The Year in Ideas

Hi everybody. I was reading the New York Times Sunday Magazine (online,
of course), which was their annual Year
in Ideas issue.

This

is great, because I get to link to a lot of interesting stuff without

having to do a lot of work (though I plan on talking about a few of

these things in greater depth).

Anyway, I've
highlighted some of the bloggier and community-type
stuff:

(One

note: The online version of the article would be a lot friendlier if

they linked to all of the stuff that they talked about. Also, since

it's the New York Times, free registration may be required. I guess

that was two notes.)

* Fleeting
Relationships looks at the value of fleeting
relationships (e.g. the people on the bus with you) and
anchored relationships (people you see only at
specific venues).

* Google
Map Mashups examines the neat things you can do with Google Maps' plug-in
architecture. Combined with Folksonomy
(which is like community content tagging) and Open
Source Reporting, it's very Web 2.0 (which
is something I will definitely be discussing
more).

* On the mostly-blog side,
we've got Splogs
(or spam blogs), Newspapers
Blogging as a primary source of info during Katrina, the rise
of Video
Podcasting, and the supposition that Conservative
Blogs are more effective than liberal blogs at advancing
their agendas.

* From the phone
world, we see a service geared to Preventing
Drunk Dialing, plus, a way from the MIT Media Lab for groups
of people to vote on whether you should be allowed to take
that cell phone call.

* Then, some that
are just interesting include: the difference
between British and American smiles, the reason why yawns
are contagious, the kind of morbid but thought-provoking idea
that you should hug
a suicide bomber (that is, because of the dynamics of a
suicide bomb explosion, one should sacrifice yourself to save others
around you), the cone
of babble, and lastly, the idea that the crawl at the bottom
of the TV news makes
you stupid.

As they say, food for thought.
Thanks -- Joe