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For all the talk about Web 2.0 and the gizmos that popped up everywhere one looked, some of the greatest pleasures to be found on the Internet in 2007 were simple, old-fashioned things.

The author who used her refrigerator to promote her book, a fiendish word game that may help to end world hunger, a simple mashup fusing a well-known film with one of the oldest video games... these made my year, and yours, I hope, a little better.

What The World Eats
www.time.com/time/photogallery
Time's feature tracked 15 families across the globe with a simple question: what does your household eat in the course of an average week? As you look at pictures of the Manzo family of Sicily (fish, pasta with ragu, hot dogs), the Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp (soup with fresh sheep meat) and the Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna (pig's knuckles with carrots, celery and parsnips), your understanding of how the world works is guaranteed to change.

Miranda July's book promotion site
http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com
Miranda July created a site on the top of her refrigerator to promote her book, No One Belongs Here More Than You, which has two covers, yellow and pink.

"One suggestion I have is that you could colour-co-ordinate and read the yellow one when you're wearing yellow. And the pink one when you're wearing pink. When you're wearing another colour you'd have to read someone else's book."

Droll and gently humourous, July's site proved that a black marker and a clean fridge top were worth a thousand blurbs. Warning to would-be imitators: July discovered the hard way that cleaning a fridge top, unlike a dry-erase board, is difficult.

God's Eye View
www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/the-bible-according-to-google-earth
God's Eye View is a collaborative art project that portrays four key Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth. Eerie, unsettling and very beautiful, this unusual view of the Crucifixion, Adam and Eve in the Garden, Noah's Ark and Moses parting the Red Sea is a keeper.

Crossover publication
http://shootingwar.com
This graphic novel began as a web experiment and became one of the most successful crossover publications in recent times. Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman's viciously satirical story about a video-blogger who's embedded with the US Army in Baghdad can be viewed at http://shootingwar.com/chapters/chapter-1 , or you can buy the more advanced version in book form. Great stuff.

Getting animated
http://minoritykart.ytmnd.com
I used to like animated gifs a lot, but they seem to have disappeared off the web. 2007 saw one gem, though, in this really funny mashup of Mario Kart and Minority Report. It's just five minutes along, but as addictive as the Dancing Baby and far less annoying.

Word games
http://freerice.com
The website promises, "For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice through the UN to help end world hunger." What they don't tell you is that after softening the avid word game player up with "stentorian" and "frangible", they move in for the kill with words like "capias" and "enchiridion". I donated enough rice to feed a small country: oh, the sacrifices we make to end world hunger.