Miles Mendoza's Website of the Day ... and more!

Neil Diamond / Doctor Who trailers

Something Musical:
>> Radio 2 Live: Neil Diamond (Exclusive video)
A big week this week for the man who will stay “Forever In Blue Jeans” – Not only has he scored his first ever #1 album in the US Billboard charts … but even bigger than that, he’s performed his exclusive gig for Radio 2. Watch a video preview now of his performance of current single Pretty Amazing Grace, Listen tomorrow from 1900, and watch video of the concert online or by pressing the red button on any BBC Digital TV channel.

Something Creative:
>> Doctor Who Trailer Maker
I rarely get on the family computer in Website of the Day Towers, now that Henry (12) spends most of his waking hours on this site! This is a simple (but fiendishly clever) video editing tool which lets you create your own customised trailers for Doctor Who by assembling short video extracts and adding green-screen effects, sound effects and background music. You can save your trailers and email them to friends. In the two weeks since the site launched, fans have created over 80 thousand original trailers.

Encyclopedia Britanica / Simpsons Catapault Game

New this week:
>> Revamped Google Video Search
>> Live Chat on Facebook
>> Encyclopedia Britanica Webshare

And a splendid Friday game:
>> Simpsons Ride: Catapult to Krustyland

‘The world's biggest free music service’

>> Last FM
I’ve been a fan of this site for a few years. It’s an interesting mixture of online radio, music recommendations and MySpace-ish social networking, but until now it’s tended to appeal mainly to younger users or music geeks. This week the site has had a major upgrade which is likely to make it much more appealing even to the least geeky of music fans

Site visitors in the UK, US and Germany can now play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm site. They now bill themselves as ‘the world's biggest free music service’. You can listen to each track up to three times in full. After that, you can still access 30” clips, and find links to buy that track as a download or on CD.

In addition unsigned artists can upload their own music and get payed every time someone listens to their tracks via the site. If you choose to sign up and create a profile page, Last FM will track your listening habits, create an updating list your most listened-to songs and artists and generate lists of recommended tracks and artists based on your current favourites

Also mentioned today:

>> BBC teams up with MySpace

>> MySpace TV: BBC Worldwide

Virtual tourism / escapism

On a damp and dismal British Friday, thoughts inevitably turn to beaches and other exotic destinations:

>> Fabsearch
This new travel site trawls glossy magazines like Vogue, Tatler, and Vanity Fair for their best travel tips and features and archives them online by source and location. Site visitors can peruse the features for free and "clip" interesting sections in a "my clippings" file.

>> AfterSunrise
This a great escapist stressbuster – Watch videos of the sunrise on Miami Beach. Each short clip features beautiful beach views, soothing sounds and feelgood quotes from Miami’s early risers talking about what they’re looking forward to doing on the day of that sunrise.

>> Friday Game: Mynci Beach Volleyball
Where turquoise cartoon animals take on brown cartoon animals in a battle for oceanside volleyball supremacy .

Christmas How-To videos on VideoJug

>> Christmas How-To videos on VideoJug
We’ve featured VideoJug before on the show: It’s a YouTube style site specialising in handy short films teaching you how to do the stuff they didn’t teach you at school (get a perfect wet shave, tie a bow tie, carve a roast dinner etc)
They’ve created an excellent section of short films to help you cope with any aspect of the festive season – From dancing at office parties to removing mulled wine stains, curing indigestion, or wrapping unusually shaped presents. Indispensible!

BBC iPlayer adds 'Click To Play' feature

>> BBC iPlayer
>> BBC Press Office Guide to iPlayer
When I was little I used to anxiously await the arrival of the Christmas double issue of Radio Times so I could meticulously plan my festive viewing. In spite of this, I usually found that by the start of the Spring term, I’d missed most of the programmes which everyone was talking about in the playground.
Which brings me to the BBC iPlayer, which launched quietly in the summer as a trial service offering UK licence fee payers free Windows downloads of BBC TV shows. Just in time for Christmas, the service is expanding to include ‘Click To Play’ programmes as well as downloads.
Now you can watch immediately online on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer. Basically as long as you are in the UK, if your computer can play YouTube videos, it should also be able to play any iPlayer Click To Play videos with no additional software.
Around 250 shows from all BBC TV channels are made available each week, and you have 7 days after the original broadcast to watch each show. Which means that even if you forget to set the video for Doctor Who, Catherine Tate or Strictly Come Dancing this Christmas, you can still catch up with all these shows online, making Spring term telly playground blues a thing of the past.

Music Club Live / Festive greetings

>> Radio 2 Music Club Live
Earlier this month Radio 2 hosted a concert featuring six acts we have supported from the beginning of their careers. Go online now to see photos, hear live tracks and watch backstage video of james Blunt, KT Tunstall, The Hoosiers, Tom Baxter and more. Then tomorrow from 2200 you can listen again to the whole gig and watch 30 minutes of highlights online or on digital TV (via the red button service)

Also mentioned today:
>> Elf Yourself
>> Everyclick presents Santa Swing

Friday quick links

>> Doctor Who Advent Calendar
Highlights so far include:

• Merry Christmas from David and Kylie video
• Christmas short story - The Frozen
• Companions Quiz
• Printable Christmas Cards
• Unreleased Murray Gold Track - The Old Rugged Cross

with lots more to come before the 2007 Christmas epsiode

>> About My Place
Zoomy-inny maps go 3D! Just like Google Earth, but you don’t have to download it first, this lets you choose from an overhead view of your house, or satellite views from North, South, East or West

>> Video clip of the week – Dance Moves: An Emergency Guide For Men


Rules:

• Accept that you can’t dance
• Vow that never again will you perform a pelvic thrust
• No singing, mauling, or woop-wooping
• Keep things VERY simple

>> Game of the week: Hair Style
Wholly in Japanese, so this animated hair-styling game is slightly baffling, but cute and compelling in equal measure!

Do The Green Thing

>> Do The Green Thing
I’ve featured plenty of sites devoted to tackling climate change - All of them are admirable, lots are highly interactive, but too many of them can be a bit po-faced. So I was pleased to find this green site which manages to convey an environmental message with a good dose of fun and creativity:

Green Thing is for those of us - and there's a lot of us - who don't get turned on by the tree-hugging thing, the guilt thing, the scientific thing or the world-is-at-an-end thing. Green Thing is an easy thing, a fun thing, a creative thing and a community thing

So the site asks you to do a different green thing each month, and encourages you to do that green thing with help from a little video clip, or game or audio download. November’s green thing asks you to ‘turn your lights off early and have some fun in the dark.”

Friday Quick links

>> Hands Up Now
Contribute a virtual handprint to an online gallery to show your support for Anti-Bullying Week
(see also Anti-Bullying Alliance)

>> Doodle
Online game in which your doodled stick-man has to jump from squiggle to squiggle on the page of a notebook, avoiding enemy erasers and other malevolent doodles

>> YouTube clip of the week: Mamma Mia performed on empty bottles
Straight from Good Morning Denmark, here is Scandanavia’s leading bottle orchestra recreating Abba’s classic using only their mouths and a row of about 30 bottles.