IttyBiz is a place to get tips, advice, motivation, and support for your very small business. If you’re working from home or just thinking about it, come and hang out here for some great ideas and bad jokes.

Welcome to WorldMap WARP, a tool based on the MapWarper platform being developed by Entropy Free. The tool is for digitally aligning (geo-rectifying) scanned historical maps to match today’s precise maps. Visitors can browse maps others have geo-rectified or upload their own to rectify. Any map which has been rectified here can be brought into WorldMap by following the instructions under Section 3.9.1 in WorldMap Help.

Series of interviews with "the next generation of antiquarian booksellers."

Maps usually display only one layer of information. In most cases, they're limited to the topography, place names and traffic infrastructure of a certain region. True, this is very useful, and in all fairness quite often it's all we ask for. But to reduce cartography to a schematic of accessibility is to exclude the poetry of place.

Or in this case, the poetry and prose of place. This literary map of Britain is composed of the names of 181 British writers, each positioned in parts of the country with which they are associated.

Knitmap is a searchable catalog of yarn stores from all over the world.

Writer, narrator, SF podcast director.

A Storified Twitter conversation on the sacrifices that academics make for the sake of their careers. There needs to be more public conversation like this.

The publishers, fiber, needle and hook manufacturers and yarn members of the Craft Yarn Council have worked together to set up a series of guidelines and symbols to bring uniformity to yarn, needle and hook labeling and to patterns, whether they appear in books, magazines, leaflets or on yarn labels. Our goal is to make it easier for industry manufacturers, publishers and designers to prepare consumer-friendly products and for consumers to select the right materials for a project and complete it successfully. Included are:

• a uniform list of crochet and knit abbreviations
• guidelines for ranking the skill level of crochet and knit patterns
• measuring, fit, and sizing guidelines for babies, children, women, and men
• categories of yarn, gauge ranges, and recommended needle and hook sizes
• categories of yarn by weight, gauge ranges and recommended needle and hook sizes
• millimeter and U.S. size ranges for hooks and needles
• graphic symbols for skill levels and yarn weights
• chart symbols for knit and crochet
• understanding yarn label information
• tips on reading knit and crochet patterns
• guidelines for industry designers
• FAQs

Blog post on Philadelphia's Art Deco architecture, with photos. Maybe do a series of knitting patterns based on art deco details?

The Studios @ 2202 Alter (also known as Octo Studio) are located in a historic biscuit bakery in South Philadelphia, just below Washington Avenue between 22nd & 23rd Streets. Created by artists for artists, the professional studio workspaces range in size from 250-550 SF and occupy three floors of this renovated industrial building. All studios are rented on an annual lease with prices ranging from $375 - $550 per month.
The studios are complete with hardwood floors, 10-ft ceilings, 6-ft windows, and floor to ceiling sheetrock or brick walls. Units are equipped with high-efficiency T-8 lighting, ample electrical outlets, radiator heat and access to shared washroom with utility sink and toilet. Very close to public transportation (Septa Route 7 & 64 buses), there is also ample on-street parking directly in front of the studio building.
Artist-owner-occupied, the studios have brought life to a once-abandoned street in an impoverished city neighborhood, showing once again how artists can transform spaces into vibrant hives of creativity and rebuild a community.

The lease has been signed. The ground has been broken. 3rd Ward is coming to Philadelphia! After five years in Brooklyn, we've decided to spread our wings, write a new chapter, and open a second location.

We’ve partnered with small business owner and longtime Philadelphia resident, Paul Maiello, and David Belt, the developer behind Macro-Sea (of Dumpster Pools and The Palms fame), to humbly serve this vibrant city with a dynamic resource for entrepreneurs, freelancers, creative enthusiasts, culture-seekers and more.

In the past couple years, the number of young creative professionals in Philadelphia has exploded, attracted by this inspiring city with a legacy of craft and ingenuity. A lot of our current Members and teachers are Philly natives, so we’re thinking there must be a special kinship. It was meant to be.

Our new Philly location is 27,000 square feet of creative workspace, classrooms and event space located in the Northern Liberties/Old Kensington neighborhood, once known as the “Workshop of the World.”

Like our Brooklyn flagship, our Philly site will offer a vast inter-disciplinary education program, membership options for every purpose and budget, and fun, smart, memorable events. It will also have its own Philly flavor, with programming and facilities that suit this great city.

Stenton Guild is a 27,000sf brick and steel building located in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. This building was part of Philadelphia’s mighty industrial past and was built for the Norton Abrasives Company. Norton Abrasives is stil in business today manufacturing sandpaper and grinding products for many industries.

