FFFFOUND image by Andy Gilmore
A personal announcement: After more than four years immersed in all things web-, blog- and ecommerce-related at the 92nd Street Y (new look/season/brand launching Thursday)—a place I love and have had the privilege of contributing to while working alongside some truly amazing people—I’m moving on to another amazing place: Etsy. Specifically [...]

Many an urban internet meme collector can tell you about the 25-year-old Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles—embedded in hundreds of city streets throughout the Western Hemisphere, a cryptic message from an unknown crank: TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUBRICK’s 2001: RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.
Researchers have traced it back to a handful of tantalizingly vague possible [...]

I posted some notes from last night’s Y event with Mos Def on the 92Y Blog. Turns out he’s not just for white people, though folks of all colors will love the new stuff he’s been working on with Madlib. It had Anthony DeCurtis nodding.

I’m not trying to compete with BibliOdyssey or anything (check out his book!), but the digital portion of the New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection is something to marvel at and mine for visual treats. Below, a completely random selection of archival rarities. Click them for more detail.
Page design by Georges de Feure, 1900
Illustration [...]

The Y blog received a nice plug in MUG today.
Given the number of performances, talks and events at the 92nd St. Y, you’d expect a blog about same to be compelling reading and viewing (lots of videos). And so it is.

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 [...]

“He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.”
Have a click around the new interactive timeline I helped put together for the Y.

I didn’t want to admit it to myself before, but I’ve been in training for my street Scrabble debut in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. Anagramming, stocking up on brain supplements, the works. Scrabulous on Facebook is wholly to blame. That and the movie Word Wars, which features Marlon Hill, my favorite [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

Saw this copy-heavy flyer on the subway today. Pullquote:
It was not a good time for the arts. We barely worked at all, and could not obtain a commission to present our songs during the five-day festival of Minerva. The atmosphere was grim and deteriorating daily. An occasional lyrical collaborator of ours, primarily a writer of [...]

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 [...]

Work, travel and ironing have been consuming potential updates to this site but the 92nd Street Y summer season is now live. Go buy yourself an art class.
I’m also pleased to report that the New York Society of Association Executives just awarded us with the 2007 CyberSpace Award for 92Y.org in the donor category. Previous [...]

We’re on a history kick at the 92nd Street Y today. It’s all because of Shorpy.

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 [...]

The latest 92nd Street Y podcast is well worth a download, particularly if you have an inventor-grandfather.

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 [...]

It’s been too long since a New York magazine cover story got this kind of reaction. Video clips from a classic 1986 episode of Donahue:

Where’s Peter Blauner now, you ask? Busy.
UPDATE: If you want to read the original article, here’s the PDF.
UPDATE 2: Peter Blauner offers his take on the article and the show.

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 [...]