(RD) As always, I like to admit my biases up front. I'm no great fan of microsoft or network television news. But I am a news junkie, so i was excited about the potential for an online news service that would combine the power of the internet with the power of television. A few weeks ago, i fired up Netscape to take a look at the preview of MSNBC... trouble was Microsoft forgot to pay their bill and the page was down that first day I went looking. This week's real debut coincided with the launch of the cable service... and predictably, the site was overwhelmed.... in other words, i had to wait a long time for the pages to appear.... the week didn't get much better when the online version missed coverage of the TWA crash for hours after the event. CNN and their online service was right on top of things.
Still, we've seen that Microsoft may stumble once .... witness the delays in Windows 95 and their reluctant embrace of the internet... but they'll rise to the occasion soon enough. I doubt that NBC will ever command the 24 hour news presence of CNN on your television, but aligned with Microsoft, the two are poised to truly use the medium of the web to its best advantage. Right now, its just another news web site, and CNN's is better and faster.
Speaking of Atlanta... CNN is one of many places sporting an Olympics page... the first olympics on the net... AT&T has developed a few games you can play on their site... although fairly simplistic games, they do allow you to compete against players from around the globe.... IBM also has a huge Olympics presence... in fact, they're selling tickets. I'm not sure what's left at this point, though... maybe just watching olympians eat lunch. Also, you can take a tour of the Olympic grounds, watch live, if extremely blurry, video feeds from strategic points. Apple has a very cool page which will bring you what you really want to do in Atlanta... people watch. All throught the games Apple will bring the sites and sounds of the city to your web pages.
If you have a Windows computer, you can now get up-to-the minute news stories about the olympics, or anything else.... fed right into your screen saver. Franky, I'm tired of Homer Simpson eating away at my desktop, and it would be nice to be able to get my custom news feed sent right to me at work, constantly. The service is really easy to use, download the application, install it, choose what horoscope you'd like to see ervydday, what stocks you like, and anything else... and it gets fed to you however often you'd like. This service is best for people with permanent internet connections at work, although it can dial in from home periodically as well. There is no macintosh version yet, and you should be forewarned that like all screen savers, his one can get annoying too. One complaint I've heard is that since pointcast checks for news while you are surfing, it can slow you down when you visit other sites. Still, pointcast has perhaps the coolest tool online these days... and is one of the few companies taking advantage of the medium.
Ok, enough news and sports... what we all really want from the net is to be entertained.... this next site I can't get enough of.... depending on how old you are, you may have learned your multiplication tables from saturday morning cartoons... school house rock holds a special place in my heart... not just for classsic like "My Hero Zero, and Conjunction Junction What's Your Function"... but for making the ugliness of law-making... singable...
<clip: just a bill... sittin here on capitol hill)
All of your favorites are here: Lolly, Lolly, Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here, Elementary my dear, two times two is four.... and one that would never make the air in these politically correct times: Sufferin' til Suffrage. Now this is cool. Be warned the site is overwhelmed and the downloads large and slow... but its worth the wait... well, if it was part of your life or your kids' life....
speaking of saturday morning television... you may have a few K-Tel records in your collection... perhaps its the music of queen or the rolling stones done by a thousand and one strings.... or K-Tel's collection of songs by that mysterious group, The Original Artists. If you missed out on buying these kinds of classics, you can still find K-tel's ... uh... finest.... online. Angie never sounded so clean....
<thousand and one strings version of angie>
Its hard to tell if the fine folks at K-tel even are aware of their own stature in american kitcsh culture.... on this site, you have to provide you own snide comments... but at Rhino Records, they take silly music one step farther:
<clip, leonard nimoy singing "i walk the line">
That's Mr. Spock... painful to be sure.... i'm not sure what genius decided that the crew of the enterprise could sing, but Captain Kirk is not about to let his second officer play first tenor....
<captain kirk sings lucy in the sky with diamonds>
they also have super hits of the 70's which bring back a decade of bad music in digital form.... but to be fair, Rhino also collects the great old records too.... the ones that the major labels will never re-release, but that you are dying to find again: otis redding's greatest hits.... funk classics... great 50's country.... you can't order directly online yet, which is a bummer.... this kind of place encourages instant gratification purchasing.... (you didn't know you HAD to have the terry jacks song seasons in the sun, but now you do...)
Still, although these last few sites are lower-tech in nature... they're infintely more entertaining. They do what the web does best.... allow people to find and share fun memories and stories... and let you find long lost information from that non digital part of your lifetime.
<at the end of one of the school house rocks songs (interjections, part of the grammer area) a little kid says "Darn! That's the end!)... this might make a cute little end:
<"interjections show excitement or emotion hallelujiah!hallelujiah!hallelujiah! Darn! That's the end!")
Links:
no time for this one:
The Why Files fun stuff about mad cows, other planets, wild fires,... science written in english