Thoughtplay

WSYVF is back!

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:06:17 GMT

We're delighted to announce that we've relaunched our famous election quiz site, Who Should You Vote For? - this time focusing on the US primaries and presidential election campaigns. There are three quizzes at the moment, one each just for Democrats and Republicans, and one for people independent of either perspective. Try them now!

Food for the future

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:54:27 GMT

While we're on the subject of environmental issues... this site about food waste is a great idea and very tastefully implemented, with lots of practical advice.

I sing the city electric

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 07:55:00 GMT

It's got a New Zealand-specific bias, but ElectroCity is a great idea: a city sim game in Flash that's based around environmental and energy constraints, teaching some useful lessons about how power is generated and energy sustained in the content of global warming. Oh, and it's pretty and fun.

Make your own entertainment pt 2

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:30:31 GMT

Wikinomics, Microtrends, Long Tail, Tipping Point... there's good money in coming up with some dubiously-argued premise for How Everything Works in modern society. Now Wired magazine has provided a handy concept generator for rolling your own.

Make your own entertainment

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:53:08 GMT

Here's more on crowdsourcing entertainment: (a) the enjoyable collaborative sitcom Where are the Joneses? (watch the episodes here), where episode ideas were discussed on a wiki (b) Crude is a documentary about climate change and the oil industry which has been 'crowd-funded' - and contributors have also been invited to appear in it.

Dear internet...

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:19:23 GMT

If your website: 1. Only works in certain browsers 2. Only works on PCs 3. Requires users to register before they can see what it does...

Million dollar thoughts - for free

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:17:51 GMT

Quelle surprise - there's another variant of Alex Tew's infamous Million Dollar Homepage: the Million Dollar Wiki (MDW). Spend $100 to 'bag' a page which you can fill with content of your choice, rather like Squidoo, which is largely regarded as a failure since it's been over-run with spam (though is at least free). MDW guarantees your page is yours (unless you sell it on) for 15 years. Some people claim to be making small amounts of money from MDW, such as John Chow. Step back, though, and of course the only people advertising, or certainly only thos emaking any money back, are people advertising services to... people considering advertising at MDW...

Taking on Lulu

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 10:53:57 GMT

Interesting to see that Amazon has launched its own on-demand publishing platform, CreateSpace, covering video and audio as well as books. this could be a serious challenge to the main player so far in this field, Lulu.

In a mine, a few diamonds shine

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:26:37 GMT

It's not very well presented, and surely risks a visit from Google's trademark lawyers, but GoogleReport does offer something intriguing: a shorter, deeper set of search results. Basically it appears to mine the best results from Google, plus content at Wikipedia, when you enter a search term. Interesting idea that could benefit from improvement.

A picture's worth a thousand free reproductions

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:05:53 GMT

Schmap's creators have had a smart idea. We came across them through an email requesting use of an image we'd put up at Flickr, in this case of a place in Edinburgh - Schmap publishes travel guides and is hunting down images people have posted publicly to use in them. They don't pay, but promise acknowledgement and possible exposure. They're the ones who gain, though: free content, already tagged and labelled.