• usa
  26
  (52%)
• government
  23
  (46%)
• maps
  14
  (28%)
• language
  7
  (14%)
• business
  7
  (14%)

Recent blips: interactive Voronoi treemaps, basketball data visualizations, Watchdog.net.

Datamob-compliant APIs: MAPLight, GovTracker, AMEE, Project Vote Smart, Civic Footprint.

Coffee table: The Alphabet Abecedarium, Mashups, Miscellany.

NEW on the internet tonight: a project I’ve been working on with Lauren Sperber, Datamob.org. Datamob grew out of an uncontainable enthusiasm on our part for projects that make innovative use of public data—sites like EveryBlock, MAPLight.org, OpenCongress, TheyWorkForYou and others. Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators podcast series, which often explores issues surrounding access to government data, is also largely to blame.

I always want to know where these sites get their data, and as I dug deeper I noticed that many of them pull from the same data sources. Open Secrets from the Center for Responsive Politics is an important data source—Follow the Oil Money, OpenCongress and MAPLight all tap into it in different ways. Datamob aims to highlight these connections and keep track of all the developer-friendly public data sources and corresponding interfaces. We’ve got feeds of everything (datasets, interfaces, resources, tags, comments, the whole ball of data) to help with that.

The site was built with Rails in coffee shops around New York City using Heroku, an amazing web-based, collaborative Rails development environment. Get the full WTF on the about page. We’re just getting started and there’s a lot more to come.

“In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste.”

—Edgar Allen Poe, 1884

While I’m on the marginalia beat, let’s take a quick tour of glosses past and present.

People have actually been trying to get annotation right on the web for over a decade—see Diigo, SharedCopy, A.nnotate, Trailfire, ShiftSpace (”an open source layer above any webpage” from NYU’s ITP) and many others. But the tool that comes closest to enabling the freeform marginalia of olde is the one that doesn’t try to at all: Twiddla. An all-out hit at the April NY Tech Meetup (and some web conference in Texas), Twiddla’s a completely web-based “team whiteboarding” app ideal for marking up and defacing web pages. Try it out in their sandbox.

For a detailed history of marginalia, check out this book by H. J. Jackson.

At some point I’ll stop blogging about LibraryThing, but it won’t be easy with the amount of material they provide. Tonight’s discovery via this post on the LibraryThing blog is the transcribed marginalia of John Adams. Before blogs allowed people to offer comment on everything they read and tediously deconstruct arguments paragraph by paragraph for the world to see, people like Adams wrote witty remarks in the margins of their books. Lots of them. LibraryThing historical consultant Jeremy Dibbell has been working with Boston Public Library staff to transcribe these gems. This is a sampling.

Monde Primitif, Volume 4 by Antoine Court de Gébelin, page 56:

Phallus. I blush to write this word: but the meaning of it is so important in all ancient religions that it cannot be omitted.

Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind by Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, page 53:

When? Where was such a people? Where is their history, their tradition, or fable? This is all fiction.

All this we see in every commercial nation, however founded—and shall see it. Thou art a quack, Condorcet.

De la Législation: Ou Principes des Loix by Abbé de Mably, page 64:

The French are as much alike as the Indians.

Monde Primitif, Volume 1 by Antoine Court de Gébelin, pages 34, 90, 95 and 132:

Oh! the length, the breadth and the depth of etymology!

What a coruscation of metaphors, fables, allegories, fictions, mysteries and whatnot!

An immensity of truth in a few lines!

How neat!

How pretty! How ingenious!

Is it possible that all this could have entered into the heads of those old fellows? Yet it seems the most natural, plausible and probable solution of their riddles. Right or wrong? No matter. Salvation depends not on the solution of mysteries, ancient or modern.

There is wit in plenty here! And sense, for what I know or care.

An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution by Mary Wollstonecraft, pages 131-134:

Her beauty was chiefly the fiction of flattery.

I never could see it.

She was giddy with vivacity.

Miss Wollstonecraft is too fond of such words.

Where is the evidence of this?

This is no proof.

Those luscious words might have been avoided by a lady.

