How to Live Happily Ever After

Herbert (104 yrs-old) and Zelmyra (102 yrs-old) have been married for 86 years (give or take a couple of months) and will be sharing their tips for marital harmony via Twitter on Valentine’s Day. If you want the benefit of their substantial hindsight, send them a question via @longestmarried (by 12th February, 2010) and they […]

Greenlit: The Tester, Sony Playstation 3

The Tester (8 x) – Reality series in which eleven gamers compete  “in gruelling physical and mental challenges”, for the chance to win a job as a Sony games tester and $5K. Channel: Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) via Sony Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable Producer: 51 Minds TX: Free download available from 18th February […]

Looking into the Past

Looking into the Past is a fascinating Flickr group that features historical photographs that have been blended with the modern world in some way. Take a look at: Dam Square shooting 1945 Amsterdam, then & now; Then in now Brandenburg gate; Looking Into the Past: Loudoun Street, Leesburg, VA;

Naughty Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse is being rebranded (or at least taking him back to his original trouble-making incarnation), in a new Wii game Epic Mickey, which allows players to bring out Mickey’s dark side. Read more on Slate and Wikipedia

Nat Geo’s World Atlas for iPhone

National Geographic has released a $1.99 iPhone application called World Atlas. You can zoom into street level and you can see lists of statistics and a database of six million towns, cities and regions, just as you would in a printed atlas. Read more at MinOnline

RateMyProfessors

mtvU’s RateMyProfessors.com has an iPhone app that lets students check up on the reviews of more than 1 million professors across the USA. I just checked up on one of my old professors and it turns out he’s slated for having ‘contrived English accent’. Hmm – he’s English! Back to school for that reviewer (or […]

Missing in Haiti

Haiti Earthquake Support Center was set up the day after the disaster by The Extraordinaries, a group that  “allows people to complete micro-tasks for organizations, causes or people they’re passionate about, using a mobile phone or web browser, in a few minutes of spare time”. When they sat down to think about what they could […]

Bravo’s Launch My Line

Bravo in the USA has launched an online tool to enable fans to enter their Launch My Line T-shirt design competition to tie in with Bravo’s latest fashion focused competition reality show in which ten entrepreneurs from a range of backgrounds are each paired with an established fashion designer who will help them design a […]

The Sky Online

The BBC is opening up the archives to make 40 years of astronomy programming available to the public The science archives stretch back across the history of the BBC. Charting the course of science’s development over the last century, the archives offer a fascinating glimpse into the changing face of science, with clips from Tomorrow’s […]

Visit San Diego Zoo on Google Streetmap

San Diego Zoo is one of the first of several locations inaccessible to cars to be mapped by Google Street View. Others include the nearby SeaWorld and Legoland. Google used a camera mounted on a tricycle to map the paths and enclosures. Take a trip to see the giraffes here. Hat tip: PSFK

Maggwire.com

Maggwire bills itself as ‘the iTunes of magazines’. As you read and rate its 600+ magazine articles it begins to recommend other articles you might enjoy. It includes articles from from Vanity Fair, Men’s Health, Esquire, Time and BusinessWeek and Marie Claire. You can search by topic and share interesting articles via Twitter/Facebook. If nothing […]

Haiti Aerial Photos of Earthquake Devestation

The New York Times has issued aerial photos of Port-au-Prince before and after the earthquake struck Haiti, including the areas around the National Palace, the National Cathedral and the Military Barracks. Slide the timeline across the photo to see the the devastation wreaked by the earthquake. See the photos here Read the related article

What Went Wrong

What Went Wrong is an eight-week online interactive series that looks at the causes of the global financial crisis, from Big Think, a “global forum connecting people and ideas,” which has an archive of video interviews with more than 600 experts including and astronaut and a former mayor of NYC. What Went Wrong features interviews […]

Papture

Papture is a new site that encouraged you, the camera phone-toting public, to become the paparazzi by filming or photographing celebrities out and about and uploading them to the website were you can track where celebrities are in real time. Apparently Noel Gallagher was buying swimming trunks in Selfridges on London’s Oxford Street on Sunday […]

Honk

Honk is a user review website that allows you to share your views about cars with other drivers. It also has suggests what make and model your next car should be based on your life stage, age and gender, hobbies and personality.  Apparently the car that TV Mole should be driving is… red.

Expedition 206

Expedition 206 is a Coca Cola funded mission to try to find out what makes people happy. To do that, they are sending a team of three “happiness ambassadors” to the 206 countries where Coca Cola is sold – they will set out in January 2010 and their trip will take 365 days. Along the […]

Facial Profiler

Facial Profiler is a Facebook application from CokeZero that allows you to upload your photo and then be matched to other people on Facebook who look just like you.

How to Pitch 360 Degree Content

At the recent Sheffield Doc/Fest, a panel of Multiplatform commissioning editors and producers talked about developing and pitching 360 degree content (i.e. content that exists on more than one platform: TV, online, books, DVD, live events, YouTube, Facebook etc).

