Rather than post an excited rant about Google Wave, the upcoming communication system to end all communication systems, and what it could mean for us, I’m just going to link to the excellent rundown on Mashable:
http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/
Read and anticipate. If you find that even halfway interesting, be sure to check out their other Wave posts as linked to at the end.
With Information Services’ Facebook page now boasting almost 200 fans a short while after its release, I thought it’d be interesting to investigate our presence in other social media - even if we’re not active in a particular area at this time, our users certainly will be.
To that end I’ve set up a shared folder on my Google Reader account that watches for mentions of the University in general (restricting it to Information Services would have been a little optimistic at this stage) on Google News, Google Blog Search and Twitter. Sadly I don’t think it’s possible to bring Facebook into the equation due to their privacy model, though anyone would certainly be able to share our new list on their Facebook account.
I tweaked the blog search to exclude those blogs we publish ourselves, as the idea here is to see who else is talking about us. There are probably a few off-site ‘official’ blogs that will need adding to the list - let me know in the comments area if you’re aware of any. Similarly, please chip in if you think there’s another resource that should be added to the three already in place on the list, or with any other ideas you might have.
Anyway, you can view the results as a common-or-garden web page: UoN References - and, as you’d expect, you can subscribe to that page as a meta-RSS feed to bring these search results into your own feed reader / browser / mobile and receive updates when new results appear - which is probably more often than you think.
It’s early days and basically a rush job, but if the University is mentioned in the news or on the web there’s a good chance this tool will pick it up. Useful? Promising? Incomprehensible? All feedback is welcome.
SET MINDS TO BLOWN: Here’s a brainmelting and substantial archive of International Times, the UK’s foremost underground periodical, offering beautiful per-page scans (and text versions, making the archive searchable) spanning three decades of psychedelic counterculture madness. And here’s an issue guide on the official IT site to help you dig up articles of interest, of which there are thousands.
See also my old post about The Realist archive if this somehow leaves you hungry for more.
I’m not sure if this is new or whether I’m flogging a dead horse that I’ve somehow failed to notice for several months, lying in the corner of the room with its awful grin and rotten hooves and swelling like a ghastly chestnut piñata stuffed with the putrid fruit of Thanatos… I’ve lost my thread.
Oh, here it is: Google in Quotes is another great product of Google Labs. It lets you place two public figures side-by-side and compare what they’ve said about anything you like. It’s preloaded with notable dignitary collections from several countries (happily, Boris Johnson makes the list in the UK) and a selection of suggested topics, but you can also mix up your own pundit pairings and throw any keyword you like at them. The speakers, quotes and suggested topics are all datamined mechanically from the Google News datacolliery.
There’s also a pleasing ’spin’ button that generates a new set of quotes in the style of a fruit machine, which I think all sensible adults would agree is the way forward for web interfaces. Actually it might be inspired by the similar way in which the iPhone handles web form elements - I confidently predict that gambling interfaces will dominate 2009; I propose Poker News, in which breaking stories gently scraped from the BBC are delivered in hands of five and pay out BIG MONEY* in the event of thematic correlation, e.g. two Boris Johnsons and three Post Office robberies for a full house, or a royal flush of racist goofs from Prince Philip or his grandson. Blogger’s Blackjack, RSS Roulette and so on and so forth, feel free to hold forth in the comments area with your own suggestions and together we can build a terrible future.
Meanwhile, there’s http://labs.google.com/inquotes/
*Tokens redeemable in information. Terms apply.
-are two of the more attention-grabbing concepts from this Guardian piece by Richard Smith on the ‘beefing up’ of copyright law and its cultural consequences. Hold on, I can’t in good conscience have an ugly phrase like ‘beefing up’ segue into half-hearted alliteration like that.
Cultural agoraphobia and the library as mausoleum are two of the more attention-grabbing concepts from this Guardian piece by Richard Smith on the commercial consolidation of copyright and its calamitous consequences for our cultural commons.
Recently I’ve seen a few highly desirable books that reproduce book covers - for example this great collection of Japanese cover designs on Amazon - but they tend to be pricey (that particular one is out of print and going for £150+ minimum at the moment, so it might be cheaper to simply buy all the books it features).
But as usual the internet has a solution for the penny-conscious - many, many solutions, but I particularly want to draw attention to the Book Cover Archive, a glorious melting pot of over 1,000 contemporary designs with publisher, designer and typeface information all nicely hyperlinked up and indexed, so you can track how many time Verdana has made it onto the cover of a book (which is zero, so don’t bother, and the same is tragically true of Comic Sans).
I’ve also enjoyed the beat generation archives provided by the seemingly anonymous benefactors at books.rack111.com - check out their fascinating collections of Burroughs, Kerouac and Cassady covers, which I found via the blog of designer John Coulthart, who regularly posts such treasures (along with the occasional slice of gay erotica, so take care if browsing alongside your homophobic aunt).