Ibid, page 522:

This word simplicity in the course of seven years has murdered its millions and produced more horrors than monarchy did in a century. As if all excellence and perfection consisted in simplicity. A woman would be more simple if she had but one eye or one breast: yet Nature chose she should have two as more convenient as well as ornamental. A man would be more simple with but one ear, one arm, one leg. Shall a legislature have but one chamber then, merely because it is more simple? A wagon would be more simple if it went upon one wheel: yet no art could prevent it from oversetting at every step.

There can be none more simple than despotism. The triple complication, not simplicity, is to be sought for.

Hints on the National Bankruptcy of Britain by John Bristed, page 65:

An eternal truth.

When love or wine get into the head, good night to ye, discretion.

A New System, or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology: Volume 3 by Jacob Bryant, page 28:

Americans! Have a care. Form no schemes of universal empire. The Lord will always come down and defeat all such projects.

Monde Primitif, Volume 8 by Antoine Court de Gébelin, page lix:

True! But what then?

Very true, but what follows?

Perfectly true! But no new discovery.

Ah! there’s the rest. We see not the end. We can foresee no end of the weakness, ignorance and corruption of mankind.

The street booksellers of New York who haunt the estate sales of deceased book lovers know where to get the best books. Via LibraryThing’s I See Dead People’s Books group:

James Joyce, genius:

· The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

· The Book of the Land of Ire, Being a Record of Those Things That Were Done by the Men of Ire in the Days When the Men of Hun Made War Upon the Earth, by Alpheo That Is a Humble Disciple and Brother Scribe of One Artemas That Hath Recorded in Many Noble Volumes All Those Things That Were Done by the Men of Ire in Those Days

· More

Tupac Shakur, American MC:

· The Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1934

· Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem

· The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

· The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

· More

Ernest Hemingway, adventurer:

· Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: A Novel by Angus Wilson

· Animal Navigation: How Animals Find Their Way About by J. D. Carthy

· The Backgrounds of Ulysses by Richard Ellmann

· The Changing Face of Beauty: Four Thousand Years of Beautiful Women by Madge Garland

· More

Benjamin Franklin, inventor:

· A General Description of All Trades

· True Contentment in the Gaine of Godliness, With Its Self-Sufficiencie, A Meditation by Thomas Gataker

· Astrologo-Mastix, or a Discovery of the Vanity and Iniquity of Judiciall Astrology, or Divining by the Starres the Successe or Miscarriage of Humane Affaires by John Geree

· More

F. Scott Fitzgerald, brilliant drinker:

· Apes, Men and Morons by Earnest Albert Hooton

· The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by H.L. Mencken

· Poems of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood by Padraic Colum

· The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W. N. P. Barbellion

· More

Your favorite living authors have made their shelves public on bookish social networks as well, FYI—peruse the libraries of David Weinberger, Jami Attenberg, Ron Silliman, Mike McGonigal (Chemical Imbalance, anyone?) and more.

NPR’s Martha Woodroof interviewed me for a piece on bookish social networks last month and the spot aired on All Things Considered today. Check it out here. Since the interview I’ve been all over LibraryThing. And since LibraryThing started bridging the gap between virtual and real bookish social networks with LibraryThing Local, GoodReads has hooked up with BookTour (which used to date LibraryThing). And some people are still just reading books.

People have been sketching user interfaces since the birth of the web (possibly even before) but the sketches usually stay locked away in old notebooks and discarded bar napkins in Austin, Texas. Many of the websites we use started out as scrawlings, and with people like Jakob Nielsen and Bill Buxton spreading the gospel of faster, cheaper paper prototypes, “next year’s Twitter” may already exist on paper.

We don’t usually get to see this handmade stage of the web, but some folks have been thoughtful/narcissistic enough to upload photos of their UI sketches, and I find them fascinating.

Many UI designers sketch with Sharpies but Sox prefers Staedtler pens, which are from Germany and built for engineers. He has a vast portfolio of UI sketches on Flickr.

Finally, some high-intensity paper-prototyping action via YouTube:

A year ago I rounded up a fairly big list of bookish social networks. I’ve since tried a number of them (as the list has grown to something like 40 bookish competitors) and was pretty hyped up about Google Book Search until their embeddable book clippings started breaking and I realized their full-text search only covers a small percentage of the books I’m interested in searching.

