Our changing Universe?

It is amazing what you can find on our little WWW each day. I have just found our whole universe stuck on a web page. Yup. It is titled Universe. What does it do? It represents the news and other bits of information in constellations, just like the stars. See the story detail on CNet (OK, I admit, I get a lot of my stuff from CNet.)

It is not easy, but with a little maneuvering you will get the hang of it. Pick for instance on the home page, under Times, say 'the past week'. It now opens a new window as a Java applet. It asks you to click on the window to 'give it focus'. When you do so you start seeing little dots appear like a evening sky in a rural area filled with stars. As you hover the mouse over it, they start to form constellations. Click on any constellation, and it gives you a name. Could be a place name or person. At the bottom words are displayed (look carefully...) Stars, Shapes, Secrets, Stories, Statements, etc.

Now click on Statements or Stories and the screen fills up with rows and columns of stories or statements. Click on one, and it moves to the centre of the screen, and words from the story float around it, which you can click to find more stories or statements.

It becomes quite involved, and I think for some personality types, it could be addictive! For others, it could cause physical violence inflicted on the computer screen out of sheer frustration.... :-)

Enjoy.

CNet carried an interesting story this week on Photobucket. the most popular unknown site? The statistics on the site are quite amazing. It is a photo sharing site allowing you to post pics to websites, blogs etc, which seems to store quite a bit of info for sites like MySpace and others. Its unique US visitors exceed that of Flickr (double) and even FaceBook according to ComScore, who tracks the monthly visitors to websites.

OK, finally getting back to CNN Money's 25 start-ups to watch, and guess who is next? Joost. I've mentioned them in one of my earlier blogs this week in relations to WebTV, and that is exactly what they are aiming at. They have signed a deal recently with Viacom, then Viacom turned on YouTube to get their content removed and launched their law suit. Michi Knows reckons that Google wants YouTube to get sued to help get legal clarity on some of their other ventures. An interesting opinion, and not entirely without merit, but completely speculative. Back to Joost, their WebSite at this stage talks about what is to come. Apparently they have some 400,000 beta testers out there testing the software. So, like Uvu, nothing just yet, although Joost seems to at least have quite a large base of Beta testers, and have signed a number of high profile content deals so far.

The next Start-up is Dabble. A video sharing tool helping to organise videos into favourite playlists. They claim 12,000 users and partnerships with YouTube, MySpace, Grouper, and Brightcove. As I do not have much by way of video on my computer, this is not of much use to me. If anyone out there knows it, or uses it, drop us a comment.

Found another version of Web 2.0 stuff this morning on CNet titled 'A New Generation of Office Tools'. Or, as they so poetically claim, Work 2.0! :-) Looks very interesting! This is going to out some pressure on me now to finish the 25 Start-ups more quickly! Will give some overviews as soon as I get to it.