Linked Wednesday.
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
Me, I always loved how the town of Derby Line, Vermont thrived in a happy world where “our neighbor to the north” is indeed treated as the best, most open, most intertwined of neighbors.
A bunch of people are building an ambitious library of the world’s books online, more or less how you’ve always expected a web-based library would manifest itself…with a catalog we all edit. The number of books that exist online now in full-text is really quite amazing. So, a grafting of Wikipedia concepts onto a really, really big card catalog, linked to full-text or where you can buy, borrow, or just read the book. Hey, now we’re all librarians! Sssh!
I miss comic book covers where the villains would, in dialogue, laboriously explain the entire convoluted story: “I’ve got this game rigged so that every time Flash makes a move, a member of the Justice League disappears from the face of the Earth.” Behold, a site with easily-searchable comic book covers…thousands and thousands of them!
There’s a compelling five part blog posting (start here and move forward in time) from one of the inventors of the Chumby about getting an assembly line for his product set up in China, more or less next door to where gazillions of iPhones and iPods are being expertly, rapidly, and obscenely cheaply cobbled together. Culture! Technology! Food! The terrors of globalism! It’s all here.
There’s now a Mac app that allows you to create your own subliminal messages that are flashed oh-so-momentarily on your screen. Don’t eat pizza! Buy Tab! So you…uh…hypnotize yourself? Dangerous, I suppose, if you can get your hands on someone else’s machine.
What the heck is electronic mail? I like to think this guy’s expression depicts the horror of the very first recipient of spam.
Meanwhile, Wired writes about how Google maps is changing the way we see our world. Boy, I’ll say. Google Maps (and Earth) find their way into all sorts of aspects of Sammy’s and my lives, both professional and not. Once your start overlaying your data on their imagery, it’s hard to stop.
But I’ll stop here.