The wide open space of the first floor features a woodshop with a full complement of professional woodworking machinery and a spray booth.
The second floor is suitable for office or artist studio space and features hardwood maple flooring, high ceilings, and abundant natural light from the many windows.
The dry open space of the basement is well lit and has the same high ceiling and square footage of the first and second floors. It is suitable for a variety of similar uses.

Amenities include key fob entrances, well lit fenced parking, video surveillance, air conditioning, and a 6000lb freight elevator. The indoor and outdoor loading docks can accommodate most delivery and shipping needs.

"Stitch Cooperative (Stitch Co-op for short) is a new business model for pattern distribution. It aims to serve both independent designers and craft shops by bringing them together in a way that hasn’t been done before.

The basics: order a broad range of patterns from talented independent designers for your shop in one fell swoop. No more juggling invoices from 40 different designers. No more hunting for the best of the best — you’ve found it here! You can sign up for our designer- or shop-specific mailing lists on our mailing list page.

Stitch Cooperative is managed by Shannon Okey, author of eleven knitting- and fiber arts-related books, knit designer, and a shop owner herself. In creating Stitch Cooperative, Shannon has reached out to designers and shop owners alike to determine what each constituency is looking for in a distribution and wholesale relationship.

Most importantly, independent designers will reach a wider audience and local yarn shops will be able to provide their customers with a broader selection of patterns with ease."

Bookmarked for the description of what a technical editor of knitting patterns does. For future reference if I ever try my hand at technical editing myself.

Inspired by Patrick Keiller's The Robinson Institute, currently on show at the Tate Britain, we present Verso's guide to political walking. We also draw influence from Will Self's Guardian article in which he pronounces that “walking is political” and suggests that the “contemporary flâneur” can be one “who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control.”

Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, among others. She gets occasional help from a handful of guest contributors.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.

Because creativity, after all, is a combinatorial force. It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will become.

Brain Pickings is your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology. Pieces that enrich your mental pool of resources and empower you to combine them into original concepts that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful — a modest, curiosity-driven exercise in vision- and mind-expansion. Please enjoy.

"You could say that Brandon Stanton is on a mission. You could say that he has a passion. Or you could say he is perhaps a bit…obsessive. Whatever you want to call it, Stanton, 28, has been walking the streets of New York for hours every day for a year and a half, taking pictures of the city’s people for his Humans of New York project. He estimates that he has shot about 4,000 portraits over that time, and heard as many stories. He calls it a "photographic census" of the city."

Why impostor syndrome afflicts academics but not athletes, even when the failure rates are equal. This explains SO MUCH.

"...running, and sports in general, LOVE underdogs. We love to hear heroic tales of people who overcame great odds, who suffered staggering defeat, and then who worked hard, pushed themselves, and made it. You never read a profile of a great runner without reading about the hard times in their lives, the difficulties they had in training, the mental blocks, the personal troubles, whatever it was. The glory is in watching them overcome, and come back, and win, against the odds. Seeing people succeed after having worked so hard and dealt with so much is inspiring. We can believe that we can do it, too. We can come back, fight another day.

We love to hear about underdogs in sports, in media, in literature. But one place you'll never hear about them? Science. Academia. No one ever introduces a great speaker with "I've known so and so for a really long time, and they've always been a great scientist. Even in the dark days when the grants kept getting rejected and we had to play poker in the lab because we were out of money, they never lost their love of science!". No one ever eulogizes a scientist with stories of scientific hardship, unless they are the rare misunderstood genius. Instead we head nothing but success after success "Why yes, Dr. Jane Doe here has always been a wonderful scientist. Having received the Wellcome Trust Prize for "Scientific Tots" at the age of 3, she graduated with a bachelors in Chemistry and Physics from Cornell while simultaneously curing cancer, and obtained her PhD from Harvard when she was 17. Since then she has worked hard and discovered great things, publishing 50 times in Science, Nature, or Cell while serving as the ambassador to the United Nations, and is generally the most wonderous, most perfect person the world has ever seen. We can all worship her godlike splendor and admire the way she has brought us all world peace while she gives us this talk on atomic structure". Obviously I'm exaggerating, but I've certainly many heard introductions that leave the entire audience sitting in awe. It's stuff like this that makes us young'uns think we can never achieve what they have, very few of us are egotistical enough to believe we are the next Dr. Jane Doe."

“I was just born to cook,” says Nigel Slater. True, but he was also born to write. Equal parts M.F.K. Fisher and Billy Collins, Slater is the author of nine cookbooks, the essay collection Eating for England, and Toast, a Proustian, flavor-driven memoir made into a BBC film in which Slater himself has a bit part. He is the culinary host of the BBC series "Simple Suppers" and has penned a weekly food column in The Observer since 1993.

