Venice Backstage is an interesting seventeen minute video about how the city of Venice works. The video, produced by the municipality of Venice, shows viewers how the water is contained, how the buildings stay upright, and how residents of Venice travel about the city. The website Venice Backstage offers additional articles and graphics to support the information presented in the video.

The GeoGames from Reach the World feature an interactive map which students drag and drop onto different elements. The beginner level games asks has student place continents and the poles in the correct position. As the games levels progress students have to place countries and capitals in their proper positions. In the Build Planet Earth section students have to place continents, oceans, mountains, and rivers in their proper positions.

Google Forms offers a range of useful tools. The author of this post has created example forms for each of the different topics,. You can follow the links in each of the ten sections

Free blog designs - backgrounds, layouts and tips and tricks for bloggers

A map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country, according to Alexa & Google Trends for Websites traffic data* (June 2010).

A list of the best graphic novels for children and teens reviewed in the past 12 months in Booklist suggests, it was a good year for sweeping, seafaring adventures, but all of the books point to the remarkable versatility of the comics format to deliver thrills, laughs, and ideas to all kinds of readers.

Zoom.it is an application for displaying large images in blogs, wikis, and websites. Zoom.it creates a display of your images in a format that allows you to zoom in, zoom out, and scroll around a large image. To use Zoom.it your image does need to be hosted online somewhere (Flickr and Picasa work fine). Then to create your zoomable image just copy the url of your hosted image and paste it into Zoom.it. You can then share your image by giving people the direct link to it or embedding the image into your blog or website.

Diffbot looks like a new sort of RSS reader but one that turns webpages of choice into a "newspaper" sort of look. This may offer others an easier way to read this information

Weezic is your place to play classical music. Grab your instrument, print your sheet music and hit play to be accompanied by the whole orchestra.

If you are into creating crazy or funny looking avatars then you will like this new service called Eightbit.me. It helps you create an 8 bit avatar of yourself. You need to sign up with them via Twitter (uses OAuth) and then you can create a full-body avatar that shows a slight movement too. Their homepage displays some examples of user avatars.

Kuso Cartoon is a free online photo to cartoon converter that offers you fast and simple way to convert your pictures into cartoon effects in just a few clicks.

Portrait Illustration Maker is a site where you can generate an avatar or carton a character for free. A lot of character icons are provided in this site completely free of charge.