My fave project in the ITP Spring Show last night was definitely AL-gorithm by Alex Kaufmann (seemingly unlinkable).

Wanting to experience language the way a computer does—as meaningless packets of information—Alex printed up 22 copies of his favorite passage of All the King's Men and cut out all but every instance of a single letter on each sheet.

The finished product is 22 sheets of paper with seemingly random placements of a single letter that create the full passage when stacked on top of each other in any order.

The very best thing about this project—aside from the Brian Dettmer-esque OCD required to complete it—is that it's basically the opposite of Raymond Queneau's Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (see this great interactive version). Each unit of Hundred Thousand Billion Poems has its own meaning, but reordering the strips destroys the original meaning of the original poem (and rarely produces new coherent meaning)—and in AL-gorithm each page has no human-decipherable meaning, but reordering them preserves the original text. Cool!

The only thing it needs is a better title. How 'bout a quote from Queneau? "Oh reader thinking thus your heart will lock."

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My fave part is when the technician goes into a container to swap out some hardware on a scooter, referred to by the narrator as his "Google-provided personal transportation device." Hilari!

"rusty chain" by shoothead on flickr

Links don't just transfer meaning directly, when visitors read the context of a link before following it, but also indirectly, through the relevance algorithms of every major search engine, which almost universally include anchor text, even after Google's 2007 algorithm update to diffuse the most blatant link bombs. As Google's webmaster tools explains it:

[Anchor text is] how Googlebot sees your site. [...] This information provides good insight into how your site is seen by others.

This simultaneous transfer of authority and meaning is something I thought about a lot when writing a reeeeeaaalllly long paper on how search engines construct authority, and it comes up again and again professionally when the name of a project I'm working on doesn't correspond directly to search queries I want to optimize it for. Turns out Google rewards boring product names as much as boring headlines.

Anyway, enough with the 2-to-3-year-old search engine links. My point is that the skyrocketing adoption of Twitter and the increased use of URL shorteners it necessitates are altering the dynamics of power and meaning in the link economy. Anecdotally, I've stopped posting anything to my del.icio.us account with the intent of actively encouraging my friends to visit those links. I still save bookmarks in del.icio.us for refindability and tag clouds of my interests, but if I want people to look at something I'm thinking about or working on, Twitter is far and away my first choice. For a larger-scale example, consider that traffic to Fred Wilson's blog from Twitter has tripled in the past three months, and of course, the hockey-stick traffic chart of Twitter itself.

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It's worth noting that, according to bit.ly stats (which I obsess over), a reasonable portion of the traffic I send to a link via Twitter comes from it updating my Facebook status—and, indeed, half of that Fred Wilson post I pointed to earlier is about the increased traffic to his blog from Facebook. But Facebook's walled garden approach means that search engine spiders can't find the links we're sharing there at all, so it's pointless to spend time thinking about Facebook in this regard.

my friend Anne Helmond in her avatar_nofollow picture on flickr (robots nofollow t-shirt)

Links shared on Twitter, however, are almost always public to spiders as well as humans. Even though Twitter disappointingly barred Google juice from passing through its fingers by adding the nofollow attribute to all tweeted links back in September, most search engines do follow nofollow links—and do use the anchor text in nofollow links to determine the relevancy of a page for the keywords its linked from—they just don't use links with a nofollow attribute to calculate the ranking with which they weight the page's authority generally. But shortened URLs shared on Twitter can't transfer meaning to humans or to spiders because Twitter doesn't allow its users to create links with anchor text.

This can lead to dubious hilarity: URL shorteners make it way easier to rickroll—I mean, rickroll—your friends. The deeper meaning of rickrolling, such as it is, is that neither the clicking human nor the spidering robot knows what to expect on the other side of the link.

"you've been rick-rolled!" by stovak on flickr

For humans who are not being rickrolled, the context of a Tweet usually tells them what to expect, but search engine bots are still at a loss for the meaning they usually retrieve from anchor links. This information is being collected by some URL shorteners—for instance, check out this bit.ly info page for a wikipedia article I recently tweeted—but it's not being passed on to search engines for use in determining relevancy.

This doesn't mean a doomsday for relevancy algorithms: Twitter may be starting to explode into the non-tech-elite world, but it's not outpacing anchor-link-friendly blogging yet.

If it does, I wonder how search engines will rework their relevancy algorithms to include "information on how [a] site is seen by others" in addition to the keywords its creators have planted on it.

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related: Check out this Hacker News thread on how URL shorteners are making money that was recently tweeted by my friend Aditya. Pretty interesting that there is no stunningly obvious business model for URL shorteners, despite their seeming positioning as brokers of the link economy. Those who are keeping thorough analytics on their short URLs (like bit.ly and cli.gs) are sitting on a gold mine of data, but it'll take serious work to monetize that information.

For those of you who were not self-loathing enough to take many literary theory or psychology classes, the split subject is just Lacan's morose notion that the subject (which generally means humans in the context of how we think and talk and write about ourselves and others as individuals) is always divided and alienated from itself.

I guess this would be a heart that's been broken and/or validated by our alienation from ourselves. Or by Lacan, whose writing once drove me to throw the four-pound Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism against walls.

Speaking of arty jewelry, check out this compass ring by LeeAnn Herreid.

She's a RISD grad, naturally. Wonder if she was inspired whilst hiding underwater, per the instructions on this sign I spotted in the RISD museum a few months ago.

We interrupt your usually scheduled long, new-job-induced blog silence to bring you this breaking news: Betty Pepper's gorgeous jewelry made from books [via Craftzine] is hella cool! More like art than jewelry, really, but what a great idea.