“The column is a bit of a confessional as much as it is a recipe column,” says Slater. “It’s not about a recipe; it’s bringing everything in. It’s our whole lives.” This approach defines Slater, who after over two decades of preparing food and writing about it still calls himself an amateur cook. He is an amateur in the true sense of the word — its origin comes from the Latin word meaning “to love.”

"I am an independent social historian of food culture and also a professional chef and confectioner. I run practical courses on all aspects of British and Italian food history at my home in the English Lake District. I am also the author of a number of books and many papers on the history of food and have curated many major exhibitions on food history in the UK, US and Europe."

[THIS IS THE LIFE I WANT. Or one of them, anyway.]

LOVE. THIS.

"Oscar Wilde would agree. In “De Profundis,” he wrote, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” In the practices of commonplacing and reblogging, this last phrase has literally become true: their passions a reblog. While Nietzsche warned us about history’s capability to imprison us, Wilde would be more concerned that these technologies could efface our identities and, as a result, diminish our capacity for original thought. On one’s Tumblr page, consciously or not, one forms one’s identity by appropriating other people’s words and images. And when using a commonplace book, as demonstrated by Justus Lipsius, one undergoes an exercise in recitation, not ratiocination. Wilde is right — these collections, online or in print, induce a sort of intellectual passivity."

The Letterpress Guild of New England is a group of professional printers, hobbyists, and others interested in the art and craft of letterpress. We meet for monthly studio trips, talks, and to share information and camaraderie.

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit art and publishing organization whose mission is to produce artisanal and trade editions of new poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. With a volunteer editorial collective of artists and writers at its heart, UDP grew out of a 1990s zine into a Brooklyn-based small press that has published more than 200 titles to date, with an editorial office and letterpress workshop in the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus. UDP favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and its books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.

Hi, my name is Marianne. I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and make books, drawings, and prints under the studio name Huldra Press. The name comes from Scandinavian folklore and describes a woman with a fox’s tail who lives in the woods.

Natural history, field guides, Shaker objects, folklore, daydreams, the Arctic, libraries, and children’s drawings, these are the things I think about and why my work looks the way it does.

The Common Press is the letterpress printing studio at the University of Pennsylvania. It is supported by a collaboration of interests at Penn, including writing (15th Room Press, Kelly Writers House), print culture (the Rare Book & Manuscript Library), and visual arts and design (the School of Design). The Common Press was founded on January 17, 2006, the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's birth.

Brooklyn Brainery is accessible, community-driven, crowdsourced education.

We host cheap classes on anything and everything. All of our course topics are dreamed up and suggested by you, and our teachers are a group of awesome people from around Brooklyn and the whole city. Anyone can teach--you just need a passion for the topic and a desire to share it with others.

Classes meet for either one, two, or three weeks, and we keep them as inexpensive as possible (something like $30 for a bunch of class sessions), because you shouldn't have to spend a paycheck to learn something new.

hey im gaunting you ok
Do you mean haunting
yeah sorry i don’t have any fingers
so im poltergeisting a stick to help me text this
Who is this?
oh sorry im a ghost
So do you live inside this phone
yeah kind of

SQL is a standard language for accessing databases.

Our SQL tutorial will teach you how to use SQL to access and manipulate data in:

MySQL, SQL Server, Access, Oracle, Sybase, DB2, and other database systems.

"The School of Life is a new enterprise offering good ideas for everyday living.

We are based in a small shop in Central London where we offer a variety of programmes and services concerned with how to live wisely and well.



We address such questions as why work is often unfulfilling, why relationships can be so challenging, why it’s ever harder to stay calm and what one could do to try to change the world for the better.



The School of Life is a place to step back and think intelligently about these and other concerns. You will not be cornered by any dogma, but directed towards a variety of ideas - from philosophy to literature, psychology to the visual arts – that tickle, exercise and expand your mind. You’ll meet other curious, sociable and open-minded people in an atmosphere of exploration and enjoyment."

Briar Press is a community of 63,494 printers and artists dedicated to the preservation of letterpress.

"The goal in designing this fabric was to see if I could line up the twist stitches with the yarnovers in an interesting and pleasing way, using texture to give an argyle effect that's usually given with color."

Motivate yourself to write with cute kitten pictures. Worth a try!

"Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.

Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof."

A response to Jonathan Franzen's ridiculous "Edith Wharton wasn't pretty and that had a huge effect on her novels" essay in the New Yorker.

Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

 

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

 

We hear from a chorus of voices from six continents including Samdhong Rinpoche, the Prime Minister of Tibet's government in exile, Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten and Zac Goldsmith. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well-being. The Economics of Happiness restores our faith in humanity and challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world.

Gorgeous book-illustration blog.

Todd Presner (Duke '94), gave a presentation at Duke on January 24 entitled "Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities: From Berlin to Los Angeles and Beyond." Presner, Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at UCLA, where he is the Director of UCLA's Center for Jewish Studies and Chair of the Digital Humanities Program introduced his award-winning "HyperCities" project (http://hypercities.com), a digital mapping platform that allows students and scholars to "go back in time." The presentation was generously funded by Duke's Center for Jewish Studies and the German Studies Department.

ArchBook is an online, open-access reference resource composed of richly illustrated articles about specific design features in the history of the book. Unlike traditional historical studies of books and reading, a typical ArchBook entry will follow a specific textual feature through its development across historical periods, with an eye to the continuities and discontinuities the feature might have with digital reading environments. At present there is no online scholarly resource that tells the story of books and reading in the form of a reference resource, with a comprehensive scope and trans-historical perspective, and with a focus on informing digital design. ArchBook seeks to fill that gap. Our goal is to make the diverse history of the book (especially the under-appreciated parts of that history) available to students, researchers, and the public.

ArchBook is a publication of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, a major collaborative research initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The project is supported by funding from INKE, as well as SSHRC Standard Research Grants held by Alan Galey and Richard Cunningham, and the iSchool at the University of Toronto.

Our goal is to build a resource that will help those using or wanting to make use of an SQL database find the resources and reference materials they are looking for: an sql tutorial, manual, introduction, SQL hosting provider, or someone to help them out. We hope to provide a broad range of material so that we can be as useful to those who are just beginning to learn SQL as we are to experienced SQL fanatics. Our materials are currently limited to MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, mSQL and Microsoft SQL, as well as materials that are applicable to any SQL server or relational database.

"What I'm really wondering is what makes some writers special. Like when I was a kid on the London Underground, I'd stare at the people around me. And every now and again I'd notice someone who had been drawn - a William Morris beauty, a Berni Wrightson grotesque - or someone who had been written - there are lots of Dickens characters in London, even today. It wasn't those writers or artists who accurately recorded life: the special ones were the ones who drew it or wrote it so personally that, in some sense it seemed as if they were creating life, or creating the world and bringing it back to you. And once you'd seen it through their eyes you could never un-see it, not ever again.

There are a few writers who are special. They make the world in their books; or rather, they open a window or a door or a magic casement, and they show you the world in which they live."

Yes. YES YES YES.

Independents Hall is a coworking space and community in Philadelphia. We are designers, developers, writers, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, educators, small business owners, telecommuters, marketers, videographers, game developers, and more.

Now this sounds like my kind of convention! (Maybe it's time to start assembling my 10th Doctor cosplay outfit...)

Quarterly Co.™ is a subscription service that enables people to receive physical items in the mail from influential contributors of their choice. [SUCH a cool idea. I want to subscribe to them ALL. Heck, I want to be one of their curators.]

"I do share one of Morrison's concerns. How will writers find leisure to write? But this is part of something larger: and it's not a literary issue, it's a labor issue. How will painters find time to paint? How will dancers find time to dance? How will anyone find leisure to do the things that make life worth living?

But this has nothing to do with the breakdown of the “professional author” system, which never employed more than a small fraction of literary writers. It has to do with wages dropping to levels at which one has to work most of one's waking hours just to sustain oneself. Having to work twenty hours a week at some crummy job never kept anyone from writing a great book or painting great paintings. But having to work fifty or sixty hours a week, or being unable to find any work, certainly will. That's the real disaster for the arts, and for all of us. In the Thatcher-and-Reagan world, we 99 percenters are either frantically busy or anxiously poor: swollen with economic desire or paralyzed by economic fear. That is something to worry about."

"That's the point of Twitter, in my mind: to talk about the things you care about. (For the record, I'm just as varied on Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.) I care about my career, but it's not all I am. I think of this as the Popeye Principle, because I am what I am. And I refuse to filter what I say on social networking sites out of fear of some mythical future employer.

Let me say this again: You cannot live your life worrying about what future employers may or may not think about you based on your Twitter stream, your Facebook page, your Pinterest boards, etc."

Hmm. If I can get my hands on some avocados, I've got to try this.

Twitter is the contemporary postcard—social updates that are limited by size, but not imagination. For a month, with a billion stamps, our correspondent moved his tweets from the laptop to the post office, and rediscovered the joy of mail.

"The idea of the post is simple. When you type a phrase into Google, Google tells you how many hits that phrase gets on the Internet, or how many pages contained that exact line.

