The much talked about Spore which is being developed by Maxis and Will Wright, the creators of the successful The Sims series, is a god simulation game. When I first heard about the game, it reminded me of another game I once read about. Following a bit of investigation on the Wikipedia I’ve found that there’s two similar games which were published under the Sim brand: SimEarth and SimLife.

SimEarth and SimLife were both fairly commercially unsuccessful compared to the more successful games of the franchise like SimCity.

The Sim franchise was rapidly - arguably too rapidly - expanded following the amazing success of the 1989 SimCity game. The Wikipedia lists 13 Sim games excluding those in The Sims, SimCity or Theme Park ranges! These games ranged from running the US public health system to creating life itself (see SimLife).

Whilst graphically primitive, SimEarth and SimLife seems to share many common principles as Spore. Spore combines many elements that SimEarth and SimLife possess.

For example, SimLife seems to focus primarily on the evolution of species whilst SimEarth focuses on the society which develops on the planet you create but also allows you to observe evolution. Spore seems to place equal emphasis evolution and civilisation.

Interestingly, both Spore and SimEarth feature a monolith which turns species sentient.

Compare the videos of Spore & SimEarth (SNES version). (I can’t find a video of SimLife )
Spore

SimEarth

It’s quite obvious that Will Wright has simply remembered an old idea of his and thought of a much better way to present it. Spore looks much more promising than the Windows 3.x-era games that it’s based upon and I can easily imagine myself getting addicted to it like I have with Civ IV and The Sims 2!

I shall leave you with a quote from The Rig Veda:

Life, death and rebirth are inevitable.

Tags: spore, the sims, sims, video games, video game, simlife, simearth

Disclosure: Webby’s World is getting paid to write this review. I will try not to let this alter our opinion.

Connecticut-based MillionDollarWiki (obviously based on the idea of the high successful Million Dollar Homepage) is a ‘wiki’ which allows members to buy an article which they then exert total control over. The idea is that members can build quality quantity which brings them extra traffic and search engine love.

A page costs $100 and it is guaranteed to stay online for 15 years (MillionDollarWiki have paid 15 years of overheads) which equals $6.67 a year!

$100 may seem steep, but John Chow, who reviewed the service here, has already made his money back from sales from his article! You also have the rights to sell your page to someone else when/if the site reaches its target of 10,000 pages and if you pay MillionDollarWiki 20% of the sale price. You can also place ads on pages; the United Kingdom article’s owner, for example, charges people £5 for a lifetime link!

Calling it a wiki is slightly false as only the page’s owner can edit it but it appears to be powered by MediaWiki. Allowing only the page’s owner to edit it prevents vandalism, of course!

MillionDollarWiki set content guidelines to prevent articles from getting ’spammy’ such as that ads can’t be excessive (in relation to the amount of content, of course), an article can’t be a pure affiliate link farm and also the first thing you see cannot be an advertisement. Also, you cannot buy ‘jibberish’ or trademarked page names.

Currently, MillionDollarWiki have sold 390 pages generating nearly US$40,000 (that’s about GB£20,000!) for themselves! This is quite amazing but as is the idea of bringing together ‘million dollar homepage’ and wikis. Some pages have had 30,000 page views so far too!

The site’s founder claims that anyone who produces quality content on the site will be guaranteed a spot on their homepage!

Get $5 off: If you use the ‘webbysworld’ promocode after you’ve selected the pages you want and you are at the checkout! I’ve spotted a few good, money making names which are still available such as ‘text links’!

The site is only two months old and I wonder how many start-ups of a similar age can boast a similar amount of revenue! It is also hopefully a way to keep folks off the Wikipedia who seem to think that the WP is a free advertisement for them! Check out Ali’s review, too.

Tags: wiki, milliondollarwiki, million dollar wiki, make money, web2.0, web2, web 2.0, web 2

Computing can’t really help the environment with its world-wide power consumption but there are many ways you can minimise the impact you have.

Free carbon offsetting from Greenvoice

Greenvoice (review) is supposed to be a central point for every environment-related! If you sign up today, they’ll pay for 2 hours of CO₂ offsetting daily for your home PC!

Whilst 2 hours isn’t enough for a typical user like myself, every little helps. I also doubt this offer will last when Greenvoice expands but I’d like to see an option allowing me to pay for offsetting for my computing and my share of my shared hosting! Hosts like Dreamhost (use the WEBBYSWORLD promocode!) are carbon neutral.

Use Google and have a CRT monitor?

Mark Ontkush estimates that if Google was white on black instead of the other way around, somewhere between 750 and 1500 megawatt hours would be saved annually (consider that the peak output of a 100m high wind turbine is ~=2 megawatts). Savings only exist for CRT monitors, though, because LCD monitors have the backlight on regardless. Whilst the odds are you’re using a TFT monitor, I’m not and neither are 50% of China!

