Maybe, but Slifeshare, which tracks every minute of your online activity in order to find other people doing similar things, is approximately 100 times scarier. Yet isn’t this what all this widgetry is leading toward? Banal surveillance media? Let’s be interesting then.

But while I love the idea of museum podcasts, in practice most of them don’t move me to joy because museums are there to display things, and audio analysis of things on display at faraway museums induces a curiously empty feeling. Video is a much better medium for these initiatives. Guided audio tours specifically designed to accompany museum visits are another story entirely and may represent the the best use of an iPod since the Sex Pistols were first loaded onto one.

The real bright spot in this area though are historical society podcasts. There aren’t many of them, but they’re all memorable:

• Kansas State Historical Society: Cool Things Podcast: Mickey Mouse panties, moon rocks and chainsaw chairs. Any questions?
• Kansas State Historical Society: A Kansas Memory Podcast: Real stories culled from letters, diaries and other historical documents. Who knew Kansas history could hold my attention for longer than one minute? Well done.
• New York Historical Society: Hidden Sites of Slavery and Freedom Tour: You can take your own guided historical walking tour around the city via cell phone (1-800-895-8161), video, video podcast, audio podcast or words embedded on paper. Points for offering every format possible and not caring whether or not it still qualifies as a podcast.
• Los Alamos Historical Society Podcast: Oral histories of the Manhattan Project, featuring singing nuclear physicists.

There must be more.

Next time you spend $30 million setting up your own private YouTube and securing 5,000 words of rhythmic, measured praise in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, DON’T kill all the hype on Monday with a PATRIOT Act-compliant registration process that demands the real names, locations and birthdates of curious visitors so that they can be verified against United States drivers’ license records. It completely freaks people out.

• aNobii: Multilingual Hong Kong-based book-lister with a clean design.
• Bibliophil.org: Personable. Feature-rich. Unfortunate design.
• Booktribes: Bookish social network with extremely busy pages.
• BooksWellRead: Way too many ellipses…
• Buchpfade.de: Bookish community site for German speakers.
• ChainReading: Aimed at reading addicts, but site activity doesn’t suggest an addicted user base.
• ConnectViaBooks: Socializing, rather than cataloging, is the main focus of this London-based booklover site. Some real potential here.
• Douban: Bookish community site aimed at some of the world’s 1.1 billion Chinese speakers.
• Goodreads: Simple bookish social network that emphasizes book recommendations from other users.
• GuruLib: For readers with a compulsive desire to catalog everything they own. Not pretty.
• Lib.rario.us: Media collection organizer in a precarious position.
• LibraryThing: The most established bookish community site of the bunch, with active developers. They just hired Wordie’s John McGrath and they’re encouraging people to make Chuck Close-style mosaics of themselves out of book covers. One to watch.
• Listal: Taggerific media-cataloging site with rich profiles, a surplus of content and widgets galore.
• Mediachest.com: Established media-cataloging site whose best feature may be groups.
• Reader2: As in “reader squared.” I found it difficult to browse.
• Reliwa.de: German book and music social network. Seems pretty active.
• Squirl.info: John McGrath, who created Wordie, is the co-founder of this social collection organizer, so I want to like it, but I don’t.
• Shelfari: Nicely designed bookish social network out to take out LibraryThing. They’ve got big widgets.
• ShelfCentered.com: Lists are called shelves here but you can’t begin browsing them until you register.

I guess what I really want is a combination of Wordie, Flickr and Amazon, with the book information pages of Google Book Search (maps included!) and highly customizable widgets. Is that too much to ask?

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 about this “Flickr for words” last month and thought it was ha-ha-silly. Then I spent two hours adding and discovering words and started eyeing my bookshelf for virgin verbiage. This site is wholly addictive. And unlike some other linguaphile sites (a word I learned on Wordie), not even remotely pretentious. Words I’m proud to say I was first to Wordie so far: netop, bialy, Joycean. What do you got?

Coastr is Wordie for beer nerds. You add the beers you like and the places you like to drink them, then find other users who share your tastes and see what other beers they like. You can review beers and beer establishments and the more you contribute, the higher your Coastr “score” becomes and presumably your clout.

I’ve been having fun listing my snobby beer preferences on Coastr but I can already tell that the userbase is lacking. I was the first person to add Brooklyn’s Spuyten Duyvil as a venue, for example, and every beer-geek in the New York metropolitan area reveres the place. And if you’re used to Beer Advocate-style beer reviews, you may be disappointed with the content. Still, it’s a fun, well-executed site that I identify with and am interested in helping grow—and inspiring that feeling is basically the goal of a novelty social network.

In addition to words and beer, I’m big into books, and there are lot of bookish community sites out there: LibraryThing, BookMooch, FrugalReader, What’s On My Bookshelf?, Shelfari and others I haven’t heard about yet. None of these do it for me right now but Shelfari looks the most likely to.

Key to the success of all these sites is a place for users to curate: a homebase with a short URL. The more customizable you can make that user profile page the better; it’s up to you whether or not you want to let your site tip over into the anarchic MySpace direction.

And key to the success of novelty social networks is simplicity. Neither Wordie nor Coastr have “take a tour!” links or “how it works” pages. You can easily figure out how they work by clicking around, because what they do isn’t that complicated.

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.

