Need to give your party that extra special something? Why not hire a look alike celebrity? OK, some are definitely a bit dodgy, but some look excellent.

Apparently this is the world’s smallest Web site. I really do have to agree. oh…and it’s simply brilliant!

The BookCrossing site is an innovative attempt to help distribute books in an ‘underground’ way – in some cases literally. The idea is that people should register their books with the site, and then, after they’ve been read, leave them around in various places for others to pick up and read. These people then can pass them on in the same way when they have finished. The result is a sort of ad-hoc free library stretching across the world. It…

MP3 – Revolutionising the Music World is an interesting white paper – perhaps a Stanford University student thesis? – looking at MP3 and the digital music revolution. It’s a bit dated by now (Autumn 2001) but has some value as an overview of the whole situation for the layman.

Why does the Artist Network initiative set up by Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics fame) and Anita Roddick (Body Shop founder) strike me as being just a little bit twee? Perhaps it’s the Web site, which is about as pretentious as it gets, with its fancy switches and front page featuring pictures of the founders. Can anyone spell the word E-G-O?

At the risk of coming across as a Google sycophant, I’ve got to follow the herd here and mention the Google Labs page. It’s got some great test services on it, like keyboard navigation of results. I couldn’t get the voice search service to work at all though, so that obviously still needs some work.

Educypedia is a great technology encyclopaedia covering just about everything to do with IT and science. Well worth a bookmark.

Remember the Sound Bug? Well I’ve now had a chance to do a hands on test. Ermm. Think small, cheap, tinny Japanese transistor radio from the 60s. And that’s through fairly resonant glass. Attach the little thing to anything less effective, like a wooden door, and the sound is all but inaudible. Not one to get excited about in it’s present incarnation, I’m afraid.

BBC Online today reports on new research by Colgate-Palmolive which promises to deliver a ‘super soap’ capable of really pummeling skin based bacteria. Meanwhile those clever boffins at Unilever have come up with a deodorant which deprives smelly armpit bacteria of the iron they need to survive, taking us one step nearer the glorious goal of ‘total under-arm freshness!’ I worry just a little about all this bacteriological tinkering, because I have a deep suspicion that these little microbes are…

The Brown and Michaels Weird Patent page is a hoot. Teeth exercisers, cheese flavoured ciggies, floating umbrellas, it’s certainly a motley selection. I also like the Patently Absurd site with it’s underwater golf trainer and let’s not forget the toe puppet at the Delphion wacky patent site or even the vehicle mounted toilet seat trailer at Patscan’s collection of bizarre patents. Oh and before I forget, what about the boatless water skiing system at Totally Absurd Inventions then? What a…

The Game Trading Zone is a new site dedicated to the swapping of computer and video games. You simply set up a free account, list the titles you have to swap and the titles you want, and a matching process will show you who to contact. It’s well set up, legitimate (i.e. no copies, backups etc, only originals) and seems to have a good chance of becoming a mini e-bay for game swapping. It seems to be advertising supported (users…

It’s so easy to be cynical isn’t it? Guillaume Defoss� is a Belgian inventor, musician and electronic specialist who claims to have developed his own digital compression language which will ‘change the world of computing, telecommunication and Internet use.’ The Web site of his company – Millennium Gate – is currently demonstrating a Nokia 9210 phone playing a 25 frame per second movie clip taken from Sean Connery’s Entrapment. The site claims that, using his compression techniques, a full 108…

What a bit of rotten luck. The Kazaa P2P network will today switch on the new Altnet service which runs alongside the Kazaa network. Altnet is basically a pay for placement service which will offer retail music files to Kazaa P2P users when they do a search which matches their content. This is likely to get a pretty naff reaction from the users, but even if it doesn’t the report of a nasty virus doing the rounds on the Kazaa…

E-Bay is now accepting bids for an official trip to the International Space Station. You have three days to hitch an expensive ride on that shuttle, but please whatever you do, don’t waste your time unless you have the right kind of financial credentials. Put it this way, the bidding has currently reached $1,100,500 and the reserve has still not been met. And please do remember to take clean underwear with you if you are successful.

PDA-Roaming is a new service which offers international dial-up roaming for users of PDAs, laptops and handheld computers. The service uses the iPass network of over 14,000 ISPs in 150 countries to let you connect to an ISP for only the cost of a local call, no matter where you are.