In some ways the olfactory (aka "smellable") web began 10 years ago. In other, more real ways, not so much. How many of you are able to smell your favorite websites today? Of course, among all the protocols and basic hardware required of modern computers, the ability to produce smell never quite earned a spot in the spec sheet. Too bad, maybe, as smells are powerful triggers in our brains.

I remember way back in 1999 when I worked for a now-defunct dot-com startup, as we suffered endless PowerPoint pitch sessions with folks looking to do business with us. One company was DigiScents, makers of the iSmell. Yes, it was seriously called the iSmell. Perhaps that is why DigiScents' website is now a blog, and not a very updated one at that. It could also be that only a few people wanted to smell the web. PC World Magazine (whose karmic retribution may be going completely virtual) called iSmell one of the 25 worst tech devices of all time way back in 2006, and since then the technology has fallen into obscurity. Sad, as in 2001 they seemed to be making all the right moves. Unfortunately I don't think people wanted to pay $200 for a USB device that made smells, no matter how "rich" the web experience could become. That's probably still true.

Or has it? I may be one of the small percentage of people actually wanting this technology, but I find it strange that we demand better graphics for games, louder and more realistic sounds, even exploring force feedback systems to immerse ourselves in online worlds, but we leave the powerful sense of smell alone. It could be that most games would smell pretty terrible (gunpowder and guts don't mix well with Cheetos and Red Bull), or it could be that people just haven't thought about it that much. NTT appears to be the only company thinking about this now, and all I've seen commercially available are some phones that stink.

And now, for your Moment of Zen: the Olfactory Transmission Protocol page from 1997.

If you've tried to register a domain name in the last decade or so you're probably aware of the "cromulent word scarcity syndrome" (yes, I just made that up). In other words, most of the good names are gone. Scratch another off the list with purplemonkeydishwasher.com, a reference to a line in The Simpsons. As is my wont, I typed this random URL into my browser and was pleasantly surprised to see a modicum of functionality (as opposed to a placeholder site with nothing but keyword links).

Purplemonkeydishwasher.com is running a fortune-telling application. Not so much a real fortune-teller, actually, but a simple random text fetcher. As the site explains:

fortune is a program which displays random messages, quotations, folk sayings, and other verbal fluff. Historically, it dates back to unix systems, and is believed to have been used by software developers to help break tension, or perhaps it was simply just an early version of a 'widget'. Because it was originally created by software engineers, some of the older fortunes are programmer's jokes and make little sense to most people. Since then, however, the fortune database has grown and forked off to numerous differing versions. Some fortunes are well dated or make social comments now out of context, others make no sense whatsoever, but many are gems, offering truly useful advice or food for thought, and many are timeless with origins unknown.

What other random URL's have you found?

Before there was Weird Wednesday, we had Freaky Friday Find -- a crazy app every week. Nearly 3 years ago I wrote a piece on an app called Tele Hypnosis, and guess what? That app still exists. Yes, you too can remotely control whomever you wish, all for the low, low price of $99. Unlike those darned fairies, this thing has no rules; you can make someone love you, cheat at math, or get your kids off drugs.

What's incredible is Tifareth has actually grown in the past 3 years, and there's an entire suite of hypno applications. Try the Studio Pro app to "Be full protected of all types of black magick, sorcery, goetia and psychic attacks." There are also add-ons in the form of sigils and symbols. As an added bonus, Tifareth offers Tarot readings online. One more thing: a full Radionic Workstation! Priced to move at $599, but you do get the app customized for your good/neutral/chaotic needs.

Does it work? Unfortunately I'm unable to access the parts of my memory where all my thorough tests were conducted. And the research is strangely missing from my hard drive. But here's a link to the original post.

Everyone knows you can't swing a dead lolcat without finding weird stuff on the internet. Before the web, the internet was a haven for all sorts of crazy "underground" information that was difficult to get published and distributed.

Fast-forward to the present day and you can indulge your weirdness with the push of maybe 5 or 6 buttons, tops. You don't need a real name, address, phone number or functional frontal lobe -- you too can pollute the mindscape of hundreds with a janky little free site dedicated to whatever weird crap you're into.

But how to find the weird stuff? Digg, BoingBoing, Fark, and many, many sites are dedicated to culling the "best" of the oddball sites out there (although more often than not the sites themselves are merely bad, not "weird"). But what about those rarely-curated Frontpage-compliant hyper-niche zany sites out there?

There's no way for us to find them all (DARPA cancelled funding for that project long ago), but here's a sampling of what we could find in about 30 minutes of searching. Something you'll notice: most of these sites also fall under the "fugly" category. Most haven't been updated in years, either.

As always, leave your own in the comments. PG-13 please, we know there are plenty of adult and "other" sites that indulge strange stuff -- and there are plenty of sites covering those, so no need for us to do the same.

History of Public Toilets. Joe the Plumber would be proud. The content is actually fascinating, even if the presentation leaves something to be desired. But there's no good way to dress up poop, really.

Here's a weird one: In Lost Aliens your goal is to get all of the aliens to the bullseye. If you click on an alien, it'll move one space to the right, and if there's another alien next to it, it'll leapfrog over it. However, if an alien lands on the blue crystal it's stuck. To get it unstuck, you have to click on the pyramid, but this will only work if another alien, who will out some sort of pulse to free it, is next to it. Other obstacles appear on the way, making this Flash puzzler addictive and challenging, not to mention bizarre.

There's a lot of things you can do with RSS headlines, but this isn't one I had thought of: Average Shoveler is a Flash toy with old school adventure game-style graphics. You control a character who can do three things: walk around, shovel snow and talk to passers-by. The passers-by will tell give you news (scraped from Yahoo! News) and when you shovel the snow, news photos will appear. Occasionally large chunks of snow will fall and photos will fly inall directions (try not to be under those when they fall, though). There's really no object to the game, other than to shovel snow, learn about current events, and explore. Eventually, though, the snow will win.

To call War of the Hell bizarre would be an understatement, as would calling it addicting. The object of this Japanese Java game is to capture the flailing stick figures with the rope that dangles from your cursor and drag them from the ground—hell, presumably—up the the top of the screen—heaven. Unfortunately for you it's a bit like capturing epileptic geese with fly paper. The object is to get as many people to heaven as possible, in as large groups as you can, but as with yesterday's time waster there's no real end to the game, but War of the Hell is strangely entertaining throughout.


[Via Weblog Wannabe]