"Yes, there’s also a QR code. Stop having a knee-jerk reaction right now and think carefully. Some of those URLs are quite long, and one day, Pinboard might not exist to click on them from. Do you want to type them in by hand? No, you don’t, so you may as well use a visual encoding that you can scan with a phone in the kind of environment you’d read this book: at home, in good lighting. It is not the same as trying to scan marketing nonsense on the tube."

The Variable Media Questionnaire is a project of Forging the Future, an alliance dedicated to building tools to help rescue digital culture from oblivion.

Very important, not entirely unproblematic, suggest reading:

Can't believe I just learned about archiving and linked data tools and — thanks @aworkinglibrary!

We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.

Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application.

"LACMA’s website has begun releasing publication-quality digital images of out-of-copyright works in its permanent collection. It appears to be the first major museum to do this, and that’s big news. It may herald the end of 'zombie copyrights.'"

The networked exchange of knowledge and the free access to information and educational resources are important prerequisites for the future of democracy, culture, and society. The Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0 has been investigating key questions of information societies since the early 1990s and has built an international competence platform for the critical use of information and communication technologies.

We all get carried away sometimes and end up posting embarrassing tweets and photos of ourselves and our friends, forgetting that all of our Facebook and Twitter contacts can see them, family included! Last Night Never Happened is the life-saving app that will help you avoid letting those posts spread on the internet and save you a lot of embarrassment. Delete multiple unwanted or embarrassing posts from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, including photos, comments, tweets, and direct messages. Available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

First are the social connections, called your Elastic Network. All of your contacts are presented in a list of thumbnails ordered by how strong your connection is to that user. Whenever Color detects that you’re physically near another user (in other words, that you’re hanging out), your bond on the app gets a little stronger. So when you fire up the app and jump to your list of contacts, you’ll probably see your close friends and family members listed first. But if you don’t see a friend for a long time, they’ll gradually flow down the list, and eventually their photos will fade from color to black-and-white.

Wanted to see a meta-timeline of Wikipedia timelines...so I made one today! (Still some text encoding to fix, etc.)

Blythe House was built in the early twentieth century as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank. The building is shared between the Science Museum, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum as a storage facility for small and medium sized objects.

The Science Museum occupies over 90 rooms, which are filled with 203,000 artefacts relating to the history of medicine, science and technology. Within the rooms, the majority of objects are either floor standing, or laid out on shelves or in cupboards with glass doors, so that they can be made available to visitors, researchers and staff. Daylight is blocked out by covering windows, which also reduces dust levels, and the environment is monitored, with a pest management strategy in place to reduce the agents of deterioration. Some rooms contain air filtration systems to remove acidic fumes, for example from the early plastics collection.

Also at Blythe House is a conservation laboratory, a photographic studio, a quarantine area (where incoming objects are checked before being transferred to the main rooms), a research room and the collections logistics office. The logistics staff maintain the store and make the objects accessible for use in exhibitions, loans and public events. The unit includes the object movement team who transfer the objects between museum sites and the storage coordinator.

Wellcome Collection is a free visitor destination for the incurably curious. Located at 183 Euston Road, London, it explores the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. The venue offers visitors contemporary and historic exhibitions and collections, lively public events, the world-renowned Wellcome Library, a café, a bookshop, conference facilities and a members’ club.


Part of Wellcome Collection, the Library has over 750 000 books and journals, an extensive range of manuscripts, archives and films, and Wellcome Images is one of the Wellcome Library's major visual collections.

Through its collections and services, the Wellcome Library provides insight and information to anyone seeking to understand medicine and its role in society, past and present. More than 30 000 readers visit each year, including historians, academics, students, health professionals and members of the general public.

In 1884 Pitt-Rivers donated at least 20,000 items from all over the world and all time-periods to the University of Oxford, which founded the Pitt Rivers Museum. But he also had a second museum, established after 1880 in Farnham (Dorset) and a large number of artefacts in his homes at Rushmore and Grosvenor Gardens, London. Until now the full extent of his collections have never been known but we have established that this second collection also numbered more than 20,000 artefacts. It is probable that during his lifetime he owned in excess of 50,000 separate artefacts.

Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use.

Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF."

Neuromatters is a neurotechnology research & development company designing and building neural signal processing and brain-computer interface systems for capturing and decoding brain activity. Founded by recognized neuroengineering and machine learning experts, Neuromatters' goal is to evolve brain-computer interface systems into application areas where information overload is prevalent.

"Baidu is Google's competitor in China, and is the 6th most popular site in the world.

Origin of the name "Baidu": 'Baidu' was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles. '...hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood.' Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal."

Open source archive software!

Create complex narratives and share rich collections, adhering to Dublin Core standards with Omeka on your server, designed for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and enthusiasts.

Browse Flickr machine tag namespaces, predicates and values.

This website is intended to be an offloading point and information depot for a number of archiving projects, all related to saving websites or data that is in danger of being lost. Besides serving as a hub for team-based pulling down and mirroring of data, this site will provide advice on managing your own data and rescuing it from the brink of destruction.

an exhibition of artists’ books and related material exploring the encyclopedic form at Printed Matter thru February.

From the wonderful FAQ on UbuWeb

Quaquaversal:

Q: When did UbuWeb Start?
A: UbuWeb was founded in November of 1996, initially as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry. Over the years, UbuWeb has embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.

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There is no giftshop:

Q: How do I purchase something from your site?
A: You can't. Nothing is for sale on UbuWeb. It's all free. We know it's a hard idea to get used to, but there's no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end of this museum.

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Stance on copyright:

Q: What is your policy concerning posting copyrighted material?
A: If it's out of print, we feel it's fair game. Or if something is in print, yet absurdly priced or insanely hard to procure, we'll take a chance on it. But if it's in print and available to all, we won't touch it. The last thing we'd want to do is to take the meager amount of money out of the pockets of those releasing generally poorly-selling materials of the avant-garde. UbuWeb functions as a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials, transferred digitally to the web. Our scanning, say, an historical concrete poem in no way detracts from the physical value of that object in the real world; in fact, it probably enhances it. Either way, we don't care: Ebay is full of wonderful physical artifacts, most of them worth a lot of money.

Should something return to print, we will remove it from our site immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from existing artists on site.

Let's face it, if we had to get permission from everyone on UbuWeb, there would be no UbuWeb.

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We're not here for that:

Q: How do I download MP3s?
A: There are thousands of resources on the web to learn how to do this. That's not what we're here for.

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An archive not a blog:

Q: Why isn't new content posted every day?
A: UbuWeb is an archive, not a blog. It has accumulated slowly and steadily and shall continue to far into the future.

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As if to say, "you come to us:"

Q: I'd like to receive notices of UbuWeb updates. How do I do this?
A: UbuWeb refuses to advertise or promote itself. Most of all, we detest the idea of filling inboxes with more unwanted material. A few times a year, we post our updates to select mailing lists; that's what they're for, aren't they? For UbuWeb updates, best to just keep checking back on the homepage, where notices of all new content appears.

Blog post found in response to somebody's question on Quora "Why aren't Flickr's photo IDs sequential":" Sharding (aka data partioning) is how we scale Flickr’s datastore. Instead of storing all our data on one really big database, we have lots of databases, each with some of the data, and spread the load between them. Sometimes we need to migrate data between databases, so we need our primary keys to be globally unique. Additionally our MySQL shards are built as master-master replicant pairs for resiliency. This means we need to be able to guarantee uniqueness within a shard in order to avoid key collisions. We’d love to go on using MySQL auto-incrementing columns for primary keys like everyone else, but MySQL can’t guarantee uniqueness across physical and logical databases."

This site documents Margaret Smith's ongoing work toward the archiving and longterm preservation of UbuWeb, an online collection of avant-garde texts, sounds, and moving images.