NNDB Mapper from the NNDB (Notable Names Database) is a sophisticated visualization tool for the people—the kind of thing we’re starting to see a lot more of—and you can use it to uncover little-known connections between Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker contributors who have been parodied as Muppets and philosophers featured on the cover of Sgt. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

#3: book covers.
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 [...]

Clockwise: QR code, Data Matrix, ShotCode, Semacode
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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The School of Everything is one of the better ideas I’ve heard for a startup in the last ten years: connecting would-be teachers with would-be students. They want to make it extremely easy to find people near you who can help you learn whatever it is you want to learn. If you think of all [...]

From Crooked House, via Silliman, for Lauren, who had a similar idea.

Who needs a cut-up machine when you can embed and combine public-domain book-page slices via Google Books?

UPDATE: “Ironics Light and Dark” above had to replaced with “ROBUST RED-BLOODED REALISM” because the 1901 poetry journal I had originally clipped from disappeared from Google’s index. One of the downsides of embeddable book clips. One of the positive [...]

Photo: Flickr user gregw
Back in February, I reviewed all the book-oriented social networks I could find and concluded that what I really wanted was a more personalized version of Google Books. The rich related content with which Google surrounds many books is what makes it so valuable. Compare the book information pages for A History [...]

With apologies to Tom Phillips, creator of the altered Victorian novel A Humument, and book alterers everywhere, I’ve been having a laugh altering Finnegans Wake. Amazingly, there’s a very straightforward linear narrative hidden in here about blogs. Parts 2-628 and back again TK.

High-rise architecture and mini-skirts have much in common.
Image, audio courtesy of UbuWeb.
See also: Getting Rid of Animus

Concrete poetry was modernist in a Greenbergian sense. It embraced all of (Clement) Greenberg’s ideas. The flatness of the picture plane. There was never an illusionistic space in concrete poetries. Hardcore modernist! And it’s extremely graphic. The first time I saw Netscape in January of ‘95, the first thing that really caught me was the [...]

Box.net has one of the best apps on Facebook right now, because it’s so open-ended. Their Files app stands out amid the Facebook app frenzy because it lets you easily share music, video, photos, images, documents and whatever else you can think of via one handy box.
Well, turns out it’s not just for Facebookers. [...]

Listen to this March 20th CalacanisCast interview with Andrew Lih, author of a forthcoming book (the first, surprisingly) about Wikipedia. Then go check out Mahalo again, Jason Calacanis’s new well-funded “human-powered search” project that currently has the blog world perplexed. Suddenly it becomes clear: Jason wasn’t able to convince the Wikipedians to let him help [...]

“Metadata is what you know. Data is what you’re looking for.”
-David Weinberger, author, Everything is Miscellaneous
“The Facebook guys are betting that the next fad or fun thing will be built on Facebook, not the internet.”
-James Hong, co-founder, Hot or Not
“I’ve been writing a blog comparing web 2.0 to hip-hop. The five elements of web 2.0 [...]

Hey, Sesame Street tried.
Up til now my math-blog reading has been limited to Scott Aaronson’s Shtetl-Optimized (entertaining) and BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen’s LiveJournal (always glad to help). But Leland McInnes’ The Narrow Road is the kind of math blog you can sit down and have a drink with, because the posts are long and you [...]

Joe Lamantia is onto something with his idea for “cloud notes”—text-cloud versions of new books for use as preparation for cocktail-party conversation. He knows how to sell them:
[...] text clouds are the common executive summary on steroids and acid simultaneously; assembled with muscular syntactical and semantic processing, and fed to reading-fatigued post-literates as swirling blobs [...]