* Some really interesting Web sites worth checking out
In this issue of the Network World Web Applications newsletter I have a couple of really interesting Web sites for your delectation.
The first is an academic project called The Internet Public Library. IPL is “a public service organization and a learning/teaching environment founded at the University of Michigan School of Information and hosted by Drexel University’s College of Information Science & Technology” which provides what is very much like a real library but for Internet content.
According to the IPL FAQ: “The IPL is many things: / the first public library of and for the Internet community / an experiment, trying to discover and promote the most effective roles and contributions of librarians to the Internet and vice versa / a group of highly talented, creative, strong-willed people, working hard.”
Self-admiration apart, the description of the IPL is accurate, it really provides a well-structured collection of resources that are organized.
A very interesting part of the IPL is that the project has done a deal with Grokker, which I discussed in a previous newsletter over three years ago. What this collaboration does is allow you to search the IPL and then have a textual or visual representation of the results organized by relevance.
This is a fantastic resource. You can find things in the IPL collection that could be very difficult to find via, say, Google simply because the IPL provides more context just as a library does. For students and general readers this is a Web site to be bookmarked.
My second pick covers a topic of great relevance to anyone interested in the topic of terrorism: The Global Incident Map (GIM) tracks all the stuff that you’re worried about such as bombs, terrorists, and anything else that’s related.
Provided by TransitSecurityReport.com, an organization that tracks transportation-related threats, GIM is a mashup of Google Maps with data that is partially acquired by automation, but mostly compiled by human editors at TeroristWarning.com, an organization that monitors news sources for terrorism events.
As a side note I can’t find much information on either outfit, which is odd. Most Web sites of any note include some kind of background on who is involved or what their affiliations are but on neither of these sites is there an “About Us” page or anything similar.
Anyway, what the Global Incident Map site shows is a map of the world (from Google Maps) with markers indicating recent terrorist activity with a ticker below listing all current events. Hovering over a marker displays a brief summary of the event, while clicking on it opens a new window with detailed information. If you scroll down the page there’s a breakdown of current events by category. The page refreshes automatically every 7 minutes and 40 seconds (a weird interval) and the site provides an RSS feed of terrorism stories.
The GIM is fascinating in a grim, scared-out-of-your-pants kind of way, but once you start watching it, it is definitely addictive. In addition, the fact that the people behind the service are invisible adds a weird “is that a black helicopter I see outside?” vibe to the experience. The truth is out there.