Many implementations of a Black Google now exist, my personal favourite being Blackle (which claims to have saved 0.16Mwh). It is also a nifty way for people to make profit as you could generate AdSense for Search revenues. There are also Greasemonkey (or GM variant) userscripts which darken Google.

Something that perhaps would be useful would be a dark version of Chinese search giant Baidu. I can’t find any besides this userscript.

Have a TFT monitor? Make your searches help charity!

Y!-powered Goodsearch is a search engine which allows you to select a charity - you could choose an environmental one - and for every search you make with them they’ll pay that charity US$0.01.

Goodsearch is US centric, though, and we Brits might find every click better. every click, in my opinion, is more attractive but isn’t powered by the best search engine (Ask.com). They donate 50% of their gross revenue to charities (awarded proportionately to users supporting that charity). Oblatoo, which is Google powered but is currently down, is another British one which donates GB£0.01 to charity per search (slightly more generous the Goodsearch at today’s exchange rate!).

This post has a list of 15 charity search engines.

Shop and have carbon offsetted

GoCarbonFree is a site which claims it will pay for carbon offsetting if you shop through sites its an affiliate of (via. their links). You could offset anywhere between 100 and 900g of CO₂ per pound spent depending on how much they make.

For example, per pound you spend at Apple Store, 100g of carbon (equivalent to a lightbulb being on for 14 hours) will be offset. So if I end up buying a MacBook Pro, I could offset 130kg of my carbon!

When you join GoCarbonFree, you will have 400g of carbon offset immediately.

I am struggling to find a similar American service; sorry Yankees!

Use carbon neutral companies

OK, not so Web 2.0 but an obvious answer is to use companies which are carbon neutral or are striving to become so such as HSBC, Google, Yahoo!, Tesco and Nike.

It’s worth point out that lots of environmentalists don’t believe carbon offsetting is an effective way of fighting global warming and is simply a ‘red herring’. Reducing the carbon you produce in the first place is much better :).

Tags: environment, web 2.0, carbon offsetting, global warming, climate change

Tracks4Africa is a project which asks for users to submit GPS data regarding African roads and places. They then sell ‘pro’ versions of generated maps (providing contributors with a free ‘pro’ version) but you can also get a lite version are now featured content on Google Earth!

I’m not an African so I have very little use for this software but I think it really is an interesting example of successful crowd sourcing. In the UK, we have OpenStreetMap which is quite similar but its coverage isn’t that good - it doesn’t have my street for example. I’m sure Tracks4Africa doesn’t have that great coverage but Africa is such a vast, and in many ways undeveloped place, where commercial GPS software such as TomTom I’m sure is even worse!

As well as maps of the roads for Africa, Tracks4Africa has notes at certain points such as ‘Police control point’ or perhaps more essentially ‘landmines on the road north’!

Just as an example of how effective Tracks4Africa is against Google Maps, see the below screenshot of Google Earth displaying the Tanzanian traditional capital, Dar es Salaam:

Without T4A:

With T4A:

Whilst you can see from the satellite imagery alone that many roads are missing I still think the amount which are present is amazing.

The main roads, or at least some, in places such as the Western Saraha are marked. Places like South Africa and Morocco seem to be pretty well covered (I’m sure Sir Mark Thatcher wished he had a laptop running Google Earth w/GPS!).

Tracks4Africa is an interesting use of crowd sourcing which has generated real results!

(via. this site)

Tags: geocaching, gps, tracks4africa, crowd sourcing, africa

Andrew Nesbitt’s recenty improved Tickets describes itself as ‘a mixture of a tumblelog, a todo list and a status notifier’ and goes onto to list a bunch of more popular uses.

Tickets are, in essence, notes which are displayed in a format similar to a microblog.

Users have the option to make public or private tickets. Those who make their tickets public might be using the site for microblogging purposes (or indeed note sharing) whilst those who keep their notes private are more likely to be using it for small-scale software/web development.

Design-wise, Tickets is superb. Utilising a nice blue gradient as a background (through the good old repeat-x technique as opposed to radical ones like the all-CSS gradient background) and content is tastefully displayed in a white box! Simple but effective!

I love how Tickets gives you so much flexibility and you don’t feel like you have to conform to a specific use for it!

I must admit that whilst for quite a while I have been objected to microblogging I am getting more and more tempted by it. I would choose Tickets as it allows you to make quite lengthy posts and include such things as code in them however I would probably find myself over on Twitter because of the existing large userbase.

Tags: microblogging, microblog, microblogs, web2.0, web 2.0, web2, web 2, twitter, pownce