************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** Between October 1995 and July 1997 I picked sites for the oldest daily web awards honoring the best in content-laden Canadian sites. The most difficult part of the job, as you could imagine, was actually finding worthwhile sites. I was always amazed by the number of web sites people put up that were nothing but some animated GIF images and a collection of links to other sites. Many of those sites would turn out to be simply a page of links to yet more sites. Arg! A lot has changed since I first logged onto the net back in 1993. What hasn't changed is that content is still king. My favorite sites are low chrome pages with loads of text -- sites that offer a database or archive of information. Below are some of my favorite info rich haunts: Internet Movie Database us.imdb.com For more than 8 years, netizens have helped build the Internet Movie Database, a searchable, interactive guide to over 120,000 movies. The Internet Movie Database is like having a press kit for nearly any film at your finger tips: you can get plot summaries, performance credits, and links to images. You can cross reference performers and find out what other movies they've stared in. The Nobel Prize Internet Archive www.almaz.com/nobel The Nobel Prize Internet Archive features a complete list of all Nobel prize winners, biographies, and relevant links. The archive, naturally, breaks the list of winners down by the usual categories (physics, chemistry, etc.), but also provides a revealing list of women Nobel prize winners. In the prize's nearly 100 year history, thirty women have won in every category except, oddly, economics. The archive doesn't just honor humankind's greatest intellectual achievements. The archive also celebrates the worst with its Ig Nobel Prize section. Winners for 1997 include "spam king" Sanford Wallace of Cyber Promo infamy and a couple biologists who measured brain wave patterns while people chewed different flavors of gum. International Lyrics Server www.lyrics.ch Ever wonder what the words are to "Louie Louie" or Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? These mysteries and more can be solved by paying a visit to the International Lyrics Server instead of convening a congressional committee and getting the FBI involved. You can search for songs based on artist, song title, or album. If you don't know the complete name of the song, you can punch in a few key terms and the server will do a match. Be warned, there are a lot of songs contained in this archive, so you better make your searches fairly exact. For example, a search on songs with "girl" in the title returns over four hundred hits. Gods Among Directors www.godamongdirectors.com You'll find an archive of scripts here by directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez (the guy who made /El Mariachi/), and Martin Scorsese. Oddly enough, this site contains more scripts for movies by other directors but there doesn't seem to be a way to access them from the main page. You can find scripts for films like /Trainspotting/ and /Aliens/ by using a back entrance provide at the Scripts-O-Rama page at www.script-o-rama.com/table.shtml. I'm sure these pages violate all sorts of copyright laws so, ah hem, I don't recommend you visit unless it's for educational purposes only. And it can be very educational. Many of the scripts, notably the script for /2001: A Space Odyssey/, are earlier drafts and deviate in interesting ways from the final product. Project Gutenberg www.promo.net/pg/ Since 1991, Project Gutenberg has been converting public domain works of literature to simple ASCII text format and making them available free of charge over the net. Project Gutenberg offers work ranging from /Aesop's Fables/ to the works of Oscar Wilde. Project Gutenberg entered its 1000th listing September 4, 1997, which was Dante's /Divine Comedy/.