www.gwer.com/
dubois.key-net.net/users/bhoover/
www.stomped.com/
www.submit-it.com/
www.liszt.com/
www.disinfo.com/
spang.com/
www.pixelsight.com:80/PS/asciiart/ascii_graphic.htmlCNN PageNet: small, sweet and superbly Shocked. www.cnn.com/ads/pagenet/
Spike heels, sequins and, well, a menagerie of the most divine coiffures on the planet. www.wigout.com/
Cast your mind back to July 1995, and the infamous "Stop French Nuclear Testing!" chain email petition. Initiated by Yuichi Nishihara and Shimizu Seishi, both physics undergrads at the University of Tokyo, the chain email quickly grew into a monster, irritating sysadmins worldwide as it gobbled up bandwidth. The site at www.nbi.dk/~dickow/stop-chain-letter.txt tells how the beast was eventually reigned in; the protest was then transferred to a dull Web site, whereupon it soon withered and died. The lesson? A Web site is compelling, or it's history - protest or no protest.All too often, protest sites fall into the trap of preaching to the converted. Fine, if you view the Web as a simple information sink for existing supporters, but wasteful if you're after new converts. Ecological activists Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets, both fall headlong into this trap.
Unsurprisingly, Friends of the Earth is a far more professional effort, but the site is a window into the home of a community, rather than an open door. Sure, there's a secure credit-card-enabled membership form, but little on the site genuinely to engage the surfer. Brochureware 1, Community Building 0.
But hey, it's not all doom and gloom down on the online barricades. The McDonalds-baiting McSpotlight site is a fine blueprint for all protest sites. Even if it's only to cause Mucky D's management to froth at the mouth (who mentioned mad cows?), this site compels. Make that Compels. McSpotlight not only dishes out the dirt via a vast FAQ, it also encourages participation by offering daily news updates, debating rooms and a truly inspirational frames-based guided tour - complete with translation - of McDonalds' official Web site. It nurtures a like-minded community by arguing a case, rather than bludgeoning with rhetoric. Ronald must be choking on those gherkins.
- Garret Keogh
Today's wired schoolkids are jammy little gits. At age ten, I lost two valuable weeks of holiday concocting 18 pages of inane, fallacious drivel about giant squid. Last month, I happened across In Search of Giant Squid, at seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/squid.html.It all came came flooding back: squid myths, squid stats, squid pictures, squid models, squid links, squid movies. In short, an A-grade project's worth of choice squidfo, all in eminently downloadable, 100% teacher-friendly format.
- Tom Loosemore
Every time you surf, your browser could be accepting sweets (well, biccies...) from complete strangers. A cookie is a tiny text file created on your hard disk by Web sites so they can snoop on and record your movements (see home.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html for the full lowdown). Most browsers allow you the option of refusing individual cookies, but the constant clicking on the "Refuse Cookie" box drives you nuts.With the tag line "If it's out there, we can filter it," Privnet Inc offers a hassle-free cookie-munching solution. Called Internet Fast Forward (IFF), this slick program (Windows NT/95; around 875K) silently refuses cookies from unapproved sites. Your mother would approve.
- Tom Loosemore
Deluging an online enemy with hundreds of emails is neither big nor clever. Luckily, mailbombing software is notoriously fickle. Until now, that is.Netscape's version of JavaScript may be a bastardised abomination of a programming language, but it's powerful enough to allow even functional illiterates to bury their pet hates in an avalanche of email - all from inside the comfort of your own browser. (Sidle over to main.succeed.net/~bbuster/hacking/bomb.html).
This is true Internet Abuse, and ought to be suppressed vigorously along with its author, one "AcidAngel". I'll get to it as soon as I've cleared my inbox of those 20,000 messages....
- Jim Smith
Imagine if RealAudio 3 and Shockwave Streamed Audio were sold at the supermarket with bold labels crying "CD Quality Sound!". Anne Robinson and her Watchdog team would be on the case, pointing out that any CD sounding like this would be landfilled and re-pressed before you can mutter "lossy compression".But Anne would be missing the point, for both technologies allow perfectly listenable stereo music to play as it downloads, thanks to compression rates of up to 176:1.
Macromedia's Shockwave Audio is the sexier of the two, linked as it is with slick interactive Director movies replete with gorgeous buttons and fiddlesome sliders. RealAudio is more utilitarian, but it does allow live broadcast. Macromedia, naturally enough, sees this as being RealAudio's sole application in the future, while Shockwave sweeps the pre-recorded board. The coming six months should settle things.
Instant aural gratification comes witha price, however. RA 3 really needs ISDN bandwidth. And even with a whop-ping 14Mb of RAM assigned to soothe its sweating brow, Netscape often balks at "Shocked" sites. Maybe it was merely drawing the line at playing me that Duran Duran snippet....
- Phil Gyford