Yet another wonderful link found on Godfrey's site: Alex Jarrett's Degree Confluence Project. Look at a map and find where the longitude and latitude lines cross. Go there. Take pictures. Alex's goal is a "snapshot of the world", and I love the idea. I hope to hit my own first confluence soon.

I don't know why I'm so drawn to stuff like this, because I always get a headache trying to understand them. But this site of Marshall MacLuhan icons is riveting.

Tuvan throat-singing is going to be huge, I tell you, HUGE! I've had the pleasure of seeing Kongar-Ol Ondar perform live on a few occasions in the last few weeks and he must be seen (and heard!) to be believed. Charismatic, beautiful. The late, great Richard Feynman is the original Friend of Tuva, and his site has instructions and a whole slew of throat-singing links. Even better, get Kongar's CD, "Back Tuva Future", and hear for yourself. It's like nothing you've ever heard -- chilling, familiar, alien and beautiful.

I've often imagined what a map of the internet might look like. Martin Dodge of the University of London has made an "Atlas of Cyberspace" that's full of maps depicting various fantastic cartographies. The effort may be futile, but the pictures shore are purty.

I've loved Camille Paglia since her first, amazing book, "Sexual Personae : Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson". Interviews, television appearances, op-ed pieces in the New York Times and features in the Village Voice only shored up my admiration for this woman who'd speak her mind and say the things that no one else was willing to say. Her Salon interview with Joan Walsh regarding the deaths of JFK Jr., along with his wife and her sister, is spot-on. Yay, Camille!

The bi-weekly column "Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability" by Dr. Jakob Nielsen is a must-read for anyone who thinks about these things, too. I don't always agree with him -- a recent column detailing the "Top 10 Mistakes of Web Design" finds me guilty of at least three, including his #1 mistake, slow download time. (I refuse to accept that the use of frames is a "mistake", however!)

Digital artist Maya Drozdz's site has at least one new thing since I was last there ("Evidence: Meditations on Small Objects" was the first work of hers I'd seen). 4817 Concord (Flash required) is nice eye candy. In the good way.

July's Film Philosophy has the first review of "Eyes Wide Shut" to pique my interest in seeing it. Maybe this weekend...

More on mapping the web: From the Fifth International World Wide Web Conference May 6-10, 1996, Paris, France, Measuring the Web by Tim Bray. I particularly love his principles of a site's visibility -- how many other sites point to it -- and luminosity -- the number of navigational points it extends. (I found this via a link from Hyperlink Totems by Martin Dodge [see his link on the 23^rd].)

A couple of recent conversations prompted me to look up a few old articles about the demise of the beloved multimedia publishing company Voyager: From Wired 4.07, "The Teachings of Bob Stein" -- a piece that ran in the summer of 1996, the beginning of the end. This article caused no small agony within the company. Too bad they don't have the graphic that ran in the issue: Bob Stein as Mao. Salon's "Not Now, Voyager" appeared when it was all over -- after everyone, including Bob, had been fired on 30^th October of that year -- causing another uproar with a single quote from Bob, "Basically, they fired everyone who could read."