Most interesting websites of 2003
'Tis the season for year-end reviews. Between Christmas and new year, media of all types make a habit of revisiting the previous 12 months, each in their own specific way. Whether it be assessing the top news/weather/sports stories of the year, ranking the biggest film and music releases, or holding video and radio countdowns, it can be almost impossible to completely avoid retrospectives in late December.
So if you came here looking for refuge, you're out of luck. But if it's any consolation, this article won't actually take the form of a countdown - it will simply suggest a handful of sites that are worth a second look. So, in no particular order...
One of the last sites reviewed this year and potentially one of the most interesting to follow through the next is Their Circular Life. Using a bit of Flash wizardry, Circular Life allows surfers to sit in one spot as a 24 hour period passes before their eyes and ears - with the option to pause or reverse time at the viewer's discretion. To date there are only two locations that have been given the Circular Life treatment, but the webmasters have made an open call for submissions from around the world, and posted the software necessary to create a contribution. If the invitation gets a significant response, Their Circular Life could become a virtual traveller's dream.
In an even more impressive case of, "you've never seen anything like this before," the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Home Deliveryapproached the file size vs. bandwidth battle by creating complete multi-media 'magazines' that could be downloaded in a single -large- piece to the user's hard drive, and then viewed without interruption. (The 500MB files still meant inordinately long download times for dial-up users -as much as 24 hours- but an application built into the files allowed the computer to transparently download the data while your Internet connection wasn't being used for other things.) A self-declared experiment that was originally to end after 10 'issues,' but which carried on for an additional 23, Home Delivery is -at least for the moment- mothballed. Fortunately all 33 issues are still available through an online archive (though not in the 'smart download' version), and with luck this trial period might be declared enough of a success to resume production in the future.
Reviewed in May, the X Prize website has been resurfacing in the general online consciousness due to several recent events. An international competition dedicated to the privatization of space, the X Prize has been getting mentions alongside news about the Chinese space program, the centenary of the Wright Brothers' first flight, and the eventual return of the space shuttle to active service. And making its own headlines, the competition reached a significant milestone recently as Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne broke the sound barrier and achieved an altitude of 68,000 feet during a December 17 test flight. With separate pages for each of the 26 ventures currently in the competition, additional Images, FAQs and links to competitors' home pages, the X Prize site has also recently added a PDF downloadable summary of the teams' progress during 2003.
While there are any number of websites inviting visitors into virtual museum exhibits, the Smithsonian's HistoryWired allows them to poke around the storerooms. By taking 450 artifacts from the 95 percent of the Smithsonian's collections that isn't on public display and putting them on the Web, the museum shares treasures that would normally only be seen by a handful of employees. And with an interface that encourages chance discoveries, and objects that range from the first Apple computer to Kermit the Frog, History Wired takes the theory of 'Internet equals access' and applies it in a uniquely imaginative way.
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