Not surprisingly, if you visit the Internet mapping project, you’ll see that people tend to view the internet… differently. Some mappers note their age and number of hours on said internet, but flipping through the drawings I can’t quite discern trends based on these self-identifications. Well, maybe one: the 40-somethings seem quick to reach for cosmic imagery.

But this just in: an Argentinian professor has already embarked on a taxonomy of these maps! That’s right, she’s mapping the maps. So now my map of the internet looks like one giant mirror.

The maturation of the web means that those of us who have no business attempting layouts, who agonize endlessly over colors and fonts, who last stumbled around CSS (and last opened Dreamweaver) sometime back in the first Bush II era — well, we can grab our look and feel from the rack and save our energies for, I don’t know, wondering if connectivity is impoverishing.

You may not care for this current incarnation — you may find it distracting or commercial-feeling (yet not a single thing to buy!) — but I like how it surfaces a little more of the content piled up around here. I’m also a little intrigued by the view/popular metrics, all of which started from scratch after the May Day theme switchover. It’s been my firm belief that only a select few check in with this site; now I’ll get a sense of what those few are looking at without bothering with the likes of Google Analytics.

Since nothing is quite as self-indulgent as a blogger blogging about his blog, indulge me further, rare and wonderful reader, in a little amble through the Wayback….

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Clayfox 2005-recently– For its second outing as a blog (the first was a very brief and forgettable foray in the late ’90s), Clayfox embraced WordPress and adopted a theme called VeryPlainText that kept things, well, somewhat clean. The author of VeryPlainText graciously tweaked his code in response to my request that my “pages” could be commented upon, just like “posts.” We had a little conversation about whether “pages” were meant to be static & impervious to comments — and I saw his point — yet the Kapaga page had to register carping & complaints. The “CLAYFOX” header was generated dynamically from Flickr images tagged with their respective letters — an effect that seemed quite clever, 2.0, variety-inducing, and colorful on top of the veryplainness. Then the javascript that I swiped for this stopped working, so the letter images became static and predictable. Anyway, say hello to a Clayfox that is no more:

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Clayfox 2004-5– Making up for previous wretched excesses (see below), I was going for a clean look in the last days of hand-coding the whole site. A fritzed-out fox carried over earlier iconography, but otherwise this was demur signaling indeed:

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Clayfox 2002-3–Oh the Wayback Machine is pitiless; even if it can’t quite capture every tiled iteration of gradient, it still grabs enough of the Clayfox home page at this awkward stage to recall its crazy insouciance, its Fireworks firewords. Streaks evoke an even earlier atrocity, the months when the home page actually had snowflakes trickling across it.

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Clayfox 1998-2000–And finally on our nostalgia tour, we see a little infant site that really didn’t have a home page to speak of, just a series of handmade course webpages, hand-coded. We see electric blue text against a darker blue background, oh yes. I was actually proud of the fox/navigation in the header: like browser buttons, you see, except they were in the webpage! Each one had to be linked to a ‘next’ and ‘back’ page.

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I think we can agree that the years between 1998 and now have been kind to Clayfox, or at least have helped make it into something more presentable. The design sins you see before you in this look back persist in some fashion, doubtlessly, on the site. Clayfox wouldn’t be itself, somehow, without some awkward badinage of simplicity, flashiness, and underengaged interactive widgets. There’s strange fun in all that–I can’t explain it to myself, but the site has been intermittently compelling enough to keep alive all these years. Just wait until it hits puberty.

This year’s list does pack a punch though, even if it makes a complete hash of Time’s list fetish. Time threw the list open to online readers with a poll that got relentlessly, ingeniously hacked. Despite Time’s best efforts, a person called “moot” ended up topping the poll as the world’s most influential person, heading a list that defined and maintained across days of voting a mysterious acrostic: “Marblecake also the game.” This phrase means something to tittering hackers clustered around a bulletin board called 4chan.

Unable to run a real poll online, Time is now trying to laugh the whole thing off: “To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it’s worth noting that everyone moot beat out actually has a job.” Be that as it may, it’s worth further noting that “everyone moot beat out” was deliberately positioned on the list by “moot,” who did a fine job, actually, of endangering the jobs of hapless Time employees.

