Are you enjoying Shark Week on the Discovery Channel? Last night's special included another analysis of the camcorder footage of Heather Boswell's Great White attack off the coast of Chile, by far the most harrowing footage you'll ever see. In support of Shark Week, Discovery has launched a cool real-time game called SharkRunners that uses the actual data from telemetry tags on Great Whites. You captain a virtual boat and select areas in the ocean for your crew to explore. Here's the twist, it can take awhile for your boat to actually encounter a shark (because the game uses real telemetry data, it's like searching for real sharks) so the idea is to leave the game, which continues on without you, and when your boat does come across a shark, you'll receive your choice of either an SMS message alert to your cellphone and an e-mail alert so you can rush back to the website and manage the encounter with the shark as it unfolds. [More]

You may have seen one of several popular YouTube videos of Nico Di Mattia creating photo-realistic portraits that, thanks to time lapse video, appear to been done in minutes (it's actually less than a day, still impressive). Over at his personal website you'll find the complete collection of speed painting videos plus details on the techniques, tools, and tricks he uses. He plans to update the site soon with detailed tutorials. [More]

From intellectual discourse to pets to baking to scientific instruction to school materials, here are five new websites that take the technical concepts behind popular social community websites YouTube, MySpace, and FaceBook, and apply them instead to specific areas of interest. Most of the websites I’ve featured here on my blog before (Fuzzster is new), but gathered here together and we see a new trend towards taking the most revolutionary online ideas, currently under mob rule, and focusing them towards a specific purpose for more substance. [More]

In this variation of Simon Sez called Play The Game, four shadow characters perform sound effects that in turn become a song (think "Stomp"). Using the A, S, D, F, keys on your keyboard it's up to you to see if you can follow along and keep up. [More]

For a keen behind-the-scenes look at the making of every major school of puppetry, including animatronic, shadow puppets, giant puppets, Japanese Bunraku, ventriloquist, and traditional globe or hand & rod puppets, check out PuppetBuildingDotCom. The site is designed for puppeteers, but it includes some fascinating videos, photos, and tutorials that make it an entertaining browse for anyone. [More]

With it's animated butterflies and bizarre clips of people breaking pencils, Kah Ra Shin is an unlikely viral website for the EA video game Burnout Dominator (although its neat how they use tire skid marks to make Kanji symbols). The site is devoted to a fictional philosophy called Kah Ra Shin (Crashing) that explores the idea of finding release through acting out, wether it be breaking a pencil or screaming intensely. The best part of the website is the "Art of Screaming" where visitors can upload video clips of themselves screaming into the camera for release. [More]

Mateusz Skutnik of SubMachine fame is back again with an all-new world called DayMare Town. According to Skutnik, it's the hardest game he's created so far and creating it took a year and a half. "It’s really nasty, so be warned. It’s for advanced pnc gamers." DayMare Town features sketch art drawings to create a strange, minimalist town full of creepy sounds, suspicious characters, and a very twisted storyline. When you get to the point of pulling your hair out, you can check out the walkthrough . And here in French. [More]