Thursday, January 17, 2008

Thanks for all the good wishes, everyone! It was a nice birthday.

This announcement from the Library of Congress is just plain awesome - a collaboration with Flickr to create Flickr Commons. It's archival processing and description work by the people, for the people. Hooray!

Another interesting technology: the New York Times is trying out all sorts of interactive formats for their 2008 election coverage. I especially like the names application, which shows you who's talking about whom amidst the candidates. It looks fairly traceable until you go to Clinton, and then it's a huge skein of connections.

The PreWarCar site is a treasure trove for antique car lovers (and possibly steampunks).

Midomi is the latest music site that promises to find the name of that song you can't remember; you can sing or hum the tune and it'll allegedly recognize what you want. (Has anyone tried any of these sites? Do they work?) Once you figure out who sang the song, you can write letters to them, a la the McSweeney's Popsong Correspondence. (I've linked to Axl Rose's letter, but here's the whole list. Good stuff. I especially like the letter from one of the kids living in Madness's "Our House.")

And lastly, here's a wonderful librarian weblog all about weird and wacky book covers. We just went to a library booksale and spent an inordinate amount of time showing each other terrible book covers, so this weblog is right up our alley!

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