Interesting Sites

http://www.mla.org/map_single An interactive mashup of US census data on languages with maps via a proprietary software (GIS). You can get a tour of the varous features at http://www.mla.org/map_tour106.

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=9TSZK4G35XEZJZG21T60 This seems like Web 2.0. but what do you call it? This particular example enables users to volunteer to examine satellite photos of the Nevada landscape to help find the missing flier Steve Fossett; one more way of using the web to harness the collective energy of a large number of people (and their computers). The whole framework is a confusing Amazon beta site called "Mechanical Turk" that lets you use their APIs to build applications to do this sort of thing; you can even pay people to take on these tasks, called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). The site already has 66,179 projects that you can work on.

http://essay.blogs.nytimes.com/ An interesting blog based on a NYTimes essay, "What's the Matter With College," published in July + the responding essays solicited from college students + a growing file of reader comments on the winning essays + "popular tags" of the essays (weighted by frequency?) + audio files of the original essay and the first-prize winner + a search function to search all 600 submitted essays (by word, state, institution, and year of graduation) + (and let's not forget this) interactive and ever-changing advertising. Using the web as a platform--kind of a digital soap box where millions of people can comment on six people commenting on an essay commenting on millions of people. This resource becomes richer the more it is used, but at some point it becomes pretty unwieldy--already there are hundreds of posted comments with no organizational principle other than chronology.

http://www.nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block A helpful description of how "social software" works, not technically, but in terms of what it allows people to do.