Sites that recharge mind, body
The kids are back at school and it’s the ideal time to recharge our adult brains after a season of lawn mowing and mixing gin with tonic.
Two weeks ago Mixed Nuts saluted a handful of sites ideal for helping students work their way back into shape. This week we’ll list some sites that give you things to think about, or at least discuss at the next office party.
One is the Museum of Modern Art’s visual Timetable of World History at www.metmuseum.org/toah. One can find many worthwhile illustrated histories across the Web. We can’t think of a better idea than compiling charts, photos, graphics and timelines to illustrate the rich textures of visual art over time.
And this site does it very well. One can browse art history through timelines, by subject matter, by artist, and even by thematic material. Everything is related to historical benchmarks. Smart and tightly organized.
RightHealth.com
Next up is RightHealth.com, a health Web site that is both a content aggregator (collecting related lists of links on given topic) and a search site.
It’s one of three new sites founded by Kosmix, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup that is taking an algorithmic approach to aggregating content. What that means is that based on the pages visited by people using the site, the front page and the “featured” items and topics getting primary display change, based on overall activity on the site.
The cleanly designed main page features areas such as latest news, featured articles and top health topics. Some of the topics link to outside news items or other Web sources. If you search for a condition, say “non-Hodgkins lymphoma,” the aggregated results are produced in a stylish, modular page with several sections to choose from: general Web pages on the topic, a Wikipedia entry, sponsored ads that relate to that search term, plus two other areas: Trusted Sources and Further Reading. Those last two are different from any other search site we’ve worked with.
This site is in beta stage but Kosmix says RightHealth is getting more than a million hits per month.