Read more from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s appearance at the 92nd Street Y last night. He’s not as quotable as Gore Vidal but he can talk about 100 times faster.

Results of recent note-taking at 92Y events:

Gore Vidal: “The last time I sat on this stage, I was afflicted by a fly. An awful fly that kept buzzing around my head as I spoke [...] After a while, I realized the fly was the late Truman Capote.”

Gary Panter: “Paul [Reuben, aka Pee Wee Herman] and I just pitched an animated version [of Pee Wee’s Playhouse] to Cartoon Network: Earth is destroyed. Pee Wee’s Playhouse is in outer space. Pee Wee falls asleep until the year 1999. The characters are mutated. And he hates them all.”

The notes don’t do him justice, but Panter was the funniest guy I’ve ever seen at the Y.

Any other compulsive note-takers in the audience at these things are encouraged to send us your quotes.

New York-based Providence types may be interested in the fact that tonight, October 10, Gary Panter and Matt Groening will be riffing off each other at the 92nd Street Y. Panter was kind enough to answer some questions for the 92Y Blog, and he also wrote the foreword to the Wunderground exhibition catalogue. Here’s how the “father of punk comics” speaks of the “Providence aesthetic”:

The punks were kind of grey ironic insincere killers of Pepperland, too. Energetic, but sometimes lacking color. Then punk, which predicted NO FUTURE, lasted thirty years, and then finally, but not lastly, when you least expected it, along comes FORT THUNDER!!! SPACE HIPPIES IN ARCHIGRAM CRAWLING CITIES once again. WOOKIE YETI QUISP HOLODECK RAINBOW CRAWLING CITIES. CHECK IT OUT. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!”

Interrelated: Lightning Bolt x Muppet Bolt on YouTube.

Mr. Hoiberg: I must point out that Mr. Wales’s inclusion of two links in his question to me, one to Wikipedia itself, is sneaky. I have had neither the time nor space to respond to them properly in this format. I could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia and weave them into my posts, but it seems to me that our time and space are better spent here on issues of substance.

Mr. Wales: Sneaky? I beg to differ. On the Internet it is possible and desirable to enhance the understanding of the reader by linking directly to resources to enhance and further understanding.

You wrote: “I have had neither the time nor space to respond to them properly in this format. I could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia and weave them into my posts, but it seems to me that our time and space are better spent here on issues of substance.”

No problem! Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article on the topic.

Fortunately, there is a vast army of volunteers eager to help good people like you and me who don’t quite have enough time and space to do everything from scratch ourselves, and they are writing a comprehensive encyclopedic catalog of all human knowledge. They have quite eagerly amassed a fantastic list and discussion of dozens of links to such articles.

We are open and transparent and eager to help people find criticisms of us. Disconcerting and unusual, I know. But, well, welcome to the Internet.

And yes, this is an issue of substance and a fine demonstration of the strength of the new model.

Like any good American I usually root for the underdog, but this is too embarassing. Stop the fight.

I can’t think of a better way to inaugurate this site’s long-overdue redesign than with this Paperrad DVD trailer.

Cheers.

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. So in deference to Jason Kottke and Matt Webb, an annotated record of my habit:

• William Blackstone: The first white settler in Rhode Island. He had the biggest library in North America at one time and used to ride a bull into town to talk religion and hand out apples to young children. No one had ever seen apples before.
• Egg cream: Had my first taste of this old-time New York beverage a while back; was disappointed to learn that it contained neither egg nor cream
• The Sandbaggers: Highly addictive British espionage TV series that’s been filling up my Netflix queue
• John McLaughlin: Didn’t know the mouth behind The McLaughlin Group was a Jesuit priest who once ran for U.S. Senate representing Rhode Island
• Athanasius Kircher: Another crazy Jesuit
• Monosodium Glutamate: Better known as MSG
• Umami: One of the five basic tastes; see above
• Co-op City: Ian Frazier’s recent piece in The New Yorker (”Utopia, The Bronx”) led me here.
• Oulipo: I think potential literature has potential.
• Cartogram: Numeric maps
• Chinglish: Burnt meat biscuits and more

But why the resurgence now? In the 19th century the increase in the number of lectures and debates came at the same time that “there was an explosion in print,” Mr. Scott said in an interview. It was “staggering, equal in its scope to the kind of explosion we are seeing in electronic and TV and visual media.”

It’s the explosion of content on the web that I think is really driving this, and you see anecdotal evidence of this daily when you do online marketing for a frenetic cultural institution. NYPL, I’m told, does all its marketing online. At the 92nd Street Y, we blog and blog, and the content we publish is republished, copied, pasted, linked, emailed, commented on, dugg, tagged, farked, quoted, indexed, debated, archived, carried around the internets and eventually broadcast on Belgian TV (or referenced in some other unusual place). The conversations happening online are just spilling out onto the streets, at least in New York.

UPDATE: The blog appears to be sponsored by Boeing but is not actually from Boeing. Looks like it’s from Seattle design firm Textura Design. Too bad, because InflightHQ is a hell of a lot better than Boeing’s actual blog.

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 is a complete Lazarus move: “We thought that died long ago.” The deep enthusiasm for making things, for interacting more deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned 10 years ago. This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking - smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action - into the main event.

And ends up somewhere in the noosphere:

In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species.