“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 [...]

When Ning relaunched with their “Create Your Own Social Network for Anything” tagline, I joked that someone should use Ning to create a social network for social networks. LibraryThing creator Tim Spalding was ahead of the game as usual and went and did exactly that: SocialCatalogers is a social network for people who make or [...]

Speaking of nerdy widgets, Random House and HarperCollins just came out with their own book widgets while I slept.
Both widgets allow you to read and search books, but the Random House widget is the clear winner for its self-contained design. Contrast it with the clunkier HarperCollins one.
For a good example, check out the widget [...]

List of White Label Social Networking Platforms
Growing like Tom’s friend list.
10 Company Name Types on TechCrunch
Compound or blend?
Ning - Create Your Own Social Network for Anything
Now everyone create their own social network so we can build a social social-network network.
What the Web’s most popular sites are running on
Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
New York Gets Googled
Google’s [...]

New York, 1890. From How the Other Half Lives.
While doing some research for 92nd Street Y work, I walked right into the exploding world of museum podcasts. If you work for a museum and you don’t have a podcast, I discreetly suggest you get with it. Head for the Museum Podcast Directory.
But while I love [...]

As I mentioned when I discovered Wordie and Coastr, I’ve yet to find a book-oriented social network that’s inspired me to register. And it’s not like there’s any shortage of them. Here’s an alphabetical list of all the players I know of, annotated with deconstructive criticism. The bold-face names are serious contenders.

aNobii: Multilingual Hong Kong-based [...]

I’ve been collecting novelty social networks lately because I’ve been working on one of my own (because who wants to start a blog network these days?). Since I have a passion for both interesting words and fine beer, Wordie and Coastr have received most of my affections.
Wordie is surprisingly fun. Like many people, I heard [...]

Is there an entry for “book deal“?

Providence types may be interested in this set of shoddy cameraphone pics I just uploaded to Flickr. They were surreptitiously taken at the RISD Museum’s blow-out exhibition, WUNDERGROUND: Providence, 1995 to the present.
New York-based Providence types may be interested in the fact that tonight, October 10, Gary Panter and Matt Groening will be riffing off [...]

You look like you could use a Kevin Kelly article on the wonder of it all. His ‘We Are the Web‘ cover story for Wired should do the trick. It starts off in familiar territory:
Coming out of the industrial age, when mass-produced goods outclassed anything you could make yourself, this sudden tilt toward consumer involvement [...]

Pheedo’s Bill Flitter on the state of RSS advertising: “Consumers believe ads are ads when they are not relevant to them; otherwise it’s called content or information.”
I think the best bet for companies thinking of advertising in feeds is to publish a feed yourself. It’ll be more effective in the long run. Ads in feeds [...]

I can tell you from experience that this is good advice if you’re a “silent corporate blogging believer” trying to sell the benefits of blogging in your company. The 92Y Blog was picked up by Google in less than 24 hours.

In his new meditation on the turntable in ctheory, Seattle writer Charles Mudede calls upon Heidegger, Marx, Walter Benjamin, Afrofuturist David Goldberg, DJ Marley Marl, Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and, unfortunately, Tone Loc to shed light on the true essence of the turntable. Very much worth a read, as he goes miles beyond the typical [...]