This week, at long last, LibraryThing won me over with:

• LibraryThing Local: This is what led me to click ‘register’ and apparently I’m not alone. LibraryThing Local aggregates and maps user-submitted book-related places and events and allows you to keep track of your favorite book spots. So LibraryThing not only makes it easy to bump into book enthusiasts online but also makes it easy to bump into them at your favorite bookstores. I’ve been waiting for this since 2003, when I attempted a one-man, manual New York version in the form of Bookcircuit. Books + community go together. But clearly the user-submitted path is the only way to make this scale.
• Selection: Most book-focused social networks get their book data exclusively from Amazon’s ASIN database, which is basically a clone of the International Standard Book Number system. The ISBN system was introduced just over 40 years ago and there are plenty of books out there that aren’t in it. If you happen to be into old, rare or weird books, chances are you own some. LibraryThing goes beyond Amazon to tap into 255 library databases from around the world. Go ahead and try to find a book that isn’t in one of these databases.
• Member-uploaded covers: Book covers, I like them. I buy old editions of books I’ve read for the covers, and seek out cover designers. When you add books to your library on LibraryThing, you get to choose the cover. Members have uploaded a lot of interesting ones that you might not have seen. If you can’t bear to look at the modern editions of old books, LibraryThing is your bookish social network.
• Book collection comparisons: As you start adding books to your library, you’ll see a box on your profile called “Members with your books.” Prepare to be amazed at the number of LibraryThing members who share your unique taste. They’ll lead you to new books. Compare this experience to that of GoodReads, which has been growing fast and is by some measures the dominant bookish social network at the moment. GoodReads is focused on book recommendations from friends, and while you’re more likely to listen to people you know, there are undoubtedly people out there who you don’t yet know who could teach you something. Try stepping outside your social graph sometime : )
• Community: All the true book freaks are on LibraryThing: the booksellers and librarians, collectors and hoarders (and writers—a lot of authors are members and you’re alerted when you add their books). If this appeals to you, LibraryThing is the right place for you. But besides the level of bookishness on display on LibraryThing, there is a real community feel to the site that is largely a result of the tone set by founder Tim Spalding and his team. New features are continually rolled out, blogged openly and chewed over in depth. And while I tend to be partial to the 37signals school of simplicity, this is an area where you want rich functionality and customization. LibraryThing’s got it.

And sure, it’s not as pretty as some of the other bookish social networks but guess what? You’re invited to help out with that, too.

I posted some notes from last night’s Y event with Mos Def on the 92Y Blog. Turns out he’s not just for white people, though folks of all colors will love the new stuff he’s been working on with Madlib. It had Anthony DeCurtis nodding.

Book art fans may know sculptor Jacqueline Rush Lee for her book works like the one above (Cube). She’s been known to kiln-fire old books like a ceramicist to make them expand and petrify, and soak and shape book conglomerations into wheels and cubes.

She’s now working with another traditionally two-dimensional medium: paint. Layers and layers of acrylic and oil paint. She recently sent in some images from her Chromascapes series. Read more about her process here.

I’m not trying to compete with BibliOdyssey or anything (check out his book!), but the digital portion of the New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection is something to marvel at and mine for visual treats. Below, a completely random selection of archival rarities. Click them for more detail.

See Also: Brooklyn’s Reanimation Library and the New York Public Library’s other unusual collections.

The Y blog received a nice plug in MUG today.

Given the number of performances, talks and events at the 92nd St. Y, you’d expect a blog about same to be compelling reading and viewing (lots of videos). And so it is.

At last night’s Advertising Club of NY Meetup at Google’s Chelsea offices, Google execs talked about how they’ve been busy reengineering the offline ad-buying process and adding web-like metrics and measurement to radio, TV and print advertising. There was talk of environmental radio ad triggers, so that if pollen levels reached a certain point in a region you could have allergy medication radio ads deployed (synergy!). The vision was for a Google Analytics dashboard utopia combining online and offline activity reporting for Maximum Ad Impact Awareness. Center Networks has video of the whole evening.

The big plan for print ads: barcodes. Mobile phone-friendly barcodes that you scan with your phone’s camera to be taken to a web page in your phone’s browser—a concept eerily similar to that of the late-bubble CueCat scanners that failed spectacularly eight years ago.

