invent the first-person shooter with Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, then went on to break the boundaries of gameplay with Quake. Both games have been deconstructed by Jodi and are now available as abstracted, skeletal versions. Shorn of most of their rendered surfaces, colour and sound effects, both games become something else entirely, but this is one of the best ways to see how such games work.
School search
Eduseek, a search engine for schools, has just been launched. Eduseek.com boasts 20,000 hand-selected links and is suitable for teachers and pupils. Like Google, the design is minimal but highly effective, and while the site features a bit of news, it is really just a search engine and not a portal. To promote the launch, Eduseek is offering all UK schools a free website.
Blog watch
Weblogs abound these days, but few are as stylish as the one at www.rebeccablood.net. Not only does Rebecca tell you where she's been surfing, she also offers one of the best critical histories of the blogging phenomenon. But all is not as it seems. Scratch the surface and you will see that the site is built around her new book, The Weblog Handbook, to be published later this year. Still worth a bookmark, mind.
Lynch web
The web is getting increasingly commercial, partly because we don't pay for content. So ads are getting bigger and more pervasive, and sponsorship is becoming more common. Some sites are trying to charge small amounts of money for "premium services", but would you pay $10 for a website? Surreal US film director David Lynch seems to think so, and has produced a website of his own. The site is full of Lynch's usual mix of the frighteningly mundane and the utterly bizarre. There are many scenes from the cutting room floor and some special web animations for those willing to cough up. But most of the content is streaming media, so you will need a fast connection.
Trade fair
Maketrade fair.com is a new online campaign, backed by Oxfam, timed to coincide with the World Bank/IMF spring meeting in Washington this weekend. It wants us to recognise that "increased prosperity has gone hand in hand with mass poverty", and that "obscene inequalities between rich and poor are widening". Make Trade Fair wants to build on the success of campaigns such as Jubilee 2000, which have helped begin to shift the burden of debt away from the world's poorest countries. Now Oxfam wants to campaign for a level playing field, so that the third world can avoid getting into debt by having a fairer share of world markets. The campaign is backed by a number of celebrities including Bono, Johnny Vegas and Ken Livingstone. The site also offers a number of templates to allow you to email world leaders including President Bush, as well as informative multimedia pages describing how world trade creates inequality. And while the site features some flashy animations, they are sparing and do not slow it down.
Muse here
The great things about online galleries and museums are that you don't have to go very far to visit them. Now, a new site makes the task even easier by collecting the best ones together in one place, a Museum of Online Museums (MoOM). Unlike the 24hr Museum, the site is US-based, and it tends to promote American galleries over the rest of the world. However, it is a valuable resource.
