************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * <kamamer@yahoo.com> * * * ************************************************************** I'm always collecting links I think might form the core of a future column. Sometimes I get around to writing the column. Sometimes I don't. I thought I'd clear out some of the links currently clogging my idea pipe. InfoSpace www.infospace.com/canada/ A lot of people know about www.canada411.ca, the massive Canada-wide white pages. Few seem to be aware of a similar and expanded service offered by a portal site called InfoSpace. Like Canada 411, InfoSpace's People Finder section lets you search for a Canadian phone number based on a name. At InfoSpace, however, you can do what is known as a "reverse look up". You punch in a phone number and InfoSpace spits out the name and address of the number holder. It's a handy feature if you don't have call display and occasionally use that *69 Bell feature. Parody Songs and Commercials www.premrad.com Parody is probably the hardest form of humour to pull off. It requires a high degree subtly on the part of the creator and a robust ego on the part of the listener. Neither seem to be predictably resident in the North American psyche. Under its comedy link, the Premiere Radio Network's web site archives parody songs and commercials produced by its various radio stations that dot America. The material is downloadable in Real Audio format. A lot of it is pretty clever. A cute one is "Canadian Woman", a parody of "American Woman". Clever lines in the song include "Don't con me with your French accents / and your dollar is worth only fifteen cents". PostPet www.sony.com.sg/postpet Sony's Singapore web site features an interesting email utility that marries the fading Tamagotchi craze with artificial life, artificial intelligence, and an ancient Commodore 64 game called Little Computer People. PostPet is a bear that delivers your email. In return, you provide it with virtual food and other necessities of virtual life. As you write email, PostPet learns about you and starts writing back. When you email other PostPet users, pets begin to trade messages between themselves. They fall in love, get into quarrels, and keep secret diaries. If you get right into it, plug-ins are available that let you expand your pet's living quarters, entertain your pet in new ways, and subject your pet to a variety of illnesses. The Easter Egg Archive www.eeggs.com As adults like to hide painted eggs for children to find on Easter Sunday, hardware and software developers like to hide small messages, bits of music, pictures, animations that slag the competition, and games inside their creations. Improbable key combinations and incantations will conjure up these Easter eggs on your computer. The Easter Egg Archive offers a massive list of found eggs and the steps required to display them. A lot are, unfortunately, just cryptic error dialogs. Science Daily www.sciencedaily.com Science Daily offers a collection of the day's top scientific news written for the average Joe. You'll find stories ranging from discoveries of possible cancer treatments to important breakthroughs in the quest for the holy grail of food science: good tasting low-fat mozzarella. We may live to see it in our time. Northern Light www.northernlight.com Trying to start a new web search engine is a bit like trying to introduce a new brand of salt. Everyone is mining the same source and it's pretty hard to differentiate your product. The primary way search engines set themselves apart is in the completeness and accuracy of the results. The Northern Light site, the net's newest search engine, boasts the largest number of indexed pages. It tries improve accuracy by sorting search results into "search folders" organized by topic. As a test, I did a search on "Sonia Jun", the name of my favorite Toronto Symphony violinist. Northern Light turned up 13 hits including a picture of her cat. How delightful! Hotbot, one of the other search engine biggies, managed 4 hits. Altavista faired better with 19 hits but turned up a couple irritating false positives.