Making the Modern World presents a set of twisty little passages through the history of science and invention, from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, brought to you by the UK's Science Museum.
posted by Miko on Nov 4, 2009 - 4 comments

Why do we have an IMG element?
posted by chunking express on Nov 3, 2009 - 84 comments

Circuits are flipping on in the nation's attic. A couple of weeks ago, 31 "digerati" -- like Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, and George Oates -- dropped in to the Smithsonian Institution for the invitation-only conference "Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age". Dan Cohen of the Center for History and New Media provides a great summary (and continues to pose provocative questions) on his own blog. Those whose invitations were somehow lost in the mail can play fly-on-the-wall by watching the keynotes, paging through the Flickr pool of envymaking glimpses of their behind-the-scenes lab and collections tours, reading the blog (where Bruce Wyman of the Denver Art Museum lays out a succinct road map for museums using social media), and poking around in the SI's website gallery. Want to cheer on the USA's favorite 163-year-old "Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge" without taking the trip to DC? Thanks to their recent efforts, you can now follow the SI on Twitter, listen to its podcasts, watch its YouTube channel, visit the Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life, or use the FaceBook gifts page to send your best friends their very own pair of Dorothy's ruby slippers, Hope diamond, Negro Leagues baseball, or coelocanth.
posted by Miko on Feb 27, 2009 - 13 comments

The recent passing of Studs Terkel sparked a renewed interest in his interview projects, like Working, Race, and Hard Times. But Studs was not just a broadcaster who liked people; he was a practitioner of oral history, a method of gathering information about the past through preserving individual recollections. It's a subfield of history, with its own ethics, techniques, professional literature, uses, and limitations. Learn how to collect and share oral histories yourself, from interviewing to recording and getting clearances to preserving and disseminating. Oral histories have been preserved as text transcripts for decades; now digital media isreinvigorating the form, bringing new ease to recording and wider opportunities for the public to see and hear the content. Explore oral history projects on the web with stories of veterans, suffragists, Tibetans, jazz cats, Nevada nuclear test site witnesses, Basque Americans, rodeo cowboys and cowgirls, musicians, Katrina survivors, ACT UP activists, Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge, Native Americans, women whose lives were affected by the Pill, survivors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire,women in World War II, Hawai'ians, workers in Paterson, NJ....
posted by Miko on Dec 11, 2008 - 20 comments

Omeka is a newly available, open-source web platform, bringing good-looking, functional online exhibitry within reach of smaller museums, libraries, and arts groups. From the Center for History and New Media.
posted by Miko on Sep 10, 2008 - 10 comments

Voice Thread Now the online world can lend support in your family argument about what really happened on your fifth birthday.
posted by Miko on Nov 5, 2007 - 6 comments

Super French Web Sites.
posted by hama7 on Jun 2, 2007 - 31 comments

Where is Kai Krause? If you were a web designer back in the day, you probably used Kai’s Power Tools (my how web design has grown). A user interface visionary, Kai bailed at the dot.com peak (just in time) and retired to Byteburg, a 1000 year old castle in Bonn, where he peacefully lives and works today.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot on Apr 6, 2007 - 46 comments

"A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun" -- ground zero of Web irony, Blog 1.0, the Picassos of the deflating hyperlink, Suck.com rocked. This is their history, as told by the promisingly named Matt Sharkey at keepgoing.org. (Suck's ex-editrix Cox is Wonkette and Terry Colon's art is everywhere. And God knows we could use a good Suck right about now.)
posted by digaman on Jun 26, 2005 - 61 comments

The First Community Blog? Five years ago today, Caleb Donaldson pulled the plug on Geek Cereal, a social experiment that began on March 21, 1996. Some of the links don't work like they should anymore, but the calendar will get you to all the juicy bits. An interesting little time capsule. The site's demise is mentioned in this Ghost Sites 1997 obit, and in this virtual eulogy from Caleb's dad on MIT's website.
posted by tpoh.org on Oct 24, 2002 - 6 comments

JavaScript Style Sheets: the CSS that "coulda been". This brief read offers up an explanation as to why CSS support in Netscape 4.x is Quite Awful.
posted by hijinx on Apr 13, 2001 - 2 comments

Mark your calendars: PBS is running a special called "Code Rush" in late March, about the hectic coding schedules that Netscape employees like Jaime Zawinski coped with in early 1998. It sounds like it's going to be good and will probably be similar to other stories about the formation of Netscape.
posted by mathowie on Feb 10, 2000 - 2 comments

Microsoft recently put up their own page on the history of Microsoft.com. They were even cool enough to include screenshots and approximate traffic loads for each iteration of the site.
posted by mathowie on Dec 28, 1999 - 0 comments