In other words, everything that makes the Treasury unique is related to the fact that it’s a Flash application: its constraints, and its real-time feel. These things are inseparable from its origins in Flash. But at Etsy an entirely new infrastructure for collections (of items, shops and other entities) is being created. This infrastructure is fully scalable and powered by MongoDB.

So we launched Treasury East (beta) as a testing ground for a new unlimited Treasury world, where anyone would be able to create a curated list of items, and that human curation activity would be empowered, rewarded and harnessed—a critical ingredient I think for a vast marketplace of unique items made and carefully selected by humans.

And the birth of Treasury East has been nothing short of remarkable. It feels like the flowering of something new and great, as amazing items and fresh shops are surfaced by people with a talent for finding beautiful things.

Because as any collector knows, it’s fun and satisfying to find things, and can be an outlet for self-expression. Here’s a collection I made this morning while on a vintage mid-century modern housewares binge (it happens). The items were all discovered via Jared Tarbell’s Tag Fractal:

But I’ve been most interested to see what kind of new game mechanics might emerge in this brave new world. Over time we see the Treasury area becoming a hub for the most active collections site-wide. Collections will be abundant but only the most active and fastest-rising ones will be featured. Game mechanics will be baked in in new ways. Scarcity is actually already baked into Etsy itself due to the one-of-a-kind nature of the items available.

Yet already we’re seeing games emerge organically, some reminiscent of the Etsy Sneak Attack and PIF (Pay It Forward) phenomena, like Treasury East BnR (Buy and Replace), started by Grace of Homespun Handmaiden:

OK I’ve started a treasury east that’s a BnR (buy and replace). Basically you can buy any of the items in the treasury and post the transaction link in the comments. I then go to YOUR shop and replace the item you bought with one of your items! It’s a win-win for all involved. This is a great way to promote your shop and support fellow etsians at the same time!

Keeping an eye on the constant stream of Treasury East blog mentions and Twitter mentions for more.

• Tangentine: My Treasury East and thoughts on SEO, usability and opportunities
• Etsy’s Treasury East Rocks!
• “I tried out the new Treasury East feature on Etsy with this Malcolm McLaren-inspired collection from DIY crafters.“
• On Curating and Treasury East
• Treasury East… oh, the possibilities!
• “The whole world of Treasury East is cleaner, fancier, and just screams ‘buy me!’“
• “So, if the new treasuries never expire, why not explore this idea even further? Why not, in fact, create a treasury/inspiration board for each of my items?“
• East vs. West
• Etsy Treasury Tuesday
• “While fears of dilution are real, I don’t think persistence necessarily = creativity, and I’m confident Etsy will refine its Treasury East algorithm until the best of the best surface.”

1.
A few months ago I started acquiring various books on architecture, urban planning and social psychology and reading them with software design in mind. Christopher Alexander’s 1977 classic A Pattern Language towers above the others in sheer richness and hasn’t left my bedside. If you’re familiar with the use of design patterns in software development and the classic book on them, the format of A Pattern Language will be familiar: it was its inspiration. Jon Udell and Erin Malone have both written recently on the relevance of A Pattern Language to software design.

2.
Also been sifting through books, papers and presentations on neuroscience while thinking about software design. Neuro Web Design distills many of the key lessons from the field into one thin volume. It’s quite basic but not a waste of time. Topics include the power of social validation, building reciprocity and concession, invoking scarcity, using similarity, mass interpersonal persuasion (MIP!) and the power of storytelling.

3.
Douglas Rushkoff spoke recently at Etsy on the creation of value and how to exchange it directly with others. His book, Life Inc., has been very much on my mind since the fall, and helped kickstart a line of inquiry I’m still following regarding the nature of currency. Watch Life Inc. the Movie for an excellent introduction. Stacey Brook also wrote up a nice recap of the Etsy event.

4.
If you’re familiar with the Yahoo Design Pattern Library you’ll be familiar with much of this book: Christian Crumlish is the curator of both. I have it open quite a bit, though in some ways I prefer Joshua Porter’s older Designing for the Social Web. See 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences from co-author Erin Malone and the Social Patterns wiki for more.

