bruceb news

The U.S. government has reworked www.firstgov.gov. It’s meant to be the entry point for all web resources related to the federal government, as well as providing links to state governments and agencies. The government has spent gazillions of dollars organizing the site and trying to make it easy to navigate. Looks like it’s well worth a spot on your favorites list.

Here’s a web site where you can listen live to whales singing and talking, through a hydrophone suspended in the water off the coast of Maui. Best listening times are from 1-9am Pacific time, and it requires RealPlayer. The whales are particularly vocal during the full moon. Very cool!

If you’re wondering whether Roger Ebert’s tepid review of Lord Of The Rings is typical (it’s not), or if everybody agrees that The Majestic is irredeemably sappy (they do), there’s two sites that give easy access to movie reviews.

The Internet Movie Database is enormous, a mind-boggling reference library on film. Click on the “External Reviews” link to see reviews of a movie in all the major newspapers, plus dozens of other sources you’ve never heard of before.

RottenTomatoes.com quotes a sentence or two from a vast array of reviews and links to the text of the full review in most cases. […] continued

Take a look at the web site for Dutton-Goldfield, Russian River Valley Winegrowers. The opening graphic is one of the most effective introductions to a web site that I’ve seen – it communicates an enormous amount in ten seconds or so. Oh, and they make wonderful wine, too.

Ready for the Internet to get more annoying? Watch for several changes in advertising on the web. A number of sites have been experimenting with bigger advertisements, taking up more of the onscreen area. Another kind of ad will be widespread soon – advertisements that play when you click on a link, preventing you from seeing that link for fifteen or twenty seconds. And Yahoo is testing pop-under advertising, the kind that appears in a small window behind your main window, waiting to surprise you when you close the main screen. Pop-unders are already being used by major players like The New York Times, AltaVista, MSNBC.com, the Chicago Tribune Internet Edition and GeoCities. […] continued

The Internet is turning into just another broadcast medium – a limited number of channels controlled by big companies, designed to maximize revenues to copyright holders and megacorporations. And we’re facilitating the takeover.

A thought-provoking and disturbing study shows that the Internet is shrinking, collapsing in on itself. Here’s some statistics:

• More than half of all time spent online centers around the web sites run by four companies – AOL Time Warner, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Napster. (The death of Napster presumably reduces the number to three in the last few weeks.)
• More than a third of all time online is spent on AOL Time Warner web sites.

[…] continued

A new addition to the Favorites page (under News / Links): Slate links, a collection of links to hundreds of political columnists, editorial pages, movie critics, book reviewers, gossip writers, and others.