The panel included:

* Lyndsay Duthie (etv productions)
* Nick Cohen (BBC Multiplatform commissioner)
* James Penfold (etv productions)
* Matt Locke (Commissioning Editor for Education and New Media at Channel 4)
* Jane Mote (UKTV Director of lifestyle, factual and new media, UKTV)

Click through to see what they said.
(Photo by gadl CC BY-SA 2.0)

Learn Something New Every Day

Learn Something Every Day is a painfully colourful set of digital ‘postcards’ decorated with cartoons that illustrate facts, such as: The average pencil can write a line 35 miles long; The Eiffel Tower is 15cm taller in the summer; The average chocolate bar has eight insect legs in it. Hat tip: PSFK

Greenlit: Dinosaurs Resurrected, Multiplatform

Dinosaurs Resurrected – A multiplatform brand that combines HD and 3D filming with the latest paleontological discoveries in a multiplatform project that includes a primetime TV series, IMAX and 3D films for theatrical release, games, live events, books and merchandise. Channel: Multiplatform Producer: Atlantic Productions / Fremantle Media Enterprises Source: Broadcast

Who’s Jack TV

Who’s Jack is a London-centric online TV network with five branded channels (Jack, Jeff, Marco, Vox and Zoe) and style/trendspotting magazine. Viewers of the videos can buy products featured in the programmes. For example, in this interview with Speech Debelle you can buy Speech’s album or the interviewer’s Lacoste shirt or Vans trucker cap. The […]

Soundwalk

Soundwalk is an award-winning audio tour “for people who don’t normally take audio tours”. They require you to immerse yourself in a city and give yourself over to an experience that takes you into private spaces and is guaranteed to get your adrenalin flowing.  MP3 tours are available for various areas of NYC – Bronx, […]

Tube Chop

Tube Chop does what it says: allows you to chop the best bit out of a YouTube video and send it to your friends / embed it on your blog.

Save Our Sounds

The BBC’s World Service is building an acoustic ecology map of the world and invites you to upload your own sounds from your neighborhood. You can “listen your way around the world” with an interactive map or take an audio tour through a virtual city. Explore more on the Save Our Sounds website.

Information is Beautiful

For his new book,  Information is Beautiful, (The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide To The World’s Most Consequential Trivia in the USA), David McCandless spent a year creating more than 200 visualizations to bring to life statistics and subjects from pop to philosophy.  You can: Reduce your odds of dying in a plane crash (don’t […]

Conflict History

Conflict History is an interactive google map that lets you explore a timeline of the world’s conflicts. Hat tip to Thrillist

AltUse.com

Altuse.com’s mission is to help you “save money and heal the earth by extending the life of everything you already own”.  It’s a compendium of grandma’s tips such as using vodka to clean your glasses (or it may just be the vodka that’s blurring your vision) and using old coffee grounds to fertilise the garden. […]

Greenlight The Stupid Show

At the recent Sheffield Doc/Fest it was hard to move for mentions of 360 content and what it might mean for documentary makers. One filmmaker who has embraced the web to help crowd fund her latest film is Franny Armstrong, who presented an entertaining masterclass on the making of climate change film The Age of Stupid. Just a couple of hours before she spoke, Franny sealed a deal with BBC2’s Storyville strand who agreed to show the film before the summit. As the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen approaches, The Age of Stupid team are now launching a live web series that ties in with the event, and are once again reaching out to the public to help fund it. The Stupid Show is a 8×20′ live web TV series that will be broadcast from the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen on 7th-18th December 2009. Its mission is ” make ‘the most important meeting in human history’ comprehensible for ordinary people”. Click through to find out more.

iSpot

iSpot is a Lottery funded Open University project that allows people to upload their photos of wildlife sightings and discuss them or ask for help in identification.  One of the latest observations is an albino squirrel in Hastings and grey seals near Falmouth. The site is UK focused but does accept worldwide sightings (although it […]

Thoora

Thoora is a new news aggregator that collects the most popular stories from blog posts, Tweets and comments. You can search categories such as Entertainment, Lifestyle, Politics, Controversy and Sci/Tech or just track the world’s top stories. Read more on Thrillist.

Happy Farming

Shanghaiist reports that white collar workers have taken their addiction to an online farming game, Happy Farm, offline. They are buying and farming their own plots at the weekend in an effort to increase parent child interactions and get the satisfaction of growing and harvesting their own food. Read more on PSFK.

Esquire Augmented Reality

Esquire is using augmented reality to attract readers to its magazine. The 7th November 2009 (December) edition has a couple of QR codes (square ‘bar codes’) that are decoded by a camera phone to reveal Robert Downey Jr emerging from the front cover to talk about the AR issue. “Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman” […]

Rice Paddy Art

Japanese farming communities take great pride in their rice paddy fields – careful planting of different varieties results in beautifully detailed artworks that can only really be fully appreciated from the air. See aerial photos on PSFK.