5.
Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future is an Etsy Book Club selection. It’s a lucid book suggesting the need to explore new economic ideas and create more localized economies. The main idea is that localization is the only way to achieve economic resilience, and Bill articulates it convincingly.

6.
I’ve been reading up on games and game mechanics for a while (see Amy Jo Kim and my favorite category on Wikipedia), and teaching myself Go, but was unaware of how great Games magazine was (is?) until I came across some early issues circa 1977 and ‘78 at an antiques market. In between scholarly articles on ancient African games and the like there are pages of logic puzzles, unusual crossword variants and ads for ’70s classics like Mastermind and Othello—plus the magazine itself is a game, with hidden contests in every issue. New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz was an early contributor.

7.
This was a birthday gift from a few years ago, but there’s so much in it it’s still speaking. An extended abstract philosophical discussion amidst dense imaginary landscapes illustrated with obsessive detail, Kevin Hooyman’s The Language Change is one of the books that’s never left the active stack because I’m still getting my head around it. In “Chapter One: The Animals Speak Amongst Themselves,” a bird asks, “Are numbers real?” A bearded dog answers, “They are useful but they are not real.” And so on.

8.
My Piece of the Pie by Donald Brown. This is my grandfather’s autobiography, which I’ve been editing and designing. Family review copies have been circulating and I’m now trying to track down his patents to include them as an appendix. It will be available on Amazon eventually via Lulu.

9.
Beautiful Data is a collection of the stories behind elegant data solutions. Almost a book version of the kinds of things I was thinking about when I started working on Datamob, with many of the same players discussing different approaches to tackling the challenges of working with data. Michal Migurski of Stamen Design, whose 2009 Flea Market Mapping presentation still gets me excited, comes through with a detailed chapter on the process of freeing and beautifying urban data. There’s also a great chapter from Jeff Hammerbacher tracing the history of Facebook’s data team and the evolution of the tools used for information processing at that scale.

10.
I spotted a pile of back issues of Evergreen Review circa 1970 and ‘71 at the Beat Museum in San Francisco and found them irresistible. I had seen issues from the ’60s but in the ’70s things apparently got a lot sexier. Writing from counterculture greats, beautiful photography plus fascinating ads for underground book clubs and defunct concerns like Truth and Soul Fashions. So much style.

And a new stack is forming now with The Pragmatic Programmer, Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, Carl Jung’s Red Book, Coders at Work, and whatever I can manage to score from the Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the World.

There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite.

Find a shop you like? Check out their favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop’s favorites. Repeat until you realize five hours have gone by and you have 60 browser tabs open to Etsy pages.

I never stop at the shop level on Etsy. If I find an item of interest, I go past the shop to that shop’s favorites, and enter an endless loop. Below are some hearters I’ve been digging lately, and here’s a Yahoo Pipes-generated meta-feed consolidating all their hearting activity which you can subscribe to if they strike your fancy as well.

Tip: If you find yourself past page 10 of someone’s favorites, subscribe to their favorites feed.

corduroy’s items populate most of my favorite sellers’ favorites, so being pulled into her favorites was inevitable. She’s led me down some fruitful paths.

Etsy all-star hearter TeenAngster hipped me to the favorites of groundwork (among many others), who happens to be corduroy’s sister. Their mother, pogoshop, is also an active hearter. They share a great eye.

Just now after following a thread from groundwork’s favorites I was led to siiso (hearted this painting of hers). Her favorites led to half-dozen other eye-openers so she joins this list as well.

Icebear, aka Sofia Arnold, is in India right now but she left behind lots of quality favorites leads. I was taken with this free bird and French hermit crab.

Domestikate favors the witty. She likes “color, humor, good design, wood and skies of blue.” She also finds and sells parrot staplers.

yaelfran is one of Etsy’s heavy hearters, with a massive number of favorites. They’re a bottomless source of unusual illustrations and prints.

I’m a fan of Virginia Kraljevic’s intricate line drawings and her favorites have led me to some interesting places, like Hillarie Tasche’s graffiti train drawings and Betsy Walton’s world.