Especially when the book is used for material (as above in her Where necklace) rather than just for inspiration.

That is all.

Did you hear the soft murmur of something new and cartographically delightful on the WWWs this evening?

Yep, outside.in's new embeddable StoryMaps are here to plot your blog posts by location. Sign up for GeoToolkit to grab one for yourself. It's super-easy to import your RSS feed and tag posts with places and neighborhoods.

If you detected a note of map-lust in my tone, it might be because I started working at outside.in last week, and it's awesome.

The wikipedia article for map, btw, is also pretty fab:

A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes.

Yep, a StoryMap is just what like that, but with a symbolic depiction of your blog posts' relationship to that space thrown in. How can you beat that?

update: StoryMaps now fit in sidebars. Check out the slickness under my search box.

Inspired by Britta's interesting annotation of her top 10 del.icio.us tags, I took a look at mine.

1. internet (200): Mostly articles or sites about the internet, ranging in quality from silly meta jokes to heady philosophical articles.
2. culture (170): Culture is pretty tough to define. I'd say these are links about the way people interact: online, through advertising, and in life generally. Occasionally a link that's sort of…uh…"cultured" will slip in there too, such as New York Magazine's NYC Books Canon.
3. humor (157): I spend a lot of time clicking on funny stuff on the internet, ok people?
4. technology (146): Lots of web-related links here too, but these also include non-internet tech, like the Phoenix Mars Mission's discovery of ice or—more importantly—sheep sculptures made of telephones.
5. art (134): Weird art I've seen on the WWWs.
6. funny (104): This is mostly redundant to my humor tag. When I first started using del.icio.us I didn't like the idea of adjectives as tags, but I've loosened up with the last 104 funny things I bookmarked.
7. design (98): These links have some crossover with art (in fact 57 of my links share the two tags) but tend to be more about graphic or web design and don't include conceptual art.
8. history (94): I'm a nerd.
9. politics (86): Mostly interesting articles about whatever's going on at the time.
10. news (83): I'm a little surprised that this appears in my top 10, since I don't think of myself as a real news hound.

Of course, most of my dominant tags were pretty clear when I bookmarked del.icio.us/kenspeckle wordle art a few months back. Also interesting is that my top 4 tags cover this blog's supposed topics.

More compelling than my top 10 tags, however, is the top 10 for all of del.icio.us. Oddly enough, my top 10 list doesn't overlap at all with the 10 most popular tags for all users:

1. design
2. blog
3. video
4. software
5. tools
6. music
7. programming
8. webdesign
9. reference
10. tutorial

The moral of the story being that most people bookmark much more useful stuff than I do.

My coworker and about page glamour-shot photographer James told me yesterday that Silverback, which we had oohhhed and ahhhed over a few months ago when it was just a holding page with a very cool (albeit almost unnoticeable) parallax effect, has released some hot new usability testing software for Mac.

I tried it out today at work while testing a microsite I've been plugging away at for awhile and it's absolutely incredible!

Silverback unobtrusively records all actions on the screen and the tester's facial expressions and comments (through iSight) and lets you mark important moments in the video using the Mac remote. After testing is over, it combines the two videos into one file—the screen capture is the main image with an inset video of the user's face—and exports as QuickTime so you can share the results without a plethora of software licenses.

Four absolute best things about Silverback:

1. It completely hides itself during recording so the user isn't distracted by his own image in the corner of the screen somewhere.
2. It subtly highlights every click with a little bubble in the final video file.
3. Fifty. Dollars. That's it.
4. Gorilla scientist logo, OMG!

The only problem is that you're not "supposed" to do usability testing on a Mac, since it's (still!) not the platform of choice for most people. But I think that if you're sure your site works the same in Firefox or Safari as it does on IE, this is definitely the way to go. At $50 for this much functionality, you pretty much can't go wrong.

Check their demo. This embedding of it starts mid-way through, skipping the overview to show how the recorded session will look when exported:

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By the way, Silverback is the creation of an English web design and consultancy group called Clearleft.

And as this fellow Pruned points out the creepy/surreal shots of the dioramas being built are by far the best. He (she?) plucked a bunch out for you to ponder if you so choose, but I also like the snapshots of AMNH visitors gazing on the dioramas when they were new and marvelous instead of musty and quaint as they seem today.

Something about the combination of morbidly realistic taxidermy with observers so old-fashioned they seem fictional in these shots makes the dioramas seem more real—or the visitors seem less real—or maybe both. Especially if you crop out the borders of the dioramas. See what I mean?

Visitor viewing Mako Shark diorama, Hall of Fishes, 1948

Visitors viewing Olympic Forest Group, Hall of North American Forestry, 1958

Visitors viewing Moa Group diorama, Whitney Hall, 1952

Freaky. Ok, I'll also give you with just one incredibly spooky photo of a diorama in the making that didn't make Pruned's…eh…cut:

Working on Condor Group diorama, Birds of the World Hall, 1963

More important than any possible Krishnamurtian significance of the meta-voyeurism of these photos (sorry Sean!) is this: The Museum of Natural History is just the most recent in a long series of the "traditional" institutions that serve as the public storehouses of our cultural memory to start releasing its incredible store of content to the big, bad internet in easily consumable form.

In recent memory, the Library of Congress went and got itself a flickr account, then the Smithsonian had to get one too, and the New York Public Library's excellent Digital Gallery, which has actually been around for some time now, is about to launch a nice redesign that's been in beta for awhile. The Museum of Modern Art, The Met, and now the Guggenheim have online databases too, but they aren't quite as accessible and blogger-friendly as the NYPL's (and their flickr accounts are sadly just event photos).

So, other grand, historical, intellectual institutions…who's next?