INTERNUTS

·  Education: The World Book for Kids is being offered online for $50 a year at WorldBook.com . The interface was designed by kids and was not the one chosen in a survey of adults. That’s nice. Unfortunately, you can buy the Windows XP disks from Amazon for less than $18, so why pay the online price?

·  World Time: Find the local time any place in the world at TimeAndDate.com. You can also pose questions like “What day will it be 9,999 days from now?” That’s in case you wanted to know what to wear. You can also generate a calendar for any year you wish, including far in the past.

·  Music: Mercora.com, an online social music network, has been revamped with an easy-to-use interface. Artists and composers are listed by name and category in a clear, pleasing display. Interfaces are important; just consider the initial success of America Online, which had little going for it in the beginning, but had a great friendly user interface.

So the interface here is the good news. The bad news is you can click on a selection, which we did from a list of songs by Andrea Bocelli, and what came up was a song from a Walt Disney movie. The problem, it turns out, is that the music is contributed by listeners, who simply post their favorites in no particular order. The selection list changes without warning; the classical category can switch to pop singers, and so on. Still, there are about 100,000 listings, and it makes for interesting browsing. No download required.

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