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Launching today, GalaxyZoo is asking for help from the masses of Internet users. The GalaxyZoo project is a one-of-a-kind site built to allow users to contribute their time picking through photos of galaxies. Similar to other collaborative projects like Folding@Home, any person with web access can join the project and can volunteer their computing power. The main difference between Folding@Home and GalaxyZoo is that instead of volunteering your computer’s time, you can volunteer your brain’s computer power.

Why does GalaxyZoo need our help? GalaxyZoo says that the answer to that question is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to classify galaxies as either spiral or elliptical. The images come from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is taking pictures of over a million galaxies. After a brief training session, you can begin classifying the galaxies, and your findings are compared against the findings of others. After deciding whether a galaxy is spiral or elliptical, you are asked whether spiral galaxies are rotating clockwise or anti-clockwise. You can see an example of a galaxy at the right (spiral - anti-clockwise). The “work” is actually fun and you get to see a lot of great photos. Classifying the images is very quick, and is benefiting a great cause. Head on over to GalaxyZoo and get to work!

Wouldn’t it be really handy if you could see the desktop of that relative who’s having computer problems but has no idea what RealVNC is? I have tried numerous services that offer to simplify the screen sharing process, and I’ve not really been impressed with any of them. That is, until I came across CrossLoop.

CrossLoop is a free screen sharing utility requiring only a small download and no registration. Any computer user who can install a program can get this software up and running. The greatest thing about CrossLoop is that the service bypasses routers and firewalls. This is an amazing step forward for screen sharing technology, and it should make computer repair and diagnosis more efficient.

CrossLoop is secure, encrypting all data using 128 bit encryption and a random 12 digit access code. CrossLoop is made possible through the use of proprietary VIP Tunnel technology and the open-source VNC viewer from TightVNC.

One user acts as a host and the other user joins the session with the access code displayed on the host’s screen. Simple solutions like this help us solve some of the most frustrating problems. Never again will I sit with a family member on the phone trying to explain how to download software.

Labpixies is a provider of widgets that can be added to your website and blog. They can also be integrated into personal homepages like Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Google IG. There’s a great selection of widgets that offer a lot of functionality:

Moodget - Share your feelings with friends.
Calorie counter - Help you manage your diet.
Travelocity - Buy flights, hotels, etc.
To Do List - Stay organized!
T.V. Widget - Watch broadcasted streaming television.
Games - Play the classics, including Sudoku and Space Invaders.

Undoubtedly there’s widget for everyone on the page, and whether you use iGoogle, Netvibes, or you have a website, you’ll have fun embedding these little tiny things into your page.

ArmchairGM was originally created by four people and launch in early 2006., before being purchased by Wikia last December for around $2 million. Based on the hugely popular Mediawiki software, ArmchairGM allows users to write and share sports related articles.

Similar to Digg and other social voting sites, ArmchairGM has added the ability to vote for good articles written by other users. The main page includes the most popular content from all different sections of the site, but you can limit the articles to any number of the sections at the top of the page (MLB, NFL, College Basketball etc.).

Each user starts with 1000 points and can receive points for writing popular articles, commenting, and otherwise being involved with the site. Users can add each other as friends and send “gifts” like foam fingers for good stories. A lot of the stories are really well written, and the comments are usually relevant and constructive.

If you like a particular sports team, you can use the search to narrow the articles to those written about your team or school. For those of you who prefer reading in RSS, its RSS feed is available here.

The site supports an extremely well-designed interface and has 40,000 pages in its shell. It’s a completely free service on the user’s end and its revenue model consists of — purely and simply — running a Google AdSense along its content pages.

Keegy (CadaMinuto.com) is a new service which compiles RSS syndicated news on the Internet in real time and displaying and sorting it based on the location of its readers.

Keegy’s real power comes from the use of the robot spider “KeegyBot.” KeegyBot travels to known information sources (mainly blogs) and pulls information and news to display on the site. As users interact with the site, their activity anonymously generates statistics for each city/country. Using this information, an artificial intelligence algorithm ranks the posts for relevance according to a visitor’s location and the stories are updated every minute.

News stories pulled by KeegyBot are sorted into categories which are accessible via the top toolbar. All stories are also given tags for quick access. A tag cloud shows the most popular tags on Keegy. Similar to other news aggregators, you are reading the news on the actual sites providing the articles. After clicking on an article, a smallframe remains at the top of the page so you can return to Keegy, but you are sent directly to the source of the information.

The site designed fairly well and is available in many languages. The search results seem relevant, and the tagging system actually works. If you are a news junky, give Keegy a shot.

The lucky winner of this week’s Worst Website of the Week Award is the Japanese Aiseikai Hospital. We had to browse around the site for quite a while trying to figure out exactly what its purpose is, and why it’s designed like the way it is. Although we’re still very confused, we managed to learn five main things along the way:

1. This website is of a Japanese women’s hospital. And yes, you’d be right in thinking that’s all we could find out.
2. The Japanese can make seizure-causing websites just as well as Americans. If last week’s worst website was dizzying, this week’s worst website is mesmerizing and nauseating. Why are the cat’s eyes flashing? Why is the red text and blue text in front of the building getting bigger and smaller? Why is the copyright footer moving from side to side? As you can see, there are a lot of questions unanswered.
3. The Google Japanese to English translation service doesn’t work too well (yeah, we know, it’s still in beta).

