My Web Daily

.@MyWebDaily reviews: Tinkatolli

It might be hard being a parent, but growing up wasn’t exactly a walk in the park either as I remember it. It can be a walk in the online park though if you join the community at Tinkatolli.me. This is an online virtual world for kids, created by parents to be a safe, fun & importantly a challenging place for young minds to start experiencing exploring & socialising online. The world is really fun to explore with games and quests littered around. But what makes this site special is the way it encourages children to play away from their computers too, providing craft projects that you can complete in Tinkatolli & build in the real world too. 

Many of the craft items – or makeables – have been designed by Tinkatolli players using actual junk – there’s a weekly competition to add more. Some games & features require a premium sign up but there is plenty of free content too. With appropriately moderated chat & all the safety precautions you’d expect from a team who are parents themselves, this looks like a great introduction for any new citizens of the world wide web.

.@MyWebDaily reviews: Doctor Who, Worlds in Time

 

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I’ve always wanted to be Dr Who’s side-kick, and thanks to a new browser-based multiplayer roleplaying game, Dr Who, Worlds in Time, I can be. You create a character, make friends, join a guild & battle all of the Doctor’s favourite enemies. The mini games are simple but fun & as you level up you can kit out your avatar & room with upgrades. Or you can pay real cash for credits that let you jump ahead – but I kind of like running around in my PJs.

.@MyWebDaily reviews: Wondermind at The Tate

Science meets art at wondermind.tate.org.uk, where in parallel with an exhibition at Tate Liverpool, the gallery has crafted a beautiful and creative learning experience about the science of the brain. The website uses Alice in Wonderland as inspiration and a backdrop for the games & interactive videos. It’s a brilliantly cunning way to deliver an education, and hats off to the Tate who have really delivered on this count. The videos are well produced, and whilst my school days are admittedly long gone, I don’t think they were too patronising, although they did teeter on the edge occasionally. But all together a great contribution to the ‘school of world wide web’ – isn’t it amazing how much more you can learn when you really go tumbling down the rabbit hole?

.@MyWebDaily reviews: Brandon Generator

Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead Director Edgar Wright and Lucas film and Marvel Comic book artist Tommy Lee Edwards have got together to create an interactive comic book in 4 parts, The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator. The story is about a struggling writer who passes out in a caffeine high & when he wakes up all sorts of notes & ideas have been left for him to find.

So far there is a trailer & episode one online, where Brandon loses consciousness and (you) the mysterious spirits infest his communications devices to fill them with random thoughts, characters & ideas. Leave voice messages on his Dictaphone, type into his laptop or scribble on his legal pad & who knows, when episode 2 comes out later this month you might find your ideas have been woven into the new storyline? I should also mention the site has been built to showcase html5 in IE9 - and whatever you think of Microsoft's browser, it does a pretty damn fine job of it.

.@MyWebDaily NEWS: This week on the web #9

OK, it's confession time... it's Easter weekend & I am so insanely busy right now I have already worked all of Good Friday & half of today (smallest violin in the world - I know...). So basically what it boils down to is I am not making a podcast this week! You'll just have to look back through the posts. There has been some great sites though, including ifttt.com & App Inventor, which are 2 of my all time favourites. As a consolation prize, have this hilarious compendium of cats & water:

.@MyWebDaily reviews: Reelr.tv

 

If you like sharing music with your social connections Reelr.tv is a site you might like. You don’t even need to go to the website to start using the service. By tweeting the track you’re playing together with the hashtag #nowplaying, the site will build a Youtube video playlist that can be accessed through Reelr.tv/your-twitter-username. The downsides are there is no click through to buy the tracks, and the quality of the video and sound can be a little dodgy if there isn’t a decent quality upload on Youtube. That said it’s super-fast & easy to use and a nice way for your friends to listen to the tracks you suggest.  

.@MyWebDaily reviews: Wreckamovie

These days you don’t have to be a big Hollywood mogul to get involved with a movie, as crowd-sourcing collaboration website WreckaMovie has shown. Here you can browse through a multitude of creative projects, or even start one yourself, ranging from short films & animations to full feature-length films. Everyone is welcome, both amateur and professional – just take a look at the Tasks tab for a project that interests you then tell the leader why you want to join & what skills you could bring to the table. It could be in graphics, script writing, promotion or as a composer. You’d be surprised how many jobs there are when you get down to the nuts & bolts of a film.

This community was created by the people who reportedly made the world’s first feature-length collaborative Internet film, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, which has had more than 8 million downloads - I've embedded the trailer above. It’s been said that collaboration projects like this could save the indie film industry, and there are some pretty amazing productions going on right now - like this production, Iron Sky.

Who knows, you could be part of the next big online sensation – just make sure you send me the link if you are.

.@MyWebDaily VIDEO: Chips with Everything ep#181

I dug around in the loft again and found a few more episodes of [.tv]'s Chips with Everything. The main problem I have with sharing them is that they're are on old BETA tapes and I only have access to one of those decks occasionally - then there is the matter of persuading my lovely editor, Cally, to stay on 10 mins late every now and then to process them to MPEGS... so I'm going to try and keep publishing one a week until I run out of episodes. Kind of like a dose of the past for those who lament the demise of Sky's dedicated technology channel.

And because they were filmed back around the turn of the millennium, it might be interesting for people to see what kinds of ordinary computer problems plagued people back then.

So, this is ep#181 - a Christmas special compilation with a parade of hair-dos I wish I could still get away with, and a fun homage to Mr Chris Long at 7'04"... I'd forgotten we did that :)

News: Sky's [.tv] - Chips with Everything archive

A little bonus retro-tech for the weekend! I've been posting links to some old 2000 episodes of Chips with Everything. This is a programme that used to air daily on Sky's computer channel, [.tv]. It was filmed in August 2000 and is a problem page for computer users - we used to film 5 20 min episodes in a day & when I was reading the questions on air it was often the first time I had seen them!! (Budget TV at it's best!!)... it's quite funny listening to how technology has changed :o

So, here's a link to the 4 episodes I've posted so far.. I will see if I can get to an old beta deck soon and digitise some more, as they seem to have pushed the old nostalgia buttons for a lot of my long term followers.

.@MyWebDaily reviews: Timedancer

If you’re looking for something cool to do with your windows phone 7, take a look at Timedancer – an episodic interactive sci-fi series that fuses video & gaming to create a really engaging experience. You make choices along the way to unlock various clips, carving a path through the narrative along a particular timeline. It’s a bit like those fighting fantasy game books where you make choices then turn to a particular page, only with great quality video & lots of interaction. The first episode is free to give you a taste – after that you’ll have to pay for each new download. This is a really well produced app with a great story, and several ways to play through the narrative so you can enjoy it more than once. Definitely worth looking at if you miss the good old days of battling through the pages of books like Deathtrap Dungeon.