Web Week

By PETER SINCLAIR

FrogMagic: For many surfers, anonymous flirtation is one of the big attractions of cyberspace, where all frogs can be princes without inconvenient realities such as what they really look like and what they do for a living. But it complicates courtship - how do you woo, let alone win, a potential cyber-sweetheart without a real name or address? FrogMagic targets the problem by letting online suitors send flowers and gifts even if they have nothing more than an e-mail address or username. The key to the system is that it is blind - the wooer cannot get any information about the wooee and vice-versa. Your gift is granted! – but where's the payoff?

World of Stainboy: Animation from Tim Burton, the man behind Edward Scissorhands - the Stainboy project presents a whole family of online amusements involving the characters Burton draws at Macromedia's Shockwave site. Watch the ill-equipped hero battle villains like Staregirl and Toxicboy, download electronic trading cards, and peek behind the scenes. Eerie music courtesy Danny Elfman, former lead of the rock band Oingo Boingo. Also onsite: interactive presentation of Madonna's Guilty single and Regurge, musical parody of Limp Bizkit.

ThrottleBox: A never-aired audio interview with Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, recorded six months before his death, is being made available for download in a novel multimedia file to showcase the new version of ThrottleBox's player. "Box file" technology lets you download a single file containing audio, video, photographs, text and hyperlinks. In the past, you would have to separately download an MP3 music file, AVI video file, JPEG photo file and so on. Cool.

FrogMagic

World of Stainboy

Oingo Boingo

ThrottleBox