I’ve recently discovered Etsy as a source for old books and bookish ephemera. A search for “altered books” in the vintage category is like entering an ecommerce-enabled version of BibliOdyssey (i.e., awesome). Some picks:
1866 Ledger
“Medusa-like animals” (1914)
The Universe and Dr. Einstein (1952)(See, he’s contemplating time and space.)
Word and Image: Posters from the Collection of the [...]

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Top interface tags on Datamob

usa
26
(52%)

government
23
(46%)

maps
14
(28%)

language
[...]

“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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The FFFFOUND ffffeed brings a lot of joy.

This is your Firefox on Wikipedia with Tabs Mix Plus.
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.

Agile software development
List of places blurred out on Google Maps
Go (board game)
Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
Graph theory
Schmidt Sting Pain Index
Hash table
Document Object Model
Gini [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of UbuWeb’s Featured Resources for the month of October, 2007.
Note: Bylined archival selections are the DJ top-ten lists of the ’00s. I’d be interested in Kenneth Goldsmith’s picks from the New York Times archives for example or BibliOdyssey’s top ten archival resources.

TimesSelect, the subscription pay-wall system that has enclosed premium content on The New York Times website for the last two years, expired at midnight last night. The gates have been torn open.
Putting aside the liberated columnists, who I look forward to reading again, the truly great thing about TimesSelect was the access it granted to [...]

Stage Nudity: Barely the Beginning
London’s Switched-on “Radio Love”
Nabokov’s Complaint—The author of Lolita and Ada in a damning denunciation of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.
Live Wires—A report on Liberation News Service (LNS), the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), and Intergalactic World Brain (IWB), the three supercharged wire services that supply news to the nation’s 200 underground newspapers.
Genetic Damage [...]

Jonathan Callan
Cara Barer
Nina Katchadourian
Vito Drago
Robert The
M.L. Van Nice
Doug Beube
Abelardo Morell
Mickey Smith
Barton Lidic� Beneš

Because Wikipedia never stops enlightening me, and because Citizendium (the “elitist, anti net-cultural counter-project to Wikipedia,” as summed up by Florian Cramer) never stops boring me, I thought I’d post an annotated list of recent Wikipedia contrails. None of the following items can be found on Citizendium, and I’m not about to apply for the [...]

Joyce Images: Ulysses in postcards
Philip K. Dick Book Cover Gallery [via Total Dick-Head]
Art Fag City rounds up the New York net art galleries.
Gallery of named graphs
Soviet poster heaven
Pixelator: Battling boring light criticism.

Scribd, the Y Combinator-backed “YouTube for documents” I and many others first blogged about a month ago, appears to be holding strong traffic-wise. Content-wise, it’s still largely a wasteland of crappy ebooks, but there are a few documents of interest buried amid the rubble. Here’s the best of what I’ve been able to find so [...]