You can also make us of Librarything’s extensive collection of covers - though only, I think, for a specific title. Here’s their gallery of 1984 covers and a round-up of Lao Tzu covers. Just search for a book and use the ‘Covers’ link to find more.
And of course Flickr is a natural home to such projects - here’s a wonderful collection of Penguin and Pelican covers that user Joe Kral has created. You can always rely on sociology texts to have a cover you shouldn’t stare at prior to shaving.
Wow! Please post the magnificent details of any other cover galleries you’ve found and dug in the comments.
I don’t want to think about how many hours of frantic scrubbing it’s going to take to cleanse the stench one acquires after linking to a Daily Telegraph article, but in an unexpected move they’ve published a profile of and interview with renowned Northamptonian Alan Moore, in preparation for the post-New Year UK publication of his porno-revisionist opus Lost Girls.
Students who’ve recently moved to the town and are wondering what we have to boast about besides a derelict lift tower and a large collection of expensive flats that were shoe factories in a previous life might find one answer there, and others might simply appreciate the charm of the Telegraph printing excerpts from a mucky book.
If you haven’t quite got the constitution for the sexual adventures of your childhood icons you might well enjoy Voice of the Fire, Moore’s psychogeographical 6,000-year-spanning novel of Northampton. He also guides Iain Sinclair through sections of our empire in Edge of the Orison, Sinclair’s travelogue in the footsteps of John Clare, the county’s finest poet, who we charitably threw in the madhouse - a fate we’ve yet to impose on Moore, though there’s still time for history to repeat herself.
Over on the Making Light blog there’s a running, user-contributed list of “scholarly or reference works so bad that you must never, ever cite them, lest you be cruelly mocked by your fellows.” Fascinating reading, as long as your bear in mind that a blog comment is in itself a terrible source.
Well, I thought I’d blogged this here when it began a few months ago, but obviously that must have been a particularly mundane dream. One Ethan Persoff is scanning and hosting complete issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s seminal journal of American counterculture that began in the 50s and rolled into the following century gathering infamous contributors like an enormous filthy snowball made of drugs and swears.
At the moment there are 12 full issues from the 1960s in place. Timothy Leary! Abbie Hoffman! Norman Mailer! Lenny Bruce! Woody Allen! The Diggers! The Black Panthers! They’re there talking trash in this groovy and historically valuable vault of anti-establishment bile and spite. Also, see Mickey Mouse shooting up in the legendary Disneyland Memorial Orgy and learn the disgusting truth about Lyndon Johnson’s last act as Vice President.
If you grow up reading the wrong kind of books you often see The Realist quoted or referenced, so it’s a long-overdue and fascinating treat to see the original issues made available to all.
Link: The Realist Archive Project
More about The Realist on Wikipedia
A while back I posted up an online version of Ulysses that made good use of the web as a medium. I’ve recently come across another online edition of a great book that isn’t such a technical marvel but does work very well online because of its visual nature.
It’s the entire first edition of Tom Phillips’ A Humument, which is comprised of the pages of an obscure 19th-centruy novel (A Human Document by W.H. Mallock) painted over by Phillips, who allows individual words and phrases through the artwork to create new texts.
Phillips has revised the work since - my 2005 (4th) edition at home has many differently-painted pages and references modern events - and plans to continue doing so, making each edition a worthwhile purchase and read in its own right. The library has two editions in stock, from 1980 and 2005 - I believe the 1980 edition is a reprint of the first edition, which is the version available online.
While I certainly wouldn’t condone the art of scribbling in books, particularly in the default medium of Stabilo Boss highlighter, The Humument is a beautiful, poetic and provocative exception to the rule. I recall first reading about it in Douglas Hofstadter’s collection of Scientific American articles, Metamagical Themas, and wondering how I could ever find a copy. Of course, that was well before any well-adjusted person knew what the internet was, so take advantage of the age we live in and enjoy the book for free at the click of a button, then check out the new edition: it’s at 741.64/PHI.
More details at the official Humument site.
The Humument’s Wikipedia entry.
More from the ‘Too Many Browsers’ dept.: Mac enthusiasts and/or browser fetishists can now test-drive Apple’s Safari browser in a new Windows version. I’ve only just got around to installing it myself (I believe it’s been out a week, so I ought to file this post under ‘History’) and I’m not sure what I think of it - I suspect it might benefit from a better graphics card than my work PC has, and I don’t like the way it dispenses with the default XP style. It might look more at home in Vista, I’ve no idea, but under XP its use of Apple’s Unified interface feels out of place. Maybe there’s a way around that - I haven’t delved too deep yet.
Pages certainly seem to render quickly and correctly, and it passes the Acid 2 test with flying colours. I’ve read of a few problems with certain features in Blogger, but the current release is a public beta, so it’s safe to expect a few quirks and subsequent improvements.
