Friday, November 10, 2006

Items

Several things:
  • Check out the BoingBoingBoing podcast with "Ghost Map" author Steve Johnson.
  • We watched a real good documentary the other night, The World According to Sesame Street, which showed how the Children's Television Workshop developed Sesame programs in Bangladesh, South Africa, and the former Yugoslavia. I did my senior research project in college on the Sesame Street phenomenon; Maybe I'll post some stuff from it here at some point.
  • Take a look at the cool retro snapshots at Square America.
  • The ♥G♥ pointed me towards a cool site where you can do jigsaw puzzles online.
  • Enough TV to make your eyeballs melt -- Get it while it lasts!
  • New York Times Magazine article by James Gleick about the Oxford English Dictionary in the age of the Internet. Excerpt: The version now under way is only the third edition. The first, containing 414,825 words in 10 weighty volumes, was presented to King George V and President Coolidge in 1928. Several “supplements” followed, but not till 1989 did the second edition appear: 20 volumes, totaling 21,730 pages. It weighed 138 pounds. The third edition is a mutation. It is weightless, taking its shape in the digital realm. To keyboard it, Oxford hired a team of 150 typists in Florida for 18 months. (That was before the verb keyboard had even found its way in, as Simpson points out, not to mention the verb outsource.) No one can say for sure whether O.E.D.3 will ever be published in paper and ink. By the point of decision, not before 20 years or so, it will have doubled in size yet again. In the meantime, it is materializing before the world’s eyes, bit by bit, online. It is a thoroughgoing revision of the entire text. Whereas the second edition just added new words and new usages to the original entries, the current project is researching and revising from scratch — preserving the history but aiming at a more coherent whole.

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Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Suggestions for Newspapers; S-Rock Rocks; GooTube and Goofice Suite; BBB

A few things:
  • Doc Searls has 10 ideas for newspapers to succeed in the age of the Internet. Excerpt: First, stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There's advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow's fishwrap behind paywalls. Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisilble. If you open the archives, and make them crawlable by search engine spiders, your authority in your commmunity will increase immeasurably. Plus, you'll open all that inventory to advertising possibilities. And I'll betcha you'll make more money with advertising than you ever made selling stale editorial to readers who hate paying for it. (And please, let's not talk about Times Select. Your paper's not the NY Times, and the jury is waaay out on that thing.)
  • Schoolhouse Rock! -- Where Are They Now? Excerpt: Ezra Mohawk stands out as the rebel rocker in the group, having performed with everyone from Frank Zappa to Jerry Garcia. She also represents all the singers who might have worked on just one or two of the Schoolhouse songs. There was Verb, That's What's Happening, by Zach Sanders, Elbow Room by Sue Manchester, and a few others, But Liz is the only person I could find anything on, so she's the spokesperson by default, and a damn good one, as Interjections is a classic. Note: If you like Schoolhouse Rock! when it rocks, be sure to check out Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks!
  • Looks like in addition to the YouTube business, Google now wants to get into the Excel business. I'm sure the jury will be out for a little while. Maybe I'll play around with it this weekend.
  • I've been enjoying the Boing Boing podcasts. Their podcast show is named "Boing Boing Boing." I kind of wish they had picked "Boing Boing Bone (Bawn)."

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Monday, October 09, 2006

Kanye Mahna

The ♥G♥ and I love this Kanye-Muppet mashup! (Found on Radio Clash, pointed out by Boing Boing.) Props to Lenlow.

Wikipedia entry here; Original Muppet version below:


Now, interesting fact: This song originally appeared in a quaint Swedish film from the late 60s, the soundtrack albums of which are shown below:

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