The Story

Rock up to The Conway Hall, London  on 19th February, 2010 for a one day story-telling conference organised by Matt Locke (whose day job is Commissioning Editor for Education and New Media at Channel 4). The conference isn’t about the theory of story or the business of selling commercial stories; more it’s about the pleasure […]

BBC Archive

The BBC is making its historic TV, photo, document and radio archive available online. Dating from 70 years ago, the archive is divided into collections including The Berlin Wall, Tomorrow’s World, Cambridge Spies, Genesis of Dr Who and Working Class Life. Explore more collections.

Book of Odds

The Book of Odds is “the world’s first reference on the odds of everyday life…. from the odds of being the only one to survive a plane crash, to the odds of having a heart attack, to the odds of having ever eaten cold pizza for breakfast.” It’s a good looking website with lots of […]

Stephen King Mystery Book Launch

Stephen King’s new book, Under the Dome, is being published in the UK on 10th November 2009, but in the run up to its release you can get involved in nation and web wide game to win the chance of early access to curl up with a special edition for the night in a hotel. […]

Facebook the Movie

The Washington Post reports that Aaron Sorkin (writer of the West Wing) is writing a movie called The Social Network about the beginnings of Facebook, staring Justin Timberlake as company president, Sean Parker and Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg. Read more.

Star Wars Uncut

Ever fancied not only watching Star Wars being in it? Star Wars: A New Hope is a crowd sourced movie project that offers you the chance to film three 15 second scenes from 1,313 in the original film.  Visit the website to choose your clips, film them and upload them and wait for the creators […]

Twitter Book Club

The Book Studio takes the author tour online and lets you take part in a book club without leaving the comfort of your own sofa. Next up is Zoe Heller’s The Believers on 19th October 2009. If that’s not your thing, you can read reviews and interviews and watch video interviews with authors such as […]

Travel Writers Recommend

If you think professional travel writers would know a good place to stay when they saw one you might want to take a look at this poll that 101 Holidays conducted. They asked well-known travel writers for their recommendations. As the survey was twitter based they had to describe their favourite lodgings in fewer than […]

Regretsy

Etsy is a brilliant place to pick up handmade, artisan-crafted gifts. Unfortunately, like …. Got Talent there are a number of people trying to sell their wares who have an inflated idea of their abilities. Check out the worst on Regretsy.  Among the safe for work items featured is a goat coat, a pair of […]

Internet Eyes Video Surveillance

Tony Morgan has created a video surveillance ‘game’ that lives in the real world. Shopkeepers in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England can pay £20 a week to have  CCTV cameran installed on their premises. The cameras are hooked up to the Internet Eyes website where people are encouraged to watch for wrongdoing, with the lure of a […]

Periodic Table of Experts

If you are looking for interesting experts (or interesting websites), check out Make: Technology on Your Time, which has a series of experts explaining their passions. Watch Bruce Hood from the University of Bristol talk about the supernatural: or Fiorenzo Omenetto, a professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University who loves silk: or Theodore Gray […]

Greenlit: Liv Online, Virgin Media TV

Liv is a new online spin off from Living (Virgin Media TV) that has a TV-style schedule of 2-3 minute shorts featuring celebrity, gossip and style focused content, using content from US Big Pictures agency. Producer: Rockabox Also on Liv: Dress Famous Liv Famous (6x ) – A spin off from Britain’s Next Top Model […]

How to Make Love to Adrian Colesberry

Adrian Colesberry is a biomedical engineer with a failed marriage behind him and a new career in front of him as a comedian, sexpert (he’s a volunteer sex ed teacher in high schools) and film extra (Spiderman, Entourage, Boston Legal and ER). Whilst not doing much on set, he wrote a “dirty, dirty book” called […]

Greenlit: Wedding Central, Web

Wedding Central is WE tv’s 24/7 multiplatform and interactive channel that targets women interested in romance and weddings. The channel is available to subscribers of Cablevision’s iO digital cable package and has 300+ hours of WE tv sourced wedding-related content, such as: Bridezillas, I Do … Let’s Eat!, Bride vs. Bride, Rich Bride, Poor Bride, […]

Soul City – Buzzing Issues

Dr Garth Japhet was a frustrated doctor working in a South African clinic wondering how to educate people in the townships about how to avoid commonly fatal health complaints such as burns, dehydration and disease. Along with another doctor, Shereen Usdin, he decided that he could better spread health education via a soap opera. Together […]

HBO Imagine

HBO Imagine is a new Flash-based multiplatform interactive storytelling site that tells a story from four different perspectives simultaneously. The stories play out on different walls of a video cube and you can click on arrows to turn the cube to get the full story. The are 41 bits of interrelated content including audio, news […]

Deathlist

The death list is a macabre roll call of fifty famous people predicted to die in 2009 – so far nine people have fulfilled expectations. The list goes back to 1987 – in 1991, none of the people on the list died, but interestingly Saddam Hussein was on there. History could  have been very different… […]