I don’t think it’s going to take the place of Firefox on my Windows PCs, or even get regular use, but it’s an interesting development (very likely released with the imminent and Safari-using iPhone in mind), but it carries across features OS X users might pine for when they’re forced to use Windows, and it’s well worth taking for a spin if you’re interested in the varieties of browsing experience - particularly as to the best of my knowledge it’s the first uncomplicated, ‘for the people’ way to check out the admirable Konqueror rendering engine under Windows, albeit in Apple’s modified form.
The release is also great news for anyone producing web pages, because hopefully you can say goodbye to having to rely on angry emails from Mac users highlighting cross-platform issues because nobody will buy you a Mac for testing - perhaps Microsoft will join the party by raising IE for OS X from the grave. On the other hand, if Safari for Windows is a success, perhaps we web folk will end up looking back fondly on the days when all you had to worry about were the hideous inconsistencies between IE and Netscape - a previously unthinkable proposition.
Art students and everybody else should check out this astounding video of female portraits in Western art (link via BoingBoing). In under three minutes you’ll encounter the persistent and hypnotic gaze of an archetype; it’s practically an alien encounter.
I was thinking what a literary analogue to this might be like, but I suppose one was produced the best part of a century ago in the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses. The portrait video is considerably more approachable, but I’ll take this opportunity to plug that Ulysses link as a must-click for anyone interested in Joyce; it leads to a full version of Ulysses presented as a hypertext concordance; clicking any word in the text brings up a full (and also hyperlinked) list of its appearances. It’s a reading method Joyce would have probably embraced.
The same site also has work by Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Plato and more (including more Joyce) in the same format, available from its main menu - all texts built from Project Gutenberg sources, a fascinating and exemplary use of a great web resource.
Songbird is an upcoming web-enabled iTunes challenger (it describes itself as “a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up”) built on the same Mozilla foundation as Firefox and, naturally, released as open source.
The homepage has a developer preview available for download, and the project looks promising; it works with iPods and iTunes tracks, matches most of iTunes’ features already and adds a few more, and will support extensions in the same way as Firefox, which ought to prove interesting - there are already several available, such as a Wikipedia plug-in that automatically gathers information on the artist you’re listening to. Its integrated web support promises to bring browsing, searching and playing music together more effectively and there are a number of features that sound useful for podcasters - the features page has more details. In the screenshot above (there’s a larger version on the project’s site) Songbird appears to have picked up the available files from an MP3 blog and presented them in an iTunes-like interface at the bottom of the window, from which you can presumably play them, rate them, store them locally and so on.
It should be very interesting - I’ll be trying it out at home. There are any number of plugins and extensions that add media functionality to your chosen browser, but the people at Songbird seem to be taking the opposite approach and placing the browser technology at the service of the media player. Of course, this will add another browser to the growing horde at home - I’ve no idea how many nest under our roof nowadays, but it’s easily in double figures and it’s only going to increase. We haven’t got one of those web-enabled fridges yet, but quite often when I go to pour a glass of juice I think how convenient it would be if I could just check my RSS feeds at the same time, in case anything interesting has happened since I stood up.
I know Big Brother starts tonight, but I think you’d be much better off heading down to the university’s Avenue campus cinema and watching a rare screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, arguably cinema’s finest and only psychedelic-symbolist-surrealist spaghetti zen western life of Christ.
I assume it’s touring because Tartan Video have just released several Jodorowsky films (including a box set) using restored prints, though for some reason the version we saw at the Forum cinema last night cropped the film’s original 1.33:1 ratio to a widescreen format by clipping off the top of the image, making Jodorowsky look a little clumsier than he actually is at times.
Still, you can’t really complain when seeing the film usually involves hunting down midnight showings in undesirable locations that are probably on a different continent. The film is visually stunning, frequently baffling, and Jodorowsky is never content to present a single religious allegory when he can cram around 50 into the background of same shot. You won’t see anything even remotely like it down at the Vue, so make the most of this opportunity and fingers crossed we’ll see more magic like this on the Avenue screen.
Oh, caveat: contains gallons of primary-red blood and a couple of hundred dead rabbits. Possibly one to avoid if you prefer your rabbits alive.
I’ve just upgraded the blog to the latest release of Wordpress - I’m still looking into handy new features this might provide, but in the meantime please leave a comment in this post if you have any problems with the blog as a reader or an author.
Just so there’s a definite feel of progress, and even though it isn’t really connected to the upgrade at all, I’ve added a word cloud to the sidebar of the main page so you can see which tired old phrases we’re running into the ground - looks like we ought to give ’search’ a rest for a while, but it’s reassuring in this day and age to see ‘books’ in there , I suppose. Nevertheless, we clearly need to break out some more exciting words like ‘cobra’ and ’scars’ - consider this sentence my contribution.
