May Day
We went to press before yesterday's May Day protests, but there's plenty of online coverage of the day's events. The Guardian has a special report dedicated to the subject while Indymedia, a loose worldwide network of alternative news websites, has a UK branch that had comprehensive coverage last year. And the long-standing Urban75 website is always worth a look, if only to give Jean-Marie Le Pen a virtual "king size slap".
God squad
The ongoing struggle between satirists and the US evangelical Christian movement makes for one of the more entertaining spectacles on the web, and especially so in the past few weeks.
A number of net news outlets, plus the usual gaggle of weblogs, jumped on a site from "Objective Christian Ministries" hosted by a Christian ISP, TruePath.com. The site was campaigning to have the Landover Baptist website (a notoriously extreme, net satire on US Christian websites) shut down. In the process, the alleged author also let rip at a number of computing targets - not least Apple and its new operating system, which "promotes Darwinism" (because part of the new OS X is based on code called Darwin).
"Consider the name of the company and its logo," said the site. " ...an Apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent. It is now Apple Computers offering us temptation, thereby aligning themselves with the forces of darkness."
Cracking stuff, but now it appears that this page too was, in fact, a spoof - a highly effective publicity stunt for Landover Baptist, perhaps?
Research aid
You won't find this anywhere obvious on Google's site, but the net's best search engine is testing a curious new service: Google Answers. The concept is simple: users ask a question, offer a fee, and a paid researcher, pre-screened by Google, will answer it. It's a bit like the Guardian's own Notes and Queries, only with no editing involved.
Any adult can apply to be a researcher - they just have to impress Google with a reasonably written essay on why they'd like the job - which may make the quality of the answers pretty variable, despite a public review system. And none are going to get rich on the fees up for grabs, which range from $4 to $50 (Google takes 25%, the researcher gets the rest).
The quality of the questions may vary, too: when Online looked in earlier this week there was a thinly disguised economics essay question on the "lower of cost or market rule", for which the researcher would be paid a less-than-princely $5. Other questions look like they are intended to defame rather than glean new knowledge.
Evil doing
Speaking of forces of darkness, have you ever wished you had an Evil Plan, but just never had the time to draw one up? Now you can, thanks to the automated Evil Plan generator. It allows you to put together a dark manifesto of nastiness that would do any B movie plot proud, complete with choice of motive (from "money" to "my mum never loved me") to dazzling array of weapons (from "thermonuclear missiles" to "needlessly big weather machine", which sounds just the job).
Hide 'n' sneak
Net surfers, tiring of going through the time-consuming process of giving away their contact details to be abused, are coming up with some pretty simple, yet effective, ways to get round it, like the NYT Random Login Generator. The page allows you to look at the New York Times' registered users-only pages without parting with your details, by filling in their forms with meaningless gar ble. Reading the NYT earlier this week, therefore, I was a 35-year-old female German cleric earning between $90-99k specialising in information technology. Which wasn't accurate, of course.
Club together
Away from the corporate glitz of the World Cup in the Far East, this summer will prove to be one of the hardest ever for dozens of Nationwide league football clubs. ITV Digital's demise this week means that several communities could see their local clubs go to the wall. Brighton fans - who this week went from celebrating promotion to watching their manager walk out over a lack of funds only days later - maintain a list of English clubs in crisis, with links to the groups of supporters trying to keep their clubs alive.
Billy Bass
Remember Billy Bass, the singing fish that (allegedly) delighted Her Majesty the Queen? Now she - and you - can add brains to Billy through the power of Linux. These brains will add new phrases to Billy's repertoire, enhance his movement and, "create a Billy whose novelty never wears".