Of particular interest in this embarrassment is the testing of reCAPTCHA, the defense against spam comment submission once used by this website & still in use all over the web, including at Time’s ill-fated poll. The blog Music Machinery has been tracking Time’s losing struggle to shore up their poll against a flood of bogus submissions, and has a particularly detailed rundown of hackers’ manipulations of ReCAPTCHA.

As I described a while ago, reCAPTCHA provides two words for a person to recognize and type: an image of a ‘control’ word that been identified by consensus, along with another image of an ‘unknown’ word. It’s a clever way to check if a captcha interpreter is trustworthy and then apply her interpretation to an ‘unknown’ word — and actually harness a comment/poll submission utility for text digitization projects.

In this instance, according to Music Machinery, the hackers tried to distinguish the ‘control’ word and match that, then flood reCAPTCHA with fake interpretations of the ‘unknown’ word (every ‘unknown’ word was interpreted as ‘penis,’ heh heh), creating a bogus consensus around ‘unknown’ words that would turn them into zombie ‘control’ words. An overwhelmed and standardized control, in turn, would facilitate autovoting.

In the end, again according to the Music Machinery narrative, all this business of distinguishing control words in reCAPTCHAs was enough of a speed bump that the hackers resorted to “brute force”: ie, interpreting both reCAPTCHA words and voting as frantically as they could by hand, with the help of some basic productivity utilities. This took a grimly dedicated team of devoted voters interpreting two reCAPTCHAs and casting votes over 200 times per hour per minute, for 40 or more hours while the poll was still open.

So what are we left with? Time embarrassed, reCAPTCHA tested, and a real contest, after all, for influence.

Today, YouTube; tomorrow, MyYouTubeSpace? I’ve pulled together a little demonstration of something that can be done today with the greatest of ease, something that does its part to elevate video out of the realm of slack-jawed consumption. A slick little new service called Mojiti allows you to write captions and overlay them onto video that has been previously created and posted. Mojiti, then, lets you annotate someone else’s video–which is a way of claiming it, analyzing it, perhaps even transforming it. Participating.

Here’s an example. Before seeing it scribbled over, have a look at my victim-video, a little snippet from The Daily Show (via YouTube) that lampoons social networking websites. It’s mighty entertaining unto itself, and it features an upcoming star of our University Seminar series, Siva Vaidhyanathan:

And now have a look at my annotated version of the very same video. As you’ll see, I’ve discovered a hidden subtext to the piece – watch with amazement as I prove it to you!

I rest my case.

Thanks to the Mormons, the world of digitized genealogy is stabilized into basic metadata; most any family tree software ports its data into GEDCOM files. That allowed us to easily move all those dates and obscure birth locales to a web-based presentation, using a GEDCOM to HTML converter.

Actually, not just a presentation — really a dynamic social platform. The open-source package that I chose, PhpGedView, allows registered members to upload all kinds of supplementary information — photos, notes, what have you (and what *do* you have from those ghostly predecessors?). It pours out data in any number of ways — fan charts, calendars, relationship maps, you name it. It offers a customizable portal, with any number of ways to communicate with fellow registrants. And it protects the privacy of the living: unregistered visitors won’t know how old I am or where I was born or even my name, though they can browse to their hearts’ content among the dead.

A pedigree chart stretches back back back…

Notes from my uncle supplement data and an uploaded picture of his grandfather, a line-o-type operator in Salmon Idaho.

I particularly like the “on this day in your history” feature, because everyday is an anniversary of some event — a birthday, a deathday, a wedding….

Mark your calendars: plenty to commemorate in May — though Saturdays are oddly event-free.

Yesterday, Grace Parker (my great-great grandmother) turned 143. Meanwhile Gunilla ‘Golda’ Endler, another great-great grandmother (oh I have lots of ‘em) will be 152 later this month. Only a few photos currently festoon our family tree; my mother has diligently digitized many old portraits, but at huge resolution so she could print out copies for family members, so this work has to be web-optimized. It happens, though, that the tree already contains pictures of our April birthday girls: both Grace (my mother’s side, born in Kansas, died in Oregon) and Golda (my father’s side, born in Belarus, died in Sweden).

