gizblog

The Celebrity Inside

Site of the week: addictive, sophisticated and almost completely pointless.

Myheritage.com is a site seemingly focused on genealogy and family communities, but is in fact a new version of Hot-or-Not (which has morphed into a dating site since I last went there years ago).

The idea behind Myheritage is that you load up a photo of yourself and it profiles the features of your face, then identifies which celebrities you are 'within' you. It all seems very high tech.

I had a couple of goes, and was matched with John Cusack (a pretty good match), Brad Pitt (obviously) and Jean Michel Jarr (really?). But there were also some alarming but entertaining wild cards: General Noriega, Tiger Woods and Deep Roy (the bloke who played all the Oompa Loompas in Tim Burton's Charlie and The Chocolate Factory).

Good fun, and well executed, but check it out soon. I can't see how it'll make any sensible money.

Keeping Tabs on Westminster

Years ago, before MP's had email addresses, a site appeared called faxyourmp Typing a message into a webpage and pressing send ensured that a fax was sent to the appropriate MP's office.

Theyworkforyou is the successor, and is all singing and dancing. Research your MP's speeches and voting records, and contact them easily. Every democracy should have one.

Unbelievable photos

Flickr has done it again. They've just introduced a geotagging service for photos. Any uploaded photos can now be easily dropped onto the exact spot on the map where they were taken.

Within a few days of it being introduced there are 1 million plus photos already on the map. It's addictive, intuitive, and wonderful. Search for photos of places you know  by clicking here

I haven't mentioned Flickr before, but my public photos are available here. My user name is giz. (with a full stop at the end) if you want to add me as a contact.

Books on the web

Three great book sites that I use regularly.

One of my main university tutors is retiring this month. It reminded me that I'd never read A Shropshire Lad, the Housman poem that he'd once recommended to me. I went to a bookshop one lunchtime, but they didn't have it in stock. But it's on Bartleby, as are loads of other fiction and non fiction titles. All easily searchable, and available for free.

Project Gutenberg has 18,000 books for download, all of which are out of copyright in the US. More than 2 million books a month are downloaded from this site.

And finally, there's an interesting community site at Librarything. By entering the books you're reading you'll be connected to other people who have similar tastes and interests, and be introduced to other books that they're reading.

Alan Bennett's complaint about the demise of the independent bookseller is right in some respects: the high street will be duller, and there will be fewer places to browse. But he's wrong, in the long run, about the lessening availability of less popular titles. As Chris Anderson has shown, digital distribution should mean greater availability than in the offline world, and the issues over copyright protection and royalties should not be insurmountable. The three sites above, and Amazon, are glimpses of things to come.

Stumble Upon

It's not easy to discover interesting new sites on the web. Search engines are great if you know what you're looking for, but not much help in the serendipity of finding everything else.

I've just found stumbleupon which is a bit like delicious in that it's a community of people who are bookmarking interesting sites that they find so that others can find them too. But there's a twist.

When you sign up for stumbleupon you select the categories of sites that you're interested in, and you get a "Stumble!" button on your browser. Whenever you click it you're redirected to a randomly selected site from your chosen categories. A bit like "I'm feeling lucky" on Google, but without having searched for anything at all. You can also submit the sites that you like so that others can get them.

It's addictive, partly because it's so random and hit-and-miss (although ratings presumably reduce this over time). Here are three sites that I found within a few minutes that I found interesting: create your own Picasso masterpiece at Mr Picasso , a fun photo project at their circular life, and an interesting music recommendation engine at Pandora.

Fly over London

A great little site which mashes up Google earth into a flight simulator. Simple, clever and fun.

It's a shame you can't go very high in the sky. But presumably that's because it's a bi-plane.

Click here for the site which is called Goggles.