But apparently barcodes have come a long way since then. There are semacodes, which I first learned about via Lauren’s blogging of Eliott Malkin’s eRuv project a few years ago (information about eruvin and the history of Lower Manhattan is a lot more likely to get me to point my phone at a barcode than an ad, but maybe that’s just me). There are QR codes, Data Matrix codes, ShotCodes and the quest to hardlink the physical world continues unabated.

Will it be catching on around here soon? No. QR codes are big in Japan, but so are mobile phone novels. You need special software to make these things work and the big American mobile carriers are not exactly on board. Google’s Great Hope: the Android mobile platform project.

Cynicism is dead in 2008. What are you doing to help the world? The least you can do is check out some forward-thinking websites : )

Meetup Alliance attempts to take the meetup concept to the next logical level. If meetups are about the power of local groups that meet regularly, Meetup Alliance is about the power of groups of local groups coordinating efforts and communicating. It’s platform-agnostic so groups that use Meetup, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Facebook, Myspace and other sites to organize themselves are welcome, which is key. An exciting idea, though judging from the activity on alliance pages and the feedback on the developer list, there’s still a lot of executing to do. They’re currently in invite-only preview mode.

GiveWell’s tagline may as well be “kicking ass and gathering data in the nonprofit world.” Started by a couple of hedge-fund managers, they drill charities for information, analyze the numbers, rate charities for effectiveness and efficiency and then put all their research online for free. Charities answer their questions as part of the application process for a GiveWell grant. Their research results are valuable and can be extremely helpful for discriminating donors who want to solve problems. They just need to stop with the fake forum posting. [UPDATE, via Rufus in the comments: Beyond the fake posts on sites like MNspeak.com, GiveWell founders have also caused a ruckus on Metafilter and upset a good portion of the internet. I like their idea and welcome all the discussion of charity effectiveness, but this is no way to lead a charge for transparency.]

I used to look enviously upon the U.K.’s pioneering government activity aggregator TheyWorkForYou.com (their parliamentary debates are a lot more fun to watch than ours, too), but now I’m too busy digging into OpenCongress. It allows you to easily track U.S. bills, committees, issues affected by bills and committees, and the voting histories and activities of senators and reps. Of course they’ve got widgets to help you keep an eye on Washington. New Zealand has a site like this, too. 191 countries to go and then we’ll need a global TheyWorkForYou aggregator.

MAPLight.org illuminates the connection between money and politics in America, specifically the U.S. Congress and the State of California. Through the magic of tabs and graphs, MAPLight deftly lays bare the influence of money on government in a way a thousand news stories and rants cannot. Watch the screencast to quickly see how deep you can go with this site.

Wikileaks is backing up a belief in the importance of transparency in government with an “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.” Some call them naive, some call them irresponsible, conspiracy theorists worry that they’re a front for the CIA—you can read their passionate rebuttals on their about page. They certainly want to change the world. The same kind of skepticism you bring to Wikipedia should be brought to their articles and analyses.

The FFFFOUND ffffeed brings a lot of joy.

Have a click around the new interactive timeline I helped put together for the Y.

Mapworks and wordworks by Chris Kenny, via Moon River.

This being the season for useless year-end lists, here are the top 100 articles in my 2007 Wikipedia browsing history based on popularity on del.icio.us.

