Computer Times
Interesting World Wide Web Sites

Web Development

Go to front page

Want to see the newest way advertisers will be crawling into your browsers? Yahoo has highlighted a variety of designer ads, created by Web magicians Michael Graves, Philippe Starck, Paul Frank, Karim Rashid, Erik Adigard, and Romero Britto. These come in the format of L-Rec (large rectangle) and super banner ad units, all storyboarded in advance like movies before their screen translation. The online adfest sponsored by One and Yahoo coincides with an art event in Miami. World Wide Web: http://promo.yahoo.com/designerads

The Oscars of the online world took place last night in San Francisco, and the results of the star-studded event are Available online. Not only is reading about the winning sites amusing, but so are the winners' acceptance speeches which have been kept, by tradition, to five words or less. The winner for Best Humor Site was The Onion and the acceptance speech was short and sweet: "To advertise call Phil Meyer." Accepting for OpenSecrets.org as Best Political Site, the winner's words were: "Spy on Washington, it's fun." World Wide Web: http://www.webbyawards.com

Here's a way to get a sneak peek at what the news industry is thinking about when it gets the news to you over the Web. The Advanced Interactive Media (AIM) Group has placed its "Great Ideas" booklet online. The document was compiled in conjunction with Newspaper Association of America for its upcoming "Connections" conference, and is available on the AIM site for free. AIM chief Peter Zollman says the booklet contains nearly 60 ideas from interactive newspaper sites, "some of them tried-and-true, others really offbeat and quirky." While a lot of them are about trying to generate revenue, others are just about getting information to newsreaders in interesting ways. The site does request registration. World Wide Web: http://www.aimgroup.com/reports

Need to be notified if your Web site goes down? This free service allows entry of two different URLs for constant monitoring, and notifies you by e-mail if either of the sites go down, and again, every 30 minutes, until the site is back up. The e-mail contains specific information on the outages, including DNS timeouts, connection refusals, socket timeouts, or errors in the path to the Web site. Once registered, a user gets their own "My Internetseer" control panel to change or add info. World Wide Web: http://www.internetseer.com

The World Wide Web has brought lousy language to millions. One day of 'net surfing' produces a veritable flood of cliches and misnomers. Oh, the shame of it all. Among words to chuck out the browser window are "Your," defined as in "your online guide to everything;" "your electronic pal that's fun to be with;" "your one-stop shop for what's hot and what's not." The verdict: patronizing. Then there's "point your browser at ..." explained as, "One cannot point programs at sites." Wipe away conceptual cobwebs here at this personal site by Web worker Jutta Degner. World Wide Web: http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/ht/writing/words.html

Have a site we should review? Send it to the editor at comptimes@aol.com and make your Subject line read "WWW Site For Review."

Go to top of page