Footnote.com, a social-networking genealogy and history site, recently released an interactive version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall . You can search for a particular solider, or view the annotated, clickable wall by browsing. Registered users (a basic account is free) can add photos, comments, and story pages to any solider on the Wall.
OnGuardOnline.gov is a federal website with practical tips on securing your computer and guarding against Internet fraud. Information is delivered with videos, tutorials, and games designed to test and expand your knowledge. Topics include laptop security, social networking, malware, identity theft and much more.
Although it is a common misconception that Google Earth images are real-time, they are not. There are, however, two ways to view nearly real-time satellite images on Google Earth. For three-hour old weather images, look for the Clouds layer, found under the new Weather layer folder. NASA also has a layer called DailyPlanet which shows the entire Earth, continuously updated in real-time at a medium resolution. For more Google Earth tips, read the Google Earth Blog.
Rasterbator is a free service that creates huge mural-size images from any picture. Simply upload an image, and then download and print the resulting multi-page PDF. Re-assemble the pages and you will have an extremely cool looking poster that can be as tall as sixty-five feet. If your original image is more than a megabyte in size, you’ll want to download the free Rasterbator Windows utility instead of using the online service.
Read This To Me is a free reading service for the blind, powered by volunteers and Internet collaboration. The blind person faxes a document to be read to the toll free ReadThisToMe fax number, and a volunteer reader (with the faxed document on his screen) will call the client and read it to him. Have a few minutes to spare while in front of your computer? Visit the website to sign up as a volunteer.
Polling is a fun way to take the pulse of a community. And if you have a webpage, blog or profile on a popular social networking site, BuzzDash makes it easy to create and distribute a your own custom poll. Polls can have from two to five answer options, can be skinned in a variety of themes, and can optionally be shared on the BuzzDash site.
Google’s Street View is now live at Google Maps for five cities (San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami) with more cities coming soon. Street View is a 360-degree street-level photograph that has some people upset about privacy concerns. Here, for example, is a view of a San Francisco restaurant I dined at over the long Memorial Day weekend. Google retorts that all photos are taken from public streets, and therefore they are not violating anyone’s privacy. What do you think?
Avid readers have long swapped books with friends. Now, with online book-swapping sites acting as middlemen, we can trade books with complete strangers. Although the basic concept is the same, each of the following sites handles the mechanics of postage and mailing labels slightly differently. Take a look at Bookins, and Paperback Swap. For more choices, here’s a longer list of book, CD and DVD swapping sites .
Time for dinner? Search expert Tara Calishain created a useful recipe search tool she calls “Cookin’ with Google“. Simply enter a few ingredients, and Google will find you a list of appropriate recipes. The reason this works so much better than finding recipes directly from the Google Search box, is that Calishain’s tool restricts the search to six well-known recipe sites.
In the old days, TV and Internet were two separate technologies. But today they are merging, and many TV networks now offer their most popular shows online, on demand. Seabreeze Computers has put together a list of where you can watch your favorite American TV shows online, and World Wide Internet Television lists over 2300 international broadcasts in dozens of languages.
