Getting down and dirty in Denver
A new feature on Google Maps tool that allows users to zoom down to street level in York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami “makes some people a little afraid and has others scrambling”, Boingboing.net reported.

Mary Kalin-Casey told the blog that the “new Google Maps zoom feature zooms all the way into my living room window. See cat on cat perch. I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes.”

Another user of the site suggested that a new word should join the online lexicon: Screwgle. . . as in “My wife caught me leaving a strip club on Google Street View; I got screwgled!” maps.google.com boingboing.net

Use the curser
Nice to see that the internet continues to build bridges between nations: Youswear.com teaches users to “swear in any language”.
youswear.com

A star is born
It’s official: the fabulously wealthy venture capitalists who made billions in a matter of months by backing Google in its garage days are having a laugh.

FunnyOrDie.com features a skit starring Will Ferrell (the star of Anchorman and Zoolander) as “a down-on-his-luck tenant being harassed by a foul-mouthed, booze-sodden landlord”, nytimes.com reported. The actress playing the landlord is Pearl McKay, the two-year-old daughter of Adam McKay, the Hollywood director.

The Landlord took 45 minutes to shoot and cost nearly nothing to produce, but was backed by Sequoia Capital, the group that invested $12.5 million in Google and saw the value of its stake surge to $1.5 billion when the search engine floated.

Its latest business proposal is obviously no laughing matter: the clip has been watched more than 1.6 million times. Ferrell and Pearl have already shot a sequel, Good Cop, Baby Cop.
funnyordie.com nytimes.com

The dark side
Amnesty International seems to have withdrawn an online poll that pitted the US Vice-President Dick Cheney against Darth Vader and Hobgoblin for the “worst human rights record”.

The poll compared Vader’s “enslavement of Wookies” with Mr Cheney’s alleged compliance in “torture . . .

kangaroo courts . . . and more”. A deeply unimpressed Wall Street Journal stepped in to make a copy of the site – just in case “some adult steps in and takes it down”.
opinionjournal.com/best

Fast film
Are attention spans dwindling online? 5secondfilms.com compiles condensed movies. The five-second Titanic, for example, neatly cuts from “this ship is unsinkable” to shot of said boat sinking. Meanwhile, Twitterlit.com will e-mail restless readers the first line of a novel every 12 hours.
5secondfilms.com twitterlit.com

Password peril
Are you one of the 44 per cent of internet users who use the same password for pretty much everything? If just one of the reputable companies you deal with let your password slip, your finances could be in real jeopardy. For £30, Garlik.com will scan 4 billion net pages to check your personal information.
garlik.com

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