Encyclopedia Britannica has launched a program named Britannica WebShare. It offers free access to web publishers, who are loosely defined as “anyone who publishes regularly on the Internet–bloggers, webmaster, and writers who publish on the Web.” This offer is worth $70 per year. Web publishers can use Britannica widgets to post links to EB articles on their blogs or web sites. Readers who click on a link will get the entire Britannica article on the subject, even if the article needs subscription.

Almost everyone can’t help but see Britannica Webshare as a response to the ubiquity of Wikipedia. TechCrunch has a post on this, in which TechCrunch describes Britannica’s move as being half-pregnant: “they want the benefits of web linking but don’t want to give up the subscription fees from the fools who continue to pay them.” TechCrunch also suggests Britannica adopt a wiki-like format to allow users’ editing if they do not want to go out of business. Hmm… if so, is it still Britannica? Read the rest of the entry…

It’s w00t!
Facebook is the runner-up.

In China, we don’t really serve fortune cookies at restaurants. Considering the lack of desserts in Chinese cuisine, I would see fortune cookies as a substitute of sweets.

Cyborgirl offers some virtual fortune cookies.

All the fortunes in Virtual Fortune Cookie (with a couple glaring exceptions) are actual fortunes my friends and I have received over the years. They are recorded word for word, including spelling and grammar errors.

The name of the Visual Thesaurus caught my attention when browsing a list of del.icio.us bookmarks. My first impression on the appearance of this dictionary was it looked exactly like a social software. Colorful nodes, solid/dashed lines, and expanding/shrinking animation. In some sense, it is a social software for words–it not only explains the word per se but also brings up other related words. Different node and line styles are used to indicate the distinct relationships. Fourteen relationships, including antonym, pertains to (pertainym), Participle of,Derived from, etc, can be displayed in VT.

Sounds cool, huh? Give it a shot. Be careful, the results might be dizzling — I was totally overwhelmed by the results after a few exploratory clicks. Surprised by the imagination and innovation of the system, I got lost in the mass information presented as well. As for me, VT is a better tool for brainstorming instead of getting someone buried by so much relevant/irrelevant information.

In this era, too much information is as perilous as no information at all.

My collection of 80 x 15 banners is still on the way. I don’t know if those designers used Bill Zeller’s brilliant button maker application or Photoshop or whatever. Anyway, you’ve got a couple of other options to make your own now.

Kalsey’s Button Maker — a user-friendly interface to Bill Zeller’s brilliant button maker application.

Dumky’s Blog sticker — a little image generator application to make “antipixel”-style stickers. You can even get the program here.

Want a sticker as big as 160 x 30 pixel? PixeLink released by Uncommon Content can help you — it is “a web-based utility for creating 160×30 pixel GIF image link buttons. The user may upload custom 24 x 24 pixel GIF sprites for inclusion in the generated GIF linking image.”

Well, if you want to stick to Photoshop, go get Dave Winer’s original Photoshop files on his Steal These Buttons.

Update: July 30, 2005

Another FREE Button Maker and Generator by Blog Flux. It can produce both 80 x 15 and 80 x 31 buttons. But the font doen’t look that appealing to me.

Hyperdictionary is “a continuation of an educational project to provide free dictionary services to any user on the web”. It consists of English Dictionary, Computer Dictionary, Thesaurus, Dream Dictionary and Medical Dictionary.

What attracts me most is the Dream Dictionary. It is fun to read, even for me — a heavy sleep who dreams two to three times a year on average.

Hey, guess what? Now you can have your own barcode to identify yourself! The code generated will indicate your sex, age, location, height, and weight. So just go get your own barcode and show it around to your friends!

This is my barcode. What information can you tell from it?

If you are as lazy as I am;

If you are as crazy about google as I am;

If your monitor is big enough;

Go get Google Deskbar to search whatever you want “without lifting your fingers from the keyboard”.

P.S. I’m never an early bird. But this time, I was! Check out my first post in Google Deskbar forum!!!