Featured Site: Duolingo

We’ve looked at several startups built to help us learn coding languages, but when it comes to learning human languages our options are pretty limited. Obviously, we’d like to see a Matrix-style system of learning as soon as possible, but until that’s commercially available (c’mon, science!), you might want to try Duolingo. Here are the facts:

• Duolingo is completely free. No subscription fees, or even advertising. More on that here.
• 34 hours of Duolingo = 11 weeks of university-level language study, according to an independent assessment of Duolingo’s process.
• Learn along with your Facebook friends, and take Duolingo on the bus, plane or train with their free iPhone app.
• Ashton Kutcher is an investor in Duolingo. While he may not be bilingual, the man can spot a promising startup.

Try it out, and tell us what you think! Or for those who, shall we say, have already jumped on board the Duolingo train, “racontez-nous ce que vous pensez!”

Featured Site: The Internet Map

The Internet Map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

It encompasses over 350 thousand websites from 196 countries and all domain zones. Information about more than 2 million links between the websites has joined some of them together into topical clusters.

Featured Site: Exobrain

Atlas Obscura is your guide to the world’s most curious places. In an age where everything has already been explored and there seems to be nothing new to be discovered, the Atlas celebrates a different way of looking at the world. If you’re searching for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you’ll find them. The Atlas is curated by Joshua Foer.

Featured Site: Exobrain

Exobrain is a Brainstorming tool and interactive web application that lets you visualize your thoughts, finds unique connections between words, and pushes past obvious ideas.

Featured Site: Einstein Archive

Ladies and Gentlemen, E=MC2 and Other Einstein Archive Treasures:

The joy of the Internet, friends.

Earlier today the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the California Institute of Technology unveiled a new online repository of 2,000 high-resolution scans from their collected manuscripts of Albert Einstein. Among them, the scribble above — one of three existing examples in Einstein’s own handwriting.

Source: The Atlantic

Featured Site: Aereo

Aereo is a web-based platform for watching broadcast television. Each Aereo member is assigned their own antenna and DVR (the devices are located out of sight at centralized data centers.) The member can then stream television broadcasts to most web-enabled devices. The service will launch on March 14 exclusively in the New York City area. Aereo was founded by Chet Kanojia and is based in Long Island, New York.

Featured Site: Show Me Non-Stop

Show Me Non-Stop is a video player that will play a continuous stream of videos based on the user’s search term. It is powered by VHX, a new platform for watching online video. Show Me Non-Stop is by Jamie Wilkinson, Casey Pugh (both co-founders of VHX) and Chad Pugh. The site was created during last weekend’s hackday.tv, a 24 hour video hackday. Previously we wrote about another project from that event, Casey Pugh’s Music Video Genome.

Featured Site: Music Video Genome

Music Video Genome by Casey Pugh is a site powered by VHX that generates a music video channel focused on an artist chosen by the user (in a formula that will be familiar to Pandora users). Pugh created the site during last weekend’s hackday.tv, a 24 hour video hackday.

Featured Site: Two of Us

Project Popcorn, an in-house project for creative agency, The Barbarian Group, has developed Two of Us, a new website where you take a smiling picture using your computer’s webcam and share it with a complete (but smiling) stranger.

The premise is simple: take a webcam pic of your best smile to brighten someone else’s day, and get a smile in return!
And no cheating, we’ve got special smile detection software to make sure you’re sending a smile and not…something else.

According to Caelin Cacciatore, a junior designer for The Barbarian Group, “The site is built in NodeJS, a cutting edge event driven web server and MongoDB. The smile detection software was written by Sebastián Alvarez…”

Via: The Barbarian Group

Featured Site: Message with a Bottle

Message With a Bottle is a pretty darned charming Tumblr by a stay-at-home dad who writes post-it notes to himself about parenting and fatherhood. They're both true and hilarious. It's only a matter of time before CBS makes these notes into a television series.

Featured Site: Our Valued Customers

A moment of clarity as he paid for his books...

Our Valued Customers is a brilliant blog of minimalistic sketches capturing one single moment of idiocy on the part of comic book store customers.  Like Overheard In New York, this site is certain to entertain you for hours on end.

Featured Site: Everything is Cuter In Bunny Ears

Suicidal Robots by Ryan Green

(Almost) every day for the last year, cartoonist/animator Ryan Green has demonstrated that Everything is Cuter In Bunny Ears

Featured Site: Fuck Yeah Headlines

F*ck Yeah Headlines! Each weekday Eric Wedum finds a headline on a major news site, and illustrates it without reading a word of the story... with hilarious results.