The Middle East continued

A bit of editorial balance, I think. We should definitely include Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial in Israel.

Algy who?

Of course, one arabic intensive site wouldn't be enough. We have to include Al Jazeera, based in Qatar.

Egyptology - not a site about Pyramids.

I found an Egyptian newspaper called Watani.

Are you a Coptophile?

Eurovision-a-rama

Well, I've found a website hosted overseas and it's about Eurovision. Bonus. Eurosong / Euroclopedy in Holland.

Bien. Et Maintenant, Nous Avons...

For France, the most sensible website would have to be The Louvre.

First things first

I decided that my UK entry would be for Chortle, as it is a site I use a lot. It's also not that well known, and worthy of more general public members reading it.

For the US, Project Gutenberg seemed a good choice. This hosts 17,000 books online, including Around the World in 80 days.

So, just about 78 sites to list!

Some rules

First things first, then. I'm going to be finding 80 websites for an article that I'm to write for Micro Mart magazine. Each website must be:

• Good
• From a different country
• Understandable to an English-speaking reader
• Not bloody obvious

That last requirement is one of my own,the first three are from the editor who commissioned the article.

Some sites I cannot, therefore include:

• Google
• Answers.com
• Wikipedia
• Or any branch of Amazon

These rules might make it seem like I'm making it harder for myself, but realistically, it would be easy to find 100 websites in UK or US and I only need one for each. So, I want to bring something new to readership and not just cheat by using the country-specific version of a massive corporate site.

As a starting point, I'm going to use the list of countries from the Jules Verne novel from which the title was obviously cribbed. Wikipedia has a nice synopsis of the story, which gives me my first batch of countries.

The purpose of this blog is to track my progress finding 80 sites and arranging them into some sort of order for publication. I will be putting a description in the article for each site. I'll not be putting that description on here.

You can help me with comments that direct me to interesting international sites. You can enjoy my struggle to find the 80 sites.

Welcome

Welcome to the new site I've set up to try to achieve this most ridiculous of tasks - disover 80 different websites from 80 different country that are good.

Feel free to help me along with this quest.