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 [...]

BibliOdyssey captures the soul of the Americas.
Scott Carney drops in on the world’s last handwritten newspaper.
gmtPlus9(-15) visits the Museum of Japanese Anesthesia.
Moon River discovers scratch atlases for a proposed 1977 Atlas of North American Cultures.
Radical Cartography points to a map of all the ships in the ocean.
The American Newspaper Repository implores you to dance in [...]

Former Y-blogger Neal Ungerleider has a piece in this month’s Wired about boozy science nights at American bars.
I would like a drink with entomologist Justin O. Schmidt, creator of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, courtesy of That’s How It Happened:

1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair [...]

Research Room panorama. Full version.
The New York Public Library as we know it today began with the merging of three private collections, those of James Lenox, John Jacob Astor and Samuel J. Tilden (hence the library’s official name: The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations). Since then many other fabulously wealthy [...]

Yes, even nerdier than manual pseudo-widgets for Wikipedia faves and Wordie lists. I’m talking real, creative web widgets for embedding on your blog, Myspace and wherever else you assert your precious individuality online.
YouTube arguably democratized the widget revolution with the embeddable video. Give people code, they showed, and they’ll run with it and spread [...]

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’m a full-blown Wikipedia addict, though not a “Wikipedian”—I don’t have the time to contribute much, but I can’t go long without instant access to Wikipedia for answers to every other question that pops into my head. Thus, it doesn’t take much to get me to tell you what I’ve been reading on there lately. [...]

Burroughs cut-up machine (for that clunky, surreal Ghostface flavor)
Rhymezone dictionary (”What else rhymes with ‘yo’?”)
LucJam’s American Brandstand chart (if you’re gonna drop brand names in your rhymes, be original about it. These are already taken.)
Sample FAQ (innovation by association)
The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive (double-check insular references)