literature-map lets you search for authors within literature (and philosophy).The application visualises the proximity of the authors/thinkers in a relational network. Authors like Jelinek, Houellebecq, Foucault, Eco for example, are bunched in tag clouds based on affiliations and influences.

The literature map is part of gnooks, 'a self-adapting community system' to search for books and writers. gnod in turn is 'a search-engine to find things you don't know about.' You can search music, books, movies or find like-minded people. The entire system leads back to the 'virtual playground' of Marek Gibney.

Nice buzz, turning pages of ancient books at the British library. Leonardo's personal sketchbook, botanical illustrations or Arabic calligraphy. The 'features' section contains 'real and imaginary gardens' old cook books. The 'showcase' contains historic books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, patents, music scores, sound recordings, photographs and stamps. Flick through the old pergament...

Philipp Lenssen shares his approaches to archive blogposts in a sustainable way. Even if you don't have the long-term in mind, it's a good read for blogging stategies.

A good remix video is on ifilms: 'George Bush don't like Black People'. Check it out!
(via Micro Persuasion )

Following the Delicious cloud one can view the most popular links by age: 24 hrs. or 48 hrs. In both cases a " 'NEW' site is a site not present in del.icio.us before yesterday." The all time popular links are also worth a look. Feeds are available. Great source for bloggers.

Buttons by George Taylor McKnight is a searchable directory of blog buttons. Check out these blog icons: memes/collectives, news, political stuff, feeds, location or navigation. Steal some buttons for your blog now!

Culturing the influenza virus to migrate from poultry to humans and then from humans to humans is well under way in our cilvilization. In Indonesia it seems just a matter of time when it (H5N1) becomes a pandemic.There is a lot of information out there in the blogosphere on the theme: a news aggregator about the flu news,a fluwikie and my own collection.

The Decameron Web is a hypermedia archive featuring Boccaccio's medieval texts about the plague and its effects on Europe. Most of the literary texts are available in English or Italian. Fun reading/viewing while chewing some cheap poultry and waiting...

Update: 24.09.2005 stats are back again!
As the stats are not working since 16.09.05 I have added another sitemeter to the sidebar.
Seit 16. Sept. keine Statistiken mehr...mal sehen ob es der neue Sitemeter bringt...

Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres, or RSF) serve the public interest by ensuring the right for everyone to be informed. They have now produced a handbook to help bloggers with tips and technical advice on anonymous blogging that is also avoiding censorship. The general advice on blogging reaches from set up to search-engines , ethics and journalistic principles. Many experienced bloggers give their personal accounts as cyber dissidents.You can download (PDF) the handbook or browse sections here. The guide will also be available in pulp form.

Carnets de digestion is a collection of imaginative gaphics in b/w, take time! Eugene Smith is a 'noodler' of very contemporary characters. Drawn is a collaborative blog sharing illustrations, art and cartooning and linking to a web of the very same. Matt Jones also has some good graphics. Codex Seraphinianus is weird and wonderful. There are a lot of 'grand illusions' (rich media) and some more on art, myth and legends. On the graffiti front Banksy is worth a click through  'outdoors' and 'indoors'.

Disenchanted with searchengines? Try Memeorandum, the all in one place to track technical and political issues. You can follow the linked threads/conversations in the blogosphere about a given topic. The intent is to 'tap the signal' of credible news 'rapidly' and 'relate the form of conversations unfolding in real time'.

via Techcrunch
Memeorandum Blog

Del.icio.us has just  turned 2 years old yesterday. A wonderful free service for bookmarking all your favourites or to browse that delicious universe.  Strong current has a large cloud on del.icio.us.

Google's (beta) Blogsearch finds stuff in the blogosphere. "The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service." The multi-lingual search can find posts or blogs and it can also be narrowed down to specific dates. Furthermore you can subscribe to your query by Atom or RSS feeds. 'Social software' and 'Web 2.0' for example, yielded well I thought. There is more here and oodles about blogsearch.

OhmyNews.com (in its English version) is on the way to pose a challenge to top-down news dissemination. The user-generated news of thousands of citizen journalists working in a transnational collaboration poses a refreshing change and challenge to the old media, sometimes regurgitated via blogs. There are many participating global citizens reporters and some well known contributers. Just register and make the news!

"We Media, How audiences are shaping the future of news and information" written by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis is a very comprehensive paper on the evolving participatory new media ecosystem. At all levels it provides orientation or in-depth analysis for bloggers, digital communities of practice or (citizen) journalists. There is a lot about building trust and credibility as the new currency of new media. It is a long, but very readable piece of work.

"Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, 'citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer.' Mainstream news media , however, have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms."

The U.S. Media Center has the vision "to be the global leader in providing intelligence and insight into the future role and use of media and enabling technology."

Socialtext has this nice summary out on the state (June 05) of the European blogosphere.The French are leading, this is seen to be due to their political background and a blog-friendly MSM.  Top, corporate, political, money generating and niche bloggers are also featured. Each country can be inquired into from the sidebar. The German scene is wrapped up here.

Some mind tools for effective decision-making you can find on 43 Folders. Mind Tools is of course a good resource for managing the self and the relationships with other selves.

Technorati announced a new Blog Finder. This directory of blogs is organised by subjects, as " bottom-up, user-generated tags". As usual they are presented in "... order of authority, which means highly-linked blogs appear first." The blogosphere is discussing it here.

A new theory is about that claims, that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is not caused by feeding dead sheep to herbivorous cows to produce CJD in human meat eaters. The theory now runs: England imported carcasses from India in the 60s which were contaminated with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) from human remains. In the collection process, the poor added a few (infected) human remains. This load was then used as British fertiliser and fed to plant-eating stock.The cattle ended up as steaks, or also known as 'mad cow' dis-ease. Many meat eaters ended up with CJD.

more:abc.sience.news