Webcams from all over the world (8,000 and counting) can be found and viewed at the Webcams.travel website. Of course most of these so called webcams are actually IP cameras.

They’ve got some really neat Google integration – so much so that between that and the site logo looking very similar to the one used by Google’s own Chrome browser, the person that pointed the site out to me told me that it was an official Google site!

Some well-thought out features, like their ‘Daylight’ button feature – which captures the webcam scene at noon and allows you to view it as captured in daylight if you happen to visit the camera after dark – a neat solution to a problem I’m sure we’ve all come across.

Integration with a hotel booking provider, that lets you find a choice of hotels near the web camera you’re viewing.

Specially developed iPhone Apps allow you to integrate with the Webcams.travel website and view your favourite tourist hot spots directly on your iPhone. Some, such as WorldView, offer a free App version. Moxier World uses their API to deliver world time, weather forecasts and live views from webcams to your iPhone, iPod Touch, or Google Android phone handset.

The ability to add/embed a gadget into your website (as we have above) or even to display your favourite web camera on your iGoogle Home page.

If you’re a webcam owner you can get automatic notification if your webcam goes down, or if somebody Posts a comment to your camera’s page.

Tight integration with Google Maps. The ability to precisely re-position a webcam to its correct location in Google Maps, and even integration with Google Earth as an official layer showing all the web camera locations.

All in all, it’s an impressively well executed set of applications. They are adding 1,000 webcams every couple of months or so, and yet it is still in Beta!

It’s fascinating to sit and watch this gadget ‘tour’ the webcams of the world – simply click on the image from any camera that takes your fancy and you’ll be taken to its home page for further details and information.

Amazing CCTV clip found over at the Telegraph website:

In the dramatic footage, a train slammed into a flatbed lorry as it was crossing train tracks in the Mediterranean port city of Mersin on Feb 25.

Propelled sideways, the lorry then swept over Cem Tokac, who was standing beside the tracks.

But while the footage, released on Wednesday by Dogan news agency, showed Mr Tokac after the accident, lying motionless on the ground, incredibly the 32-year-old suffered only minor injuries.

“I can’t remember anything about the accident,” Mr Tokac said. “I thought I was asleep. But when I woke up, I was not in my bed. I was on the ground.”

Mr Tokac, who plans to marry in April, said Feb 25 is his new birthday.

“Life is really beautiful,” he said.

CCTV camera statistics are often quoted to illustrate how we are all watched by 300 cameras a day, and how many millions of security cameras there are in the UK.

We’ve commented on these ‘facts’ previously and pointed out that they never seem to increase since we first quoted them over five years ago, and wonderment at how these numbers of installed surveillance cameras were ever established?

There was an interesting piece in The Guardian yesterday by Paul Lewis, with many links to research and the original documents that first cited (in some cases made-up) these claims.

David Aaronovitch has been snooping on statistics. His mission: to get to the bottom of the dubious claim, often quoted as fact, that the average Briton is caught on 300 CCTV cameras a day.

The statistic is fiction. Or at least was written as such when it first appeared in 1999 in the book The Maximum Surveillance Society. The author, Sheffield University’s Professor Clive Norris stated clearly in the book that the “contrived account” of a day in the life of a man called Thomas Reams was “a fictional construction” designed to mirror the reality of routine surveillance. That important detail appears to have been lost when the estimate was referenced in a landmark study for the Office of the Information Commissioner.

The original detective work of chasing these stats was carried out by David Aaronovitch in an article in The Times:

The mystery stat was sitting on one of our Times blogs and read “the average Brit is caught on security cameras some 300 times a day” and, God knows why, I just decided to chase the number down and find out where it came from. The colleague responsible for the blog referred me to a couple of news stories, and to a document issued by the office of an important and newsworthy quango.