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.
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.
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.
Robert Hirsch, a photographer, critic and writer for many prominent photography journals and magazines, has made available the full text of some of his articles via his webpage Light research. Article topics include exhibition reviews, ‘why people make photographs’ and photographic truth. The articles may be of interest to artists and photograpy students as well as anyone with a passing interest in photography.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has made available some of its popular audio recordings. Discussions and lectures from scholars, art critics and museum staff on the exhibitions within the museum as well as on related topics are freely available from 2005 onwards. Downloads available include offerings from the popular “brown bag lunch series” as well as “conversations with contemporary artists”.
Another museum offering free audio recordings is the Tate Britain, which as part of a past exhibition has made available some clips from the audio cassette-magazine Audio Arts, which was established in 1973 by Bill Furlong. Most have transcripts available and quite a few also have audio files available, including interviews with artists such as Damien Hirst, Gilbert & George, Joesph Beuys and Howard Hodgkin.
For me, books are great to buy and read, but then they pose a problem: storage. Of course you can donate them to your local public library/charity shop or sell them online for pennies. At a push you could put them on one of the newly-formed piles on top of the books already on your bookcases (well, my bookcases at least…)
Or, if you are not a great reader, but wish to pretend to the world that you are well read, you could invest in ‘designer books’ and go for that leather-bound stuffy library look. If this idea appeals to you, there is a company out there ready to find books that will look good on your bookshelves at the same time as solving the problem of what to fill the vast empty space with that many of us would, well, sell books for. It’s unlikely though that these books will be in English so be prepared to hone your foreign language skills to find out exactly what material you are bringing into your home…
Apologies for the excessive use of the dots - it’s a bad habit of mine.
Sofa Storage
Bookcases as part of your sofa! If you’re like me and need to find more and more space to store your newly-acquired useful nik-naks, then this is the furniture for you. And you won’t even need to get up if you need to grab that dictionary/magazine/photo album.
I’ve just come back from my annual pilgimage to the ‘Online Information’ exhibition in London. There were the usual range of information products, seminars and freebies, and a few new toys to get excited about.
Checking out a couple of presentations to share with my colleagues, I came across ‘Slideshare‘, “the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web”.
The purpose of my visit was to find Karen Blakeman’s ‘Searching without Google: alternative tools for more expert searching’.
Both Slideshare and Karen’s presentation are worth a look. But don’t forget - if you want further information you can always ask your Academic Librarian.
I’ve just noticed a new tab on Amazon called ‘Shoes’. I’m not a big shoe person myself, but if you are studying the Fashion, Footwear and Accessories course here there are some interesting photos for some of the examples on sale. I think copyright prevents the copying of the photos so do use them for inspiration purposes only.
Also interesting if you are a big fan of shoes!
Whether or not you consider yourself to be a “visual learner”, this site could save you a lot of stress.
www.bubbl.us is a free online mind-mapping tool. This means that you can create visual structures of essay plans, project plans etc which are easy to edit - you can add, move, edit or delete the bubbles really easily.
An added bonus is that you don’t need to download anything, and if you register with your email address you can then save your maps online and come back to them later from another computer. You can also print them or export them as jpegs for emailing.
It’s incredibly easy to use and I’m dead impressed with it 
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.
I admit it - I’ve been getting a little jaded with the Web lately. What with the Second Life economy outstripping the GDP of several real countries and huge amounts of money moving across cyberspace thanks to ebay, Amazon and their compatriots, I was beginning to think that Mammon had won.
But then I discovered, joined and used the utterly fabulous Freecycle. This is essentially a free locally organised, ebay. People offer their unwanted items or put out want adds and the group responds. There are groups all round the country, including Northampton, and everything is offered for free - yes, no money is allowed to change hands.
The whole experience has not only had me reliving the Summer of Love (OK, I was only 6 but Walsall was a groovy place you know) it has revitalised my faith in humanity. Give it a look now and feel the love.