(with pictures:
www.thisdayinmusic.com
www.thisdayinfootball.com
www.sbrowning.com/whowhatwhen/

)

THE INTERNET COLUMN
By Giles Turnbull

MOST newspapers like to carry "On this day" columns, that tell you a few snippets about past events and birthdays.

The This Day in Music site (www.thisdayinmusic.com) is pretty similar, but obviously concentrates purely on music.

And there's nothing quite like music to get you feeling all nostalgic. Or feeling old. Thanks to this site, it's possible to find out that Nirvana's rock hit Nevermind is now 10 years old, and that George Harrison's My Sweet Lord was a hit single no less than 30 years ago.

It's a nice and simple site, not overcrowded with content but with enough stuff to keep you clicking for a few minutes. Perhaps it's best suited for a quick surf in your lunch break.

It has an album of the week slot, pop music jokes, and an amusing archive of what famous people have said about classic albums - ideal if you're desperate to know what Elton John thought of Peter Gabriel's So.

There's a fun pop quiz too - send your answers in by email before the end of the month and you could win £100 worth of CD vouchers.

If you're not particularly interested in pop music, you could always try out the sister site, This Day in Football (www.thisdayinfootball.com), instead. It's got almost identical features and will keep any keen football fan happily surfing for ages.


BUT if it's a more serious approach to history you're looking for, you should give Who What When a go. 

The site (at www.sbrowning.com/whowhatwhen/) is a remarkably detailed timeline of the people and events that have shaped the last 1,000 years.

Behind the scenes, it relies on a huge database of information, but shows it to you in a delightfully simple and clear way.

So you can start your search through time by entering a name - say, Isaac Newton - and you will be presented with his birth and death dates, his age when he died, and some more buttons. 

One of these buttons opens a new window with a web search for that name (the default search engine is Google, but you can change it to Amazon, the Open Directory, or Yahoo, if you want to). 

The other button opens a timeline for the person you have chosen. The timeline is downloaded as a Java applet, so you will need to be using a browser that can cope with Java before you try using it.

Within the timeline appear (in this case) Newton's contemporaries from the world of science and nature. Click on any of their names to start a Google search in a new window. You can also choose to see what artists, authors, or politicians were alive alongside Newton. 

The timeline will also show historical events, and swapping between the worlds of science, politics, and literature, you can find out that Newton lived during the European colonisation of North America, and was a contemporary of author Daniel Defoe and astronomer Giovanni Cassini.

Sites like this are great for idle surfing, but could also end up being useful for school homework, or even university-level research.

Because it creates a timeline from a database in the background, Who What When uncovers relationships between people and events that you might not have considered before. And the tight integration with search engines means you can instantly find out more about everything listed in the database, with a single click.


GOOGLE, everyone's favourite search engine, has bought the Usenet archive from Deja.com, and promises to restore to the net the full archive of Usenet messages, dating back to 1995.

This is the archive that everyone loved Deja for, back when it was Dejanews.com. The very same archive that suddenly disappeared when Deja made the bizarre decision to become a shopping portal.

Thankfully, the archive of millions of usenet messages was kept in a safe place, just in case they could find a use for it someday.

Word has it that Deja, having ditched the shopping portal format a few months ago, was rapidly running out of cash, and Google's executives stepped in at just the right moment to save the Usenet archive.

This is good news for everybody, because the people at Google clearly understand the net. Google users like Google because they see Google's management as being on their side.

At first, some disquiet was voiced about the new Google interface (groups.google.com), which removed most of the handy features that Deja was famous for, like the ability to post messages.

But Google has promised: all these features, and more, will turn up eventually. This could spell the beginning of a surge of new interest in what had become an internet backwater.


BROWSING AROUND  ...

:: Got big feet? You should have a look at Big Shoes Direct then (www.bigshoesdirect.co.uk)

:: Homesitters stay in your home while you're away from it (www.homesitters.co.uk)

:: What's happening near your home today? Local Today can tell you (www.localtoday.co.uk)

:: The BBC has a new site all about religion and ethics (www.bbc.co.uk/religion)

Giles Turnbull has a web site at gilest.org

ENDS