Recently in Webbery Category

I thought I'd share a link to this site, Digital History Hacks.

From his "About" (sort of buried in the "archive"):

My premise is that the web constitutes the largest, most easily-accessible archive that people have ever created, and also the most radically unfamiliar. Material is being added to the web at an exponential rate, but it is of low average quality; it usually has an uncertain provenance and uncertain lifespan. Much of it is created by machines and meant to be ‘understood’ by other machines.

Historians and other humanists and social scientists need a new set of computational tools for dealing with the web. About half of the posts in Digital History Hacks are devoted to making the argument for a new historical discipline that is analogous to bioinformatics, and draws on machine learning, computational linguistics, information retrieval and other fields. The rest of the posts are about hacks, short programs that demonstrate the potential of digital history, and are designed to be shared, extended or modified (i.e., hacked) by others.

He received something called a "Cliopatria" award, which I'd never heard of, so I checked it out. The past awardees include some interesting clicking.

Since I've been giving Chris Higgins all my ideas, I'll borrow one of Rich's which he made in a comment yesterday --

"I imagine Wonkette only with all the pictures replaced by those from Cute Overload. How's that for a concept?"

That, my friend, is BRILLIANT. Can someone please make that happen with RSS feeds or something?

This reminds me of some of my mash up ideas, which I'll get back to later.

One of my excuses for not blogging more lately is because every time I have a great idea about something bloggable, I give it to Chris Higgins rather than blogging it myself because he's actually paid to blog, and he generally does a better job, anyway. Zip codes? Coyle and Sharpe? That was me.

However, it's worth noting that Higgins has some very good -- even great -- content of his very own, so much so that Mental Floss has become one of the first three websites I look at every day. At first I thought the site was a little corny, but I have grown to like the low-snark, high-science ratio.

I've been thinking lately about snarky and sarcastic sites versus sweet and sincerely sites lately. Like, do you know of any sweet and sincere political blogs? Or any snarky and sarcastic craft blogs? I haven't read any, but maybe I need to get out more. I get really tired of snark sometimes.

Anyway, Higgins regularly links to his MentalFloss entries over at Chrishiggins.com (about every Sunday), but some of my personal recent favorites have been:

• My Credit Card Experiment
• Rephotography (I gave him The Third View project)
• iPhone Versus Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• 120 Minutes Archive

Please make a note of it!

Favorite search terms for the week that brought people to marysgreatideas.com (btw: "photos of my filthy feet" continues to be one of my leading search terms, second only to "american inventor audition update"!)

• Halle Barry's Butt

• why does my blue heeler stink

• ugliest babies in louisiana

This is one of those boring, self-referential google analytics posts -- but for some reason I seem to have a lot of visitors coming here from Dublin. More than from Portland. Odds are it's some kind of fluke, or people from Dublin are visiting some content somewhere deep in the archives and won't even see this post, but if you're here from Dublin -- Can I ask why? I've never been to Dublin, but I'm sure I'd love it. I don't have any way of knowing anything else about you other than someone in Dublin is clicking here a lot, so don't worry that I'll get nosy. I'm just curious.

My favorite search terms that brought people to Mary's Great Ideas in the last week:

• can a laptop work in a sauna

• photos of my filthy feet (warning: not family friendly or worksafe)

  and ...

• great ideas that don't exist I RULE that wordspace! Well, except for this site, which is kind of interesting. And a couple others.

I can see how this google analytics thing could easily lead to an endless series of self-referential posts, and I'm pleased by that! Still, in the interest of drawing out the fun, I'll try not to do this too often.

I have a new idea, this one I'm actually going to do something about: an oral history podcast. I don't usually like to blog about ideas I'm actually doing something about, seems like a jinx, but in this case, I need your suggestions for a name for the project.

It will go like this:

A host interviews an oral historian about oral history projects he or she has done, playing clips from the oral history project. The conversation between host and guest is guided by an interest in how the materials might be integrated into K-16 US history classrooms.

Another downloadable file on the same site, called "for the classroom" would consist of just the audio clips played during the interview, so that a teacher could have it cued up for use in the classroom without commentary.

Yet another audio file could consist of the entire oral history interview/s, if that's do-able in terms of legalities/server space/etc.

That's my idea!

So far, names I've considered or had suggested and rejected because they are too close to other projects (I don't want to be the Rolax of the historical world) or already had the domain names taken include:

historycast (Chris's good suggestion, but taken)
castfromthepast (.com is taken)
speakinghistory (too close to "talking history" the OAH radio show -- I imagine they'll turn that into a podcast at some point)
podcastfromthepast (that one's actually available but ...)
oralhistorypodcast (available but boooring)

I'm refraining from making a bunch of oral jokes, although Melissa got in a few good ones about anal historians.

OK -- it still kind of sucks (or maybe it's just really dada), but now it functions, from a technical perspective, anyway:

Great Idea Generator.

Update, May 1
Last week's webzen was all on generators, including the Prior Art generator, which is a more elegent (although less interactive!) application of the Great Idea Generator. Note that Melissa's old favorite, They Fight Crime! is also included.

Higgins and I have a new blog, How Other Couples Do It -- the Blog. I'm using it as a place to make research notes for now. Cuter graphics, full-on website, more content -- still to come. But it's a BLOG ferchristssake! Rejoice!!

Photos to come of my husband's nice busy pair. This idea would another of those "rate my ..." sites, which would have pictures of bushy eyebrows. Some of them get really extreme. I think tekekahkweuhsés is nice! And how appropriate to know the word in West Virginia Mingo!

I think the "rate my..." francise is hard to beat. It's one of those things like calendars or coffee mugs or t-shirts that's ready made for specific content insertion. It's interesting how many of those kinds of things we have. I don't know if it's latestage/rampant capitalism/consumerism, or boredom, or what. The "rate my" my thing doesn't have anything to do with identity, does it? Whereas, t-shirts and coffee mugs are ostensibly about identity at some level ("I am the world's greatest grandmother/cat lover/leo/Metalica fan" etc.). I think it would be nice if someone sold a mug that just said, "world's greatest coffee mug" on it. Maybe I'll make a cafe press shop for that.

However, I think things that are easily loaded with outside content/themes need a name of their own and an analylsis of their own. I don't have one to offer myself at the moment -- but I'm sure I don't need to -- someone must have done so, already. I'm still working on the classification of what it is I'm thinking about: they are things that try to say more than their function.

I'm seeing this as something relatively contemporary -- possibly driven by/led by advertising? What did early wall calendars look like? where they invented by advertisers?

I need to do more research on this topic, but I'm not sure I'll have time -- but that's why this is a blog and not a dissertation.

In the meantime, stay tuned for bushy eye brows!

After I upload all my old great ideas, I anticipate having two great ideas a day for the next four days, then one great idea every other day for the next two weeks, then two great ideas a month for the next six months, and then I'll get distracted by something else.

My great idea for the day was to have a blog, and Chris made it happen within an hour!!!

Thank you, Chris!