archive.Joe Lamantia.com

“On average, a new record is added to the WorldCat database every 10 seconds. Watch it happen live…” Watch WorldCat grow
According to the About page:
“WorldCat is the world’s largest bibliographic database, the merged catalogs of thousands of OCLC member libraries. Built and maintained collectively by librarians, WorldCat itself is not an OCLC service that is purchased, but rather provides the foundation for many OCLC services and the benefits they provide.”
Here’s what went into the system while I was typing this entry out:
———————
The following record was added to WorldCat on 08/10/2005 9:08 PM
Total holdings in WorldCat: 999,502,692
OCLC Number: 61245112
Title: Theological and cultural studies in honor of Simon John De Vries /
Publisher: T. & T. Clark International,
Publication Date: c2004.
Language: English
Format: Book
Contributed by: SAINT PATRICK’S SEMINARY LIBR
———–
Some impressive WorldCat statistics from the OCLC site:
Between July 2004 and June 2005:

• WorldCat grew by 4.6 million records
• Libraries used WorldCat to catalog and set holdings for 51.9 million items and arrange 9.4 million interlibrary loans
• Library staff and users conducted 34.7 million searches of WorldCat via FirstSearch for research and reference, and to locate materials

Also:

• WorldCat has 57,968,788 unique bibliographic records
• 53,548 participating libraries worldwide use and contribute to WorldCat
• Every 10 seconds an OCLC member library adds a record to WorldCat
• Every 4 seconds an OCLC member library fills an interlibrary loan request using WorldCat
• Every second a library user searches WorldCat using FirstSearch

For us information types, it beats the hell out of the old population clocks that the U.S. Census Bureau still runs for the US and the world.
BTW, for the curious, “According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, projected to 08/11/05 at 01:24 GMT (EST+5) is 296,854,475”

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From someone else named Joe, a free service that generates sparklines:

http://bitworking.org/projects/sparklines/

Now I can plot the truly disatisfying long-term performance of my 401ks using a convenient networked infrastructure service…

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Traces of Fire is an art exhibit and social exper­i­ment that used wildlife-tracking teleme­try to trace the move­ments of ten cig­a­rette lighters ‘lost’ in famous pubs in Lim­er­ick. The lighters were car­ried around Lim­er­ick by unknown peo­ple, as trans­mit­ters relayed loca­tion and motion data to observ­ing artists for nearly two weeks. From the cumu­la­tive data, the artists built a series of exhi­bi­tions show­ing pat­terns in the loca­tions and move­ments of the lighters around the city.

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C404 — an art/media group — brings you music icons includ­ing The Sex Pis­tols, Hen­drix, AC/DC, and Van Halen per­form­ing live in videos ren­dered in Wachowski-style cas­cades of glow­ing ASCII text.

I cre­ate cat­e­gories pro­fes­sion­ally, which means it’s almost inevitable that I’m inter­ested in things that chal­lenge and escape cat­e­gories (the “mind forg’d man­a­cles” Blake labelled so well) by their nature.

Though I’m sure this will appear in an over-miked com­mer­cial for tooth­paste or pick-up trucks soon, at the moment it’s a new way of look­ing at sev­eral very famil­iar cul­tural prop­