Digital Culture Studies

A Capella tribute to Facebook.

Everyblock is both fascinating and scary at the same time. It filters an assortment of local information by location so you can keep track of what’s happening in your own neighbourhood, right down to your own block.

 I just ran my own address, and even though it didn’t find much for my exact street, I am astonished by the depth of information pulled in from the surrounding area - business licenses, a murder (murder!), lots of theft under $300, some narcotics (marijuana under 30 grams) charges and one possession of crack(seriously?), some real estate information, etc. What is especially surprising is the huge number of sources being aggregated, from a Chicago Public Radio story looking for Pakistani born Chicagoans reactions to Bhutto’s death to police records (one of my neighbours was murdered? what!?) to a “missed connections” ad on Craiglist, to city business licenses, both large news papers, and what appears to be fire department logs.

 On the one hand, great aggregator. On the other hand, how much information do we need? Sometimes I struggle with aggregators - I am overloaded with things I don’t need to know, but as an information junkie, want to have just because I can have it.

The bonus, of course, is that I live in an area of Chicago often referred to as being rough, yet the crime for my neighbourhood is much, much more mild and run of the mill than for the gold coast, which I checked after my own. Chock full of sexual assaults, cocaine, and other serious crimes.

The last traditional speaker of the Eyak language died yesterday, making the language extinct. Eyak Chief Marie Smith Jones passed away yesterday at the age of 89, and as the last speaker of Eyak, her language dies with her. First Nations languages are especially at risk for this, for a number of reasons, but there are groups out there trying to save what they can.

Chief Jones’ obituary. She was the last living Eyak.

• Bloggers win the “Test the Nation” trivia challenge. First of all, I would be on any team headed by Samantha Bee. Second, how fun is Canadian television? Third, apparently every blogger in Canada was involved :)
• “What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?” An interesting experiment over on Grand Text Auto.
• Watching the economy dump yesterday got you confused. This Modern World explains the global economy.

Just refresh the Google finance tracker page, over and over again. A great question on CNN - will the cure be worse than the disease? What I wonder is, how does the use of real-time web-based software change investor beliefs in the current tumultuous market? In ‘87, there was a news delay, and only professional traders knew exactly what was happening, minute by minute. But now we all know - does this benefit or harm the markets right now?

Need a moment of inappropriate humour right now? Sometimes tagging can be very, very funny. Case in point, on Amazon: Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment (Hardcover) is currently tagged ‘goatse’. You maybe have to be an innerwebs old timer to get the joke.

From the Stats website: “ Since its founding in 1994, the non-profit, non-partisan Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) has become a much-valued resource on the use and abuse of science and statistics in the media. Our goals are to correct scientific misinformation in the media resulting from bad science, politics, or a simple lack of information or knowledge; and to act as a resource for journalists and policy makers on major scientific issues and controversies.”

With that in mind, check out their list of the worst science news stories of 2007. This doesn’t really need my commentary - just go read it and laugh.

Some great visualizations of how Flickr works, via Flickr, naturally: a simple version, and below, a more complex one, via Bryce Glass at soldierant.

• Kristina Contes is the Lindsay Lohan of online scrapbook forums. You know I want to make a joke here about how ’scrappy’ internet forum participants can be, but I am afraid that they will excoriate me for it.
• How to Feel Miserable as an Artist.
• Data Visualization. I pledge to step away from the pie charts and make data more visually interesting!

The Library of Congress has a Flickr site. And a blog. In their own words, “If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.”

• Design Police. I just saw a blink tag working on a livejournal site last week. Proof enough that we need some enforcement around here. If you scroll through the pages (which is a very elegant design feature), page four has some nice “design stolen from” and “idea stolen from” badges.
• MyMap. Data visualization is so beautiful.
• USB desk vacuum. Hilarious and useful.