O, nerd joy! I just found out there exists such a glorious thing as the Internet Broadway Database. I don’t know I could have missed this. Living in a cave? Seduced, perhaps, by the indispensable Internet Movie Database?

No matter. Yay, happiness. When I was a kid I used to pour over cast recording liner notes to try to figure out why a voice sounded familiar. Now I have the miracle of IBDB. Huzzah!

I hesitate to mention how I made this serendipitous discovery, but some of you would appreciate the fruits of this path. I was flipping through blogs for design inspiration, and I happened upon one which featured a clip of Yoda rapping. I thought I’d track down the source and ended up on the Star Wars fan film awards site hosted by AtomFilms. There I learned about the newly released version of the Star Wars Gangsta Rap. It’s certainly prettier than the original version, but there’s something missing, I think. I didn’t laugh nearly as hard when Vader slices off Luke’s hand this time round.

From here I meandered through the 2005 offerings to discover the ever so delightful One Season More. Of course insufferable Luke is a Disney character yearning to break free from his provincial life. Why didn’t I see it before?

I had to know more about Timothy Edward Smith, one of the wits behind this bit, and that Google search led me to discover the IBDB.

And then there’s this:

Star Wars the Musical.

I had heard about this one, but I had no idea the songs were available online. Oh my. Think I’d better fetch Ãron for a proper geek fest.

Check it out! The back of Matt’s head made CNN:

Sci-Tech: Space Elevator Games take off

Guess CNET found him more photogenic. Heh.

Good luck today, Star Climber team. Ãron and I have made all the requisite sacrifices of cute, fluffy animals, and the Interdimensional Potato(e) has been appeased. You should be all set.

Finally! I think I’ve found a way to increase Astropoetica’s poetry budget:

The Dread Pirate Roberts Seminar

Finally caving in to peer pressure and curiosity, I set up a del.icio.us account this week. For those of you not already light years ahead of me on web trends, deli.icio.us is a social bookmarking manager. It works very much like your web browser’s bookmark feature, except that you can access your links from any Internet connection and share them easily with others.

What makes del.icio.us particularly interesting is its reliance on amateur, non-hierarchical classification schemes. When you bookmark a site, you are prompted to hand tag your listing with subject keywords. Depending on your existing tag pool, del.icio.us may offer suggestions for relevant keywords, helping you to maintain consistency in your tagging by reenforcing your preexisting subject headings. Additionally, if your site has previously been bookmarked within the del.icio.us community, you will see a list of popular tags that have been applied by others. You can choose from these tags as well and thereby confirm and reenforce the community’s classification schemes.

It’s an LIS student’s dream. (Or nightmare, depending on how you look at it.) Whether del.icio.us proves to be a persistent information tool or little more than a trendy, web-based toy, it’s a fascinating experiment in grassroots information organizations. And look! New jargon! ==> Folksonomy. (Forgiving, for the moment, the weird, hybrid etymology of that word. Though given what it describes, perhaps it’s appropriate after all.)

The real puzzle is how to make this useful to you. If it were simply a matter of sharing favorite links with your friends, I don’t think it would have taken off. Why bother, when you could just email the link or slip a mention in your blog? No, what makes this particularly interesting is the ability to pick the brains of those interested in the same things you are. When I bookmark a site, I can find out all the other users who have also bookmarked it and then take a look at their lists. Maybe they have found related resources that I have missed. Maybe they are bookmarking fiends whose talents for finding the niftiest gems on the web far surpass mine. In that case I can subscribe to their bookmark lists and be notified every time they add something that might interest me.

It’s Vannevar Bush’s memex in action. Spiffy, eh?

Of course, you can also search for bookmarks marked by a particular tag. I’d warn you not to expect any of the precision of a true library catalog. There’s no real concept of authority control, and the tags consist of one word without standardized definition. One man’s “religion” is another man’s “humor.” Your “politics” may fall under my “horror.” Thus, I think you’d be better off trying the “like minds” approach mentioned above than floundering in subject searches. It may be hit or miss also, but it’s at least more voyeuristically satisfying.

If you do decide to peruse my bookmarks, you’re welcome to judge me a freak of dullness, but give me some time. I’m still figuring how I want to use it and just how much of a psychological profile I want to give to Those Who Are Always Watching.

Congratulations to Matt and company for their recent mention in Popular Science. “A very interesting design,” they say. How cool are you?

Though I still say you would have raised more money if you had used my alternative design for your t-shirts, I shall wear the official version with geek pride.

What are the rules for blogging in obscurity, anyway? Are you still obligated to begin posts with complete sentences, or can you dash straight on in full postcard mode:

Had a great time at the Digital Media Center workshop. Wish I weren’t the only who showed up. Next time you should all come!

No? Really, it was all very interesting. I learned a few new Photoshop tricks for restoring old photographs and discovered just how easily the burn tool can create historical fiction.

Note to self: find out more about this curious notion of using bones as restoration tools.

Bear with me. I’ve been tinkering with the default WordPress template, and it would seem I’ve made things a bit ugly for IE users. I should be concerned about this one pixel madness, I suppose, and spend my afternoon trying to figure out how to fix it. Or I could just tell you to download Firefox.

Not that I don’t care about IE users, or anything.

Let the epic navel-gazing begin!