More found daily.

Capitol Words visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record and does so in more useful ways than those Wordle word clouds we see all too often. They have a blessedly simple API as well.

ReadTheStimulus.org has made the full text of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (House Stimulus Bill) searchable with comments for each page enabled. Actual dollar appropriations from the bill have been parsed out by volunteers and entered into a Google spreadsheet. Their tagline says it all: “$850 Billion, 941 pages, and counting… somebody needs to read it!”

The Legislative Lookup API from Mobile Commons is a database that matches latitude and longtitude with the U.S. congressional and state legislators for that location. Could be put to good use in your pet mapping application. They even made it available as a standalone Rails app.

Represent from The New York Times is the kind of application you could use the Mobile Commons Legislative Lookup API for. It’s a nice way for New Yorkers to find their elected representatives and see what they’re up to.

The New York Times Congress API is what actually powers Represent (Represent!). The great thing about it is that it was built to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can use it with the seven-character code used to identify members of Congress in the official Biographical Directory, or the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack to individual member responses.

DC Bikes is another example of a good local application, mapping bike routes, bike thefts and bike-related Craiglist postings for Washington, D.C. bikers. It uses the same Mapnik toolkit EveryBlock uses to get their nice maps. Built by Development Seed for the D.C. Data Catalog’s Apps for Democracy competition.

iLive.at also came out of Apps for Democracy. Enter a Washington, D.C. address and receive information tailored to that location and organized into categories like Errands, Emergencies, Recently Reported Crimes, People, Transportation and “Did You Know?” I would love to see a New York version.

You can keep up with all the action in this space on the Open Government, PoliParse and Sunlight Labs Google Groups.

Full disclosure: I tend to be partial to notebooks of the pocket-sized, reporter-style, durable, flexible, wirebound and blank variety, but I use and sample all kinds. To my mind there are two types of notebooks: portable and desktop. Portable notebooks should be easy to carry around and fit comfortably in your pocket. Which pocket you use, and therefore which notebook, can depend on the season. In the warm months I require a slim, flexible notebook for my back pocket. In the winter, a harder-backed notebook can go into my inside coat pocket. Many notebooks that are marketed as portable—hello, Moleskine—are actually desktop notebooks in my opinion because they don’t fit comfortably in your pocket. They have their place.

Pluses: Pretty. Moderately hackable.

Minuses: Unoriginal. Low-quality paper that can’t handle fountain pens, so pen nerds shun them (pen reviews is another post).

Pluses: Free of artifice. Also cheap! Many of their notebooks are $1.

Minuses: Very few. Available in New York at the MoMA Store, Muji Soho and inside the New York Times Building.

Pluses: Striking. Orange. Endorsed by poet-blogger Ron Silliman.

Minuses: Too clunky for portable use.

Pluses: Ultra high-quality paper.

Minuses: Their portable model, the CD5, is a bit too small for serious note-taking.

Pluses: Like Moleskine but much more flexible, with higher quality paper.

Minuses: Pages won’t lay flat. Owners of the most annoying website in the world.

Pluses: See above.

Minuses: Hard to come by. I recommend subscribing to his shop’s feed if you want in on the next batch.

Ecoteca was a sturdy and stylish Portuguese brand of notebook that now appears to be defunct.

Pluses: Rounded corners.

Minuses: Impossible to find.

Pluses: Pocket-friendly. Heavy paperstock. Futura typeface.

Minuses: Seemingly designed with Urban Outfitters in mind. Tries too hard. Staplebound.

Pluses: Waterproof authenticity.

Minuses: None.

Pluses: Closes with a sensible horizontal elastic band.

Minuses: Too thick for portable use (twice the thickness of a Moleskine). A bit overzealous in their marketing.

Pluses: Pocket-size. High-quality paper. Durable green cover.

Minuses: Only available in Japan.

Pluses: Stiff yet flexible. Pages open flat. Back flap can be used as a bookmark. Made entirely in Italy. Not a Moleskine.

Minuses: The newer versions don’t have the creamy paper or colored page edges of old.

• 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.

—Edgar Allan 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.

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.

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.