Neuromancy
Forget the hype over Star Wars: Episode 1. Real geeks and the digerati will be far more excited at the prospect that, at last, they can jack in to the Matrix when the film version of William Gibson's Neuromancer comes to the big screen. When? The official website at www.neuromancer.org, isn't saying much about anything, but the opening Flash sequence is nice. Brit music video director Chris Cunningham is doing us the honours of filming the 1984 novel in which Gibson coined the word "cyberspace" and pretty much envisioned the then-nonexistent world wide web. Interestingly, the film's creators also want to develop a parallel website. "Our goal with the Neuromancer website is to provide an opportunity for artists, writers, technologists, and fans to collaborate and create a vision for the internet of the future," they say. Unfortunately there are no further details about that project either, but this looks like a site worth watching.
Let's play
Mix the writings of psychologist August Klein and the deconstructed memories of artist Arthur Doyle and you just might end up with the hypnotic website Play-lets at www.clubi.ie/stunned/playlets, a web project by artist Conor McGarrigle. The hypertextual site was one of 13 international entries chosen for the art gallery at the venerable computer animation conference SIGGRAPH this month in Los Angeles. If it all sounds too arty, keep in mind that there's a cool Javascript simulation of Asteroids (above) included in the site.
Keep in touch
Be sure to pack this address along with the walking shoes and sunscreen. The perfect website for the wired traveller is Net Caf* Guide, at www.netcafeguide.com/mail, which gives information on 1,300 cybercafes around the world and also fetches your email from any POP server. All you have to do is type in your email address and - if you aren't squeamish about such things - your password; there's no need to set up a special online email account. Check out the site's privacy statement if you want more detail on how the site is run.
Grammar school
Why not educate yourself instead of wasting time looking at frivolous web pages? Sign up for free grammar lessons at Daily Grammar at www.dailygrammar.com. An American English teacher emails out a brief lesson five days a week, and at the end of the week, you also get the extra pleasure of a quiz on all you've learned. If that sounds like it will sap too much of your already-scarce August energy, you can, like 200,000 linguaphiles, opt instead to receive a word and its definition a day from A Word A Day at www.wordsmith.org/awad
Speakeasy
Peacefire, the youth alliance against internet censorship, features a "blocked site of the day": a site which has been censored by governments, "nanny" software or other organisations. The website at www.peacefire.com provides some historical background for blocked sites and explains who is doing the blocking, and why. Peacefire also has links to other material related to online censorship, including texts of government bills, pending lawsuits, and information about the possibility of a PC version of the "V-chip" - a censoring chip designed for television sets.
World view
Did you know that the UK has 170 paved medium-sized airports, while Brazil has only 130? Such essential pieces of information, comparing any two countries or entire regions like the EU or African continent, are generated by Your Nation at www.your-nation.com. Pick what you'd like to compare and contrast and the results are displayed in a nice little bar chart.
Skin deep
Go on, admit it: your VCR still says it is eternally noon because you can't be bothered to dig through the manual to figure out how to set the time. Yet seven year olds have no difficulty setting the clock on a PC. According to online magazine Feed's editor Stephen Johnson, that's because the interfaces on home electronics have barely changed in a decade, while PC interfaces - at least, DOS-based ones - keep advancing. Johnson thinks the next big innovation will be the wide adoption of the concept of "skins" - changeable, customisable interfaces that first appeared with the WinAmp program, an application that lets PC users play MP3 music files. Johnson delves into the idea of flexible computer interfaces in his column at www.feedmag.com.
Who's there?
Ever wonder how many people are linking to your own website? You can get that information for free from Link Popularity, www.linkpopularity.com. Just type in your page's address and this tool queries the search engines AltaVista, HotBot and InfoSeek for webpages with references to your site.
Six of the best: Fiction and literary sites
Vast Victorian website www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/ landow/victorian/ victov.html
Libyrinth: Borges, Joyce, Marquez & Co
http://rpg.net/quail/libyrinth
Literary Gothic. Spooky!
www.siue.edu/~jvoller/gothic.html
Beat Generation
www.levity.com/corduroy
Luminarium: medieval-17th century
www.luminarium.org/lumina.htm
Banned Books Online
www.cs.cmu.edu/People/spok/banned-books.html