Flickrvision opens a new world

Flickrvision, brought to you by the people who produced Twittervision, will either bug you or become a regular Web distraction.

Twittervision is an online application that uses Google maps to highlight every new comment posted by people using the social network site Twitter. It offers a steady stream of absurd and delightful posts popping up widely across the planet.

Now imagine a site doing the same for the steady stream of photos that people have just uploaded to picture-sharing site Flickr.

Every few seconds the map rotates to a new spot, a picture pops up and the window tells who took the picture, where it was taken and the time the photo was uploaded.

One annoying non-feature: It doesn’t let you screen or separate photos by location, as far as we can tell. The only setting is for all photos uploaded anywhere that show up on Flickrvision. You cannot, for now, only see photos taken in the Southern Hemisphere, for instance.

Startmysong.com

Songwriters and musicians are not having a great decade. The Web has essentially taken their work and tossed it all together in one big online freebie sale.

Startmysong.com wants to become a gathering place for songwriters and music artists to share ideas and promote their talents.

Artists can upload songs, melodies or lyrics and ask others to rate them. You can rate the work of others as well. All of your uploaded content will display on your profile page, along with your contact information.

But it’s not free. Every snippet or song you upload costs (for now) $5. I can see musicians panhandling outside Startmysong, asking someone to fork over cash so they can use the site to push their careers.

Near-Earth Object Program

Lest you think the Web is totally consumed with the trivial and silly, we recommend the Near-Earth Object Program run by NASA, at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/.

The site is a tracker and chronicler of matters related to potential crashes of asteroids with objects in our universe, including our own planet.

You would never know how close Asteroid 2007 TU24 came to Earth this past January if you didn’t check this site. Answer: not that close, but still close enough to pay attention. In fact, it came roughly 1.4 times the distance between the moon and Earth. In universal terms, that’s in our backyard.