   “Three warehouse priests the ? doctor of countryside prejudice and being arbitrary, interpreting the ‘your grateful sutra’.”

   “The case of childbirth, after the baby is born, it is discharged outside the parent.”

   “6 generations are conveyed, that business trip diagnosis and treatment was done often even in room state, are rich in activity power greatly, become 1 people of the ancestor/founder of medium interest.”

4. Literally, every element on that site was made to “stand out,” if you know what we mean.
5. Colours are a big part of this world. Red, blue, orange, green. And sites like these makes us realize that.
   

Editor’s Note: We have LiveRail invites! Head over to the advertiser or the publisher invitation request page and mention that you’re a Rev2 reader in the ‘Tell us something about yourself’ section.

LiveRail, a video distribution and advertising platform, launched yesterday in private-beta. Privately funded, LiveRail was developed by an international team based in the UK. The concept of LiveRail is essentially to be a platform for publishers while providing advertisers a way monetize it through a unique ‘AdSense for Video’-like approach.

With LiveRail, ads are targetted to the user using a variety of variables [location, content, language, etc.] and presented in rotating text form in a section below the video. While the user is watching a video, he can choose to click on any that he finds interesting, which overlaps the existing video and brings up the ad until it finishes.

LiveRail uses a concept first introduced by Google where advertisers bid on keywords on a per-click basis, although a notable factor in its ad determining technology is the popularity of a certain ad — which is balanced equally with the bidding amount. For example, as an advertiser who wants the most exposure for your campaign, you can either bid a relatively high amount or focus on the actual ad itself (and its content — to increase its clickability/liking) and get away with a smaller bid.

Of course, unlike some of the other interesting video ad startups, LiveRail aims to also be a publishing platform (on par with Revver et al). Publishers can upload their video content and keep a 50% of the ad revenue share. One of the key differences in LiveRail’s concept, however, is that they don’t themselves aim to organize and present the content on their website (in the manner of YouTube, for example), but simply provide publishers with an embed code to put on their blogs and websites. Such a concept yields more professional interest seeing publishers are always in control of where their content is published.

The LiveRail developers hope this model will encourage fun, interesting advertising as advertisers compete for extra exposure, which will result in, among other things, their publishers getting a good revenue stream. You can see an example of the concept here.

Bored? JellyVision’s computer game series, You Don’t Know Jack has an online version. YDKJ, known as the game “where high culture and pop culture collide,” released the full online version in March of this year. I know this isn’t breaking news or anything, in fact they are now on the 18th full episode of the online series.

For those of you who haven’t given the new site a visit, I definitely recommend it. You probably remember You Don’t Know Jack for its use of animated text instead of high impact graphics. Although this technique was originally used in the game to save space on discs, it has been carried over in all its glory to the online version.

The game play is still just as entertaining as ever. The hosts asks tough questions and each answer receives a witty response. The questions and games keep you on your toes, and even the voices asking questions remain much the same (remember Cookie?). The weekly online games are completely free and load really quickly. Feeling smart? Give it a go!

I Heart Movies was originally designed as a manual install script known as Movie Database (MovieDb). Since 2005 when MovieDb was created, the developers have created quite an interesting service now dubbed I Heart Movies.

The developers of I Heart Movies are in the process of re-designing a good portion of the site, but in its current incarnation, it already demonstrates some really great functionality. The main purpose of this service is to assist your organization of your movie collection. When you log in for the first time, you begin by searching or browsing for movies you own. The search is really slick and recognizes your text as you search. After finding a movie in your collection on the site, relevant movie information is displayed such as a community rating, language, director, and the other users who have the movie in their collection.

Each movie has a section of tabs with lead to some other great features. For instance, you can view movie trailers, a photo gallery, a forum for each movie, trivia, and tags. As your collection of movies saved in the database grows you can browse the titles alphabetically or search them. Additionally, users can assign movies a rating in their own collection separate from the social ratings. The site has many social aspects such as collection sharing, borrowed movie management, and chat. Although I don’t own a whole lot of movies, I know a lot of you do, and I definitely recommend giving I Heart Movies a shot.

Yahoo and others are reporting that Mountain View, CA based Google has lost the long drawn out “Gmail” lawsuit in Germany. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the suit, the lawsuit was filed over the use of the Gmail brand name for free e-mail services.

A 33 year old German has used the name G-mail.de for his free email service since 2000. Google’s Gmail was launched in 2004. The three year legal battle ended with the German court holding that Google did not own the Gmail trademark in Germany. This latest hearing is important because the German court effectively told Google it could not take the case to a higher court. The same brand was valued at $48 million to $64 million in the U.K. in 2004. Gmail Deutschland will be rebranded Google Mail.

Interesting fact: Google has the rights to Gmail in over 60 countries and is currently involved in battles for the name in Portugal, Spain and Switzerland. The Gmail.com domain originally hosted a free email service for Garfield.com (orange cat!).