Bacon site, others may be worth their salt

indystar

September 21, 2009 by indystar | Staff

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Are you feeling overwhelmed by all the Facebook quizzes that purport to determine your superhero name, what brand of beer you are and your real race?

Then check out the first entry in this month’s Seven Sites column.

1. http://lite.facebook.com: Even Facebook knows you’re fed up. So, it has launched a “light” version of Facebook, with a handful of only slightly time-consuming features. Update your status, check the news feed, post photos, post videos, comment on your friends’ status updates. That’s about it. This is about as simple as Facebook will ever get.

2. http://bacontoday.com: Speaking of Facebook, my first brush with this Web site came from a friend who kept posting links to articles about, well, bacon. Being curious, I read a few of the articles and discovered a humorous, but disgusting site. Here, you can find recipes for bacon-shell tacos, a “turbaconducken” — that’s a chicken stuffed in duck stuffed in a turkey, all wrapped in bacon — and bacon brownies. (I can only assume the latter would appeal to those of you who ate chocolate-covered bacon at the State Fair this year.) You’ll also find weird stories, like the one about a guy who proposed to his fiancee with bacon.

Trust me; it’s amusing. And I don’t even eat bacon anymore.

3. http://peopleofwalmart.com: Far from politically correct, the concept of this Web site is simple. Weird stuff happens at Walmart, and here you can see pictures of it. Web page after Web page shows user-submitted photos of creepy or funny-looking shoppers in weird outfits doing weird things. Even crazy vehicles in the parking lot aren’t exempt. Only posting photos of people who are mentally or physically handicapped is forbidden. But that leaves a lot of room for humor.

So, watch what you wear to Walmart at 2 a.m. There might just be someone watching and snapping photos of you with a camera phone.

4. http://well-beingindex.com: If you’ve ever wondered what the country’s collective mood was, this is the place to find out. Noted research firm Gallup has been tracking the well-being of Americans, interviewing about 1,000 people every day about their emotional health, physical health, work environment and other areas. This survey is expected to continue for the next 25 years. The result so far is a daily pulse of the nation’s mood and comparisons to last year. The results are interesting, if at times a bit predictable.

5. www.data.gov: In June, the Obama administration launched this Web site as a public repository of information collected by the government. The data sets range from statistics on crime to fossil fuel emissions. It’s a one-stop shop.

6. www.datamasher.org: Piggybacking on data.gov, several Web sites have popped up that use the government statistics but make them more palatable for the average user. DataMasher.org is one of these sites.

Here, when you sign up for a free account, you can select two different data sets and compare them — or “mash” them up. What you’ll get is a map of the United States with rankings based on the data sets you chose. You also can check out other users’ mashups and leave comments.

7. www.thisweknow.org: This is another Web site that’s making good use of the information available on Data.gov. Here, you can pull basic facts on just about any city in the country. Type in “Indianapolis” and see how many factories are in the city and how many pounds of pollutants they release. Granted, the data on Indianapolis are slim, but for other cities, such as Chicago or Detroit, you can see a lot more. The site is being updated constantly, though, so more data are on the way.

Categories: Erika Smith, Business

Tags: 

collective mood, superhero name, user submitted photos, walmart, status updates, posting photos, weird things, weird stuff, fiancee, bacon, tacos, news feed, parking lot, handful, shoppers, quizzes, shell, recipes, Erika Smith, Business, Facebook, State Fair, starheadlines

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