Some things you may be interested to track on the internet

Inspired by the weather tracking website that we unearthed during our research for an article yesterday on the storm that hit Ireland, we wondered what else you could track on the internet.

We know all about hurricane trackers and the NASA Space Station tracker, so here are some of the more interesting alternatives in no particular order.

1. Shark attack

Want to poke your toe in the water without getting your leg bitten off? Then check out where the sharks are first with the OCEARCH Global Shark tracker.

For a more benign subject, the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group provide regular reports on sightings of Fungi's friends and marine associates.

2. Terminal fatigue

There you are, stuck in some lifeless, backwater airport after some impossibly named Icelandic volcano causes havoc for travellers everywhere. Information on your flight is next to impossible to get so instead you take the initiative and find out for yourself on Flightradar24.com which tracks thousands of commercial flights worldwide in real-time.

With flight numbers included in the data, it may kill time and give you the opportunity to provide your own updates to other disgruntled airline passengers.

It also might stop some tweets like this:

Chillin on the tarmac in a bus is not the same as boarding the plane. #flightdelay

— VMM (@lapindelaforet) January 29, 2013

3. War and Peace

Emigrating or going abroad for holiday and don’t want to run into trouble? Find out where NOT to go with the conflict tracker, a fascinating, if slightly depressing, tool that is fed by journalists and citizens worldwide to highlight various violent hotspots that may not be on everybody’s radar.

Alternatively, for advice on places to go that have a happier time of it, the OECD's Better Life Index is a colourful way of finding out how the 34 countries under the auspices of the organisation rank in 11 categories. The categories include, housing, health and jobs and Ireland currently comes in at 15th, ahead of Germany and France.

4. Fishing for news

Love all things maritime? Then you’ll be entranced by this shipping tracker from MarineTraffic.com. It gives you live updates on shipping all over the world with details on the type of vessel it is, its name, the ship’s speed, course and size.

It also provides visual evidence that the English Channel is the busiest waterway in the world.

5. Can’t see the forest for the trees

Not exactly real-time, but for those with a green bent, the environmental news and watchdog site mongabay.com, have a deforestation tracker, which identifies places that have lost at least 40% of their green vegetation cover over the past year. It updates every three months and to check out Ireland’s status, pick your timeline and country, and then you will view a rough guide to where forest cover has declined by more than 40% in the past 12 months.

If you feel depressed by the current state of forestry affairs, here is a Coillte video highlighting their efforts to restore the country's woodland.

6. Money’s too tight to mention

With the times we are in, everyone (well, everyone who likes their optimism kicked out them every day) wants to know what is happening with the world’s finances. Those folks at the Economist have provided us with an essential tool for checking the debt levels of nearly every country in the world, even China. Some notable exceptions - apart from the obvious ones like Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea - include quite a few African countries, some states in the Far East and Greenland for some reason.

Twitter users from America can have the latest National Debt figure for their country tweeted to them by the Peter G. Petersen Foundation.

So, today's number on Sesame, er I mean, Wall Street is:

,432,555,923,758.99 (-) #nationaldebt

— National Debt Tweets (@NationalDebt) January 28, 2013