morningbuzz

Ireland, Twitter, Oscars, Buildings, More: Morning Buzz, February 26, 2012

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Nifty. Virtual tours inside corporate art collections.

Marcel Breuer is getting a digital archive. It launches March 23rd. “The website (breuer.syr.edu) represents a collaborative effort headed by the Library to digitize more than 30,000 drawings, photographs, letters and other materials related to the early career of Marcel Breuer, one of the most influential architects and furniture designers of the 20th century.”

The LA Times is going paywall. The LA Times is one of my favorite non-local papers, and if this helps them financially, bully for them. But it grinds me that if I want to subscribe, I have to pay $3.99 a week, while there’s a $1.99 a week deal if you also get the Sunday paper.

Irish court records covering 1850-1910 are now available online. “The new database at findmypast.ie, which will have another 15 million cases added during 2012, lists court Petty Sessions order books from 1850 to 1910.”

One of my fave raves, the Open Clip Art Library, has a new release.

Handy tips: how to find digital copies of your user guides.

Google crunches search data and guesses some Oscar winners.

Speaking of the Oscars, Twitter has the hashtag lowdown and tips for livetweeting and enjoying the livetweeting.

Hey, this sounds fun — a new online resource about skyscrapers. “Launched by the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the site profiles every building in the world higher than 656 feet, or 200 meters.”

Ooooh, I can’t wait to try new search engine YossarianLives. “Its creators claim YossarianLives is a metaphorical search engine, designed to spark creativity by returning disparate but conceptually related terms.” Good morning, Internet…

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1 reply »

  1. Hey there. Did you ever get back to that “Yossarian Lives!” site? I recently got an email update from them — a link to a “How do you use the site?” survey, basically — which perplexed me because I couldn’t remember EVER using the site, ha.

    Anyway, it’s pretty interesting. I’m not 100% sure I “get” it yet, but I thought this (from the About page) was interesting:

    Today’s internet search algorithms have a problem, in that they tell us what the world already knows. They return results that are closely related to your query. Think about Google, Bing, or Yahoo…where before you can even finish typing your query it begins to return what everyone else has most often searched for. We’ve recently heard these called “Junk Food Algorithms” and instead of inviting us to grow or stretch in our understanding of a topic, they reinforce existing knowledge, and collapse creative possibilities.

    …We want you to generate new knowledge. To accomplish this our algorithms take your query and then work to understand the structural components and attributes of the concept. We then search for concepts with similar structural attributes, and return results from entirely new domains. This is how creativity, invention, and innovation often happen, when we take ideas from one domain and apply to another, helping us see things in a new way. What we are actually talking about is a metaphorical link between concepts.

    I like that they started with images only. Again, I don’t quite understand how they’re putting their results together, but I’m getting results MUCH more interesting than I’ve ever gotten from Google Images search.

    Reply

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