1. Agile software development
2. List of places blurred out on Google Maps
3. Go (board game)
4. Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
5. Graph theory
6. Schmidt Sting Pain Index
7. Hash table
8. Document Object Model
9. Gini coefficient
10. Portal: Cryptography
11. Films considered the worst ever
12. Collyer brothers
13. Rube Goldberg
14. Scoville scale
15. Quicksort algorithm
16. Linked list
17. Ivan Illich
18. Reflection (computer science)
19. Stendhal syndrome
20. 1 − 2 + 3 − 4 + · · ·
21. El Lissitzky
22. Combinatorics
23. Ambigram
24. HyperCard
25. World Heritage Site
26. Seven Bridges of Konigsberg
27. Coral Content Distribution Network
28. Advance fee fraud
29. Pioneer plaque
30. Chiptune
31. Fatal hilarity
32. An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything
33. Lisp (programming language)
34. Manhattanhenge
35. Recursive acronym
36. Haptics
37. Lists of corporate assets
38. Kryptos
39. Image macro
40. List of protologisms
41. Bibliometrics
42. Earworm
43. Kraken
44. Dodecahedron
45. Winsor McCay
46. Paper prototyping
47. Methane hydrate
48. Cryptic crossword
49. Brutalism
50. Mastermind (board game)
51. Orthography
52. Geoduck
53. Ainu
54. Jaco Pastorius
55. Citation index
56. Giambattista Vico
57. Telemetry
58. Brion Gysin
59. Baddeley’s Model of Working Memory
60. Carl Sagan
61. Belphegor
62. Francesca Woodman
63. Metamathematics
64. Speciation
65. van Eck Phreaking
66. Language recognition chart
67. Savile Row
68. The Young Ones
69. Acrostic
70. Aleatory
71. Shmoo
72. Hyperborea
73. List of groups referred to as cults
74. Anglish
75. Rakia
76. English words with uncommon properties
77. Pale Fire
78. CamelCase
79. Hot toddy
80. Turkish Delight
81. Video synthesizer
82. List of anarchist communities
83. David Axelrod
84. Dead drop
85. Yat
86. Sidhe
87. Transatlantic telephone cable
88. Pasta Puttenesca
89. Scrabble variants
90. Received pronunciation
91. Telephone exchange names
92. Schwa
93. Space is the Place
94. Automat
95. Meze
96. Max Fleischer
97. The Scene
98. Philippe Petit
99. Halva
100. Bibliogram

Boston public television station WGBH has started to do what many people long for TV stations and related entities everywhere to do: chop up their archives into short video clips and make them findable online. Open Vault boasts a growing library of clips, mostly from the ’70s. Quick picks:

Nam June Paik’s “9/23″
Featuring the Paik-Abe video synthesizer.

Man Ray, Man Ray
The man and the dog.

“Negro Masonry in the United States”
Chamillionaire wasn’t first.

Robert McNamara reading a Teletype message from Nikita Khrushchev sent during the Cuban Missile Crisis

Free wishlist:
� Embeddable clips
� Better ‘related videos’ functionality
� Tags
� More New Television Workshop video art clips

But WGBH hasn’t stopped at the vault, they’ve also opened up a sandbox of clips for your manipulation in what may be their most visionary move since the hiring of Monty Stark. Break out the video synths (or software).

Books sampled in Marshall McLuhan’s War and Peace in the Global Village (1968):

• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
• The Codebreakers by David Kahn
• The Senses by Otto Lowenstein
• Theories of Personality by Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey
• The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo
• The Human Revolution by Ashley Montagu
• Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White
• Oliver Cromwell by John Morley
• Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
• Robots, Men and Minds by Ludwig von Bertalanffy
• The Human Body and Its Functions by Charles H. Best and Norman B. Taylor
• Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot
• The New Industrial State by John Kenneth Galbraith
• The Artillery of the Press by James Reston
• Art and Illusion by E. H. Gombrich
• Studies in a Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon
• The Life of Napoleon I by J. Holland Rose
• The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G. Chandler
• Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace with introductory material by Leonard C. Lewin
• Man and People by Jos� Ortega y Gasset
• Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
• Walden Two by B. F. Skinner
• “The Human Revolution” from Current Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 3 by Charles F. Hockett and Robert Ascher
• Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships by Eric Berne, M.D.
• History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History by Jos� Ortega y Gasset, with an afterword by John William Miller
• I Ching, Book of Changes translated by James Legge, edited with introduction and study guide by Ch’uchai with Winberg Chai
• Propaganda by Jacques Ellul
• Two-Factor Theory, or How to Turn Eighty Million Workers into Capitalists on Borrowed Money by Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter
• The New Science of Giambattista Vico by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch
• Animal Species and Evolution by Ernst Mayr

See Also: Kung Fu samples used in Wu Tang songs [via Fimoculous], Kon and Amir - On Track Vol. 6 [via Fat Beats on a Bagel Buffet], Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Sigmund Freud [via Paper Cuts via Silliman].