Happy birthdays, ladies — you’re no spring chickens, and I’m sure you never gave each other’s world much thought, but here you are, linked through one of those improbable combinations of American circumstances, and settled side-by-side on the web. Settled, at least, for now; despite those lock-in gazes, we know you’re both migrators.

Now this is a little embarrassing. Like the PG-13 cheap laugh, when the spunky granny grabs the mic and roks da house. Or like Helen Gurley Brown. Hey, Westmont Public Library is with it! Who I’d like to meet: You :) Westmont Public Library’s Interests: Books, Graphic Novels, Magazines, Music, Movies, Video Games. Status: Single. Zodiac sign: Capricorn. (Why are many of these MyFriendly libraries Capricorns? As in Tropic of? Isn’t that a Graphic Novel?) MyFriendly libraries tend to have other libraries in their friendspace. So with one click, here were are at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library. Interests: General — helping people. instant messaging. RESEARCH yo! Books — the ones inside me. You go, Tom Ford! And Brooklyn College Library is in the house–or, as ‘she’ puts it, BC Library — Here on Your Space!

And check out that sassy 100-year-old, the Tonganoxie PL:

As an Xer happily removed from the MySpace generation (though my friends in bands almost dutifully keep pages there), I don’t really understand the appeal. The pages are ugly and ungainly; text can be impossible to pick out against garish image backgrounds, tinny sound files unspool the moment a page opens — it’s all reminiscent of wayback web hideousness, which all too often isn’t so wayback. Still, for better or worse, this is space that teens of all ages build . I guess it’s easy to share music, real-time flirtation, self-branding, endless LOLs. Mostly MySpace seems like high school online — full of chatter, hormones, and the pursuit of popularity. “It’s an unphysical way of hanging out.” Sure kid, great, but someday you’ll want better unphysical spaces. Tonight, at least, MySpace times out constantly. Hey Fox, buy some servers!

As they say, the kids love it; 46 million members just can’t be wrong, can they? Isn’t this democracy? And aren’t libraries at the core of democracy? At least these libraries are trying–but in MySpace they have little to offer, aside from a campy Hello! Nothing to build here, nothing to interact with or collect. To be fair: some libraries link to ‘blog’ entries, like, say, the one posted by Angela at the New Castle-Henry County Public Library listing teen movies, pizza taste-offs, and – spa night? Hmmm… Or the Tanganoxie Public Library’s list of their New Music CD Collection (topped off by Kelly Clarkson! Breakaway! LOL!!) But it’s very unidirectional. Information emanates from the ancient single female Capricorns to all you undifferentiated kids. The full extent of the idea is to show up In Your Extended Network.

This is piggybacking, really, on the idea of social software–just showing up when you should be interacting. Of course, just showing up to the party is a hoot when you’re 90. Links back to the OPAC, indexes of holdings, announcements of teen-centered activity: that’s fine, but how about the actual music? Can I bring library images or videos into MySpace? Can I build immediate links to cool passages of my favoriate favorite favorite books? Can I make a montage out of those awesome graphic novels? How can I collect anything other than a thumbnail picture of the library–a cute little building facade to add to my friends collection? When libraries stop billboarding and start actually transforming themselves into MySpaces–then we’ll have something.

Well, it’s a first step, and Rome wasn’t built in a day–even MySpace wasn’t built in a day, though it might seem otherwise. Here’s the 100 year old Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library: Who I’d like to meet: Anyone! Really! Well, put it like that, & you might be irresistible. A bit pathetic, but, whatever, popular. Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library has, at this writing, 163 friends.

…after drinking up kulcha at the Met like a good New Yorker:

…after wandering and wondering around Harlem:

…after drinking up kulcha on the Lower East Side:

…after getting used to being back in New York in the first place:

Now that we’ve returned to Maine, my camera battery is too frozen to function. For the time being, you’ll have to imagine an icy Portland for yourself, or see what more intrepid shutterbugs are seeing here.