It should be stated before we begin that Google is, for a computer program, often strangely illogical and inconsistent, but it's the best we've got. The number of hits is listed after the line. Click on the author's name for the full poem."

Interesting. I wouldn't have expected Yeats's "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" to be so prominent, and I would have thought "Daffodils" would beat out "Intimations of Immortality." And Hamlet's "To be or not to be" is #19?

Then again, as the author of this post points out, counting Google hits isn't an exact science.

"It’s often been said that Wainwright pulled off the same trick as the man who designed the London Underground map. AW took a three dimensional picture, in his case a Lakeland mountain, and by turning it into a two dimensional image made it more understandable.

Well now the 214 Wainwrights get the tube map treatment. Wainwright Society member Peter Burgess from London has created Tubular Fells having noticed that the colour coding of the London Underground lines matches the colour coding of the Pictorial Guides. Great fun and a great talking point. Ideal for framing."

Periodical Poetry indexes English-language poetry published in nineteenth-century periodicals, including texts by nineteenth-century British and American poets, poets from earlier periods, and poems in English translation. In its initial phase, Periodical Poetry does not index poems quoted in periodical essays, reviews, or fiction. Periodical Poetry does not provide full text of the poems; rather it offers full bibliographic citations as well as other information such as first lines, poetic form, length, and notes on illustration and other poem features. This information will be available for users to access through searching and browsing. Periodical Poetry will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of nineteenth-century periodicals and poetry.

Bookworm demonstrates a new way of interacting with the millions of recently digitized library books. The Harvard Cultural Observatory already collaborated with Google Books on the Google ngrams viewer that has data for years. Bookworm doesn't work so closely with Google Books: instead, it uses books in the public domain so you can explore the information we know about a book from many angles at once: genre, author information, publication place, and so on. We're submitting it as part of the Digital Public Library of America's Beta Sprint initiative.

DHCommons is a hub for people and organizations to find projects to work with, and for projects to find collaborators.

Welcome to the Odyssey Podcasts. These podcasts are excerpts from lectures given by guest writers, editors, and agents at the Odyssey Writing Workshop.

Coming off my recent post on How I Learned Code, I've decided to write a series of blog posts that will introduce historians to the basics of Ruby that I will eventually publish as a free ebook. My hope is to write an accessible introduction to Ruby and demonstrate not only how to write small programs but also think about ways programming can help scholars in their everyday tasks. Although I'm aiming this at historians, my hope is that anyone interested in humanist computing (or Ruby in general) will find this useful. Watch here, follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to catch updates as I produce them.

Brilliant brussels sprout recipe.

We deliver locally grown, mostly organic, fresh vegetables, fruit, dairy products, meat, baked goods, CT maple syrup, and more directly from local farms and producers right to your door whether it’s your home or a restaurant who wants to serve local and fresh food.

Using Cytoscape for network visualizations. Looks easy and fun!

Reading Notes are for book readers who like to jot down thoughts, quotes, and related miscellany while reading. A notebook fits inside an envelope which sticks to the inside cover of the book you are reading. You record important reading data - such as when and where you began and completed the book; your notes will never again be separate from the book that inspired them.

"The service is simple enough -- and draws upon a few social conventions that will be instantly recognizable. (So feel free to just go try it out and skip the rest.) At its core, Findings is a service that allows you to capture, store, search, and share small snippets of text from eBooks and web pages. It integrates Kindle highlights and web clippings (with more input options to come.) And it gives you the ability to share those quotes with your peers, as well as follow other people’s quotes through your timeline. 

"There are plenty of other services and apps out there that clip and store text. (When John and I first met for lunch, he was using a modified WordPress setup to store his personal quotes.) But with Findings, we are trying to do something that is dedicated explicitly to the task of curating quotations. In other words, it’s not designed to be a broader publishing platform, or a more generic notebook app that happens to include quotes every now and then. It’s a social commonplace book.

"That narrowness of focus has allowed us to concentrate on a couple of key features that make Findings particularly useful. First, because we are focused on quotations, we have built a number of smart systems that pull metadata from the sources, which allows you to seamlessly organize your quotes around authors and titles and sources (and other organizational schemes we are going to dream up in the months ahead.) And the social component means you can do the kind of “searching someone else’s library” that I was dreaming of seven years ago. The combination of sharing and metadata means that we can start pinpointing the exact pages and passages that people are fixating on right now."

[OMG! Commonplace book + social network? I am THERE.]

Seriously, why aren't all HTTP status messages like these?

Which headlines are real, and which came from the Onion? It's surprisingly hard to tell. Another for the information-literacy file.