kelly's i.
Byline: Matt KellyTONY Blair's big push for goverment online, UKOnline, launches today. We're not sure if this is another project he applied the Euan Test to, but, like the Dome, it's overblown, boring and going to be as popular as the Chernobyl tourist industry.
The site at www.ukonline.gov.uk links 1,000 official sites in a Government one-stop shop. There is a pile of useful information in there, but it's buried under pages and pages of crushingly tedious Government announcements and press releases. Example: "Metadata scheme for websites in the legal and advice sectors." Metadata? New Labour, new words, it seems.
We didn't expect Shockwave games of Two Jags Racing or MP3 downloads of Tone getting battered at PMQs, but a country with ambitions to be Europe's e-leader should manage something with a bit more flair than the minutes of a parish council meeting.
NET NEWS
LEECHNET, the Napster-style porn-share site we told you about last week, has collapsed under the weight of its own "enormous growth" (oo-er). This note appeared on the Swedish site over the weekend: "Due to recent media coverage and enormous growth, Leechnet has temporarily been disabled while we evaluate our current status."
CHINA and America are at war over who owns the rights to sell domain names with Chinese script. US firm VeriSign has been busily flogging registrations ending .com, .net and .org, while the China Internet Network Information Centre is selling the same names with a .cn extension. Despite China's knee-jerk loathing of anything as unrestricted as the net, analysts believe there will be more Chinese language domains than English within ten years.IT'S no coincidence they also invented cuckoo clocks. The latest stroke of genius to emanate from Switzerland is the GPS weight-watcher. Scientists are strapping global positioning systems to the backs of fatties to measure how many calories they burn as they move about. By monitoring them all day, they hope to find why people get fat. We can tell them for nothing - they're lazy and eat too much.
NEW NET
www.which.net/shopping/guide.html
WHICH? Online's guide to e-shopping for beginners offers positive, balanced advice without scaremongering about fraud. Essential if you've never bought online before, and some useful pointers about security even if you've stocked an entire library from Amazon.com
e-HEE
THANKS to Joel. Keep your email funnies coming to kellysi@ mirror.co.uk
SITE OF THE DAY
http://www.lileks.com/institute/motel/index.html
DEDICATED to the Gobbler Motel, a Wisconsin monument to bad taste. Compared with this, the most flamboyant efforts of the Changing Rooms team are as tame as a quick coat of magnolia.
Contact me or my colleague SHIRAZ LALANI at kellysi@mirror.co.uk or phone 020 7293 2412/3
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| Title Annotation: | Features |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Mirror (London, England) |
| Date: | Dec 5, 2000 |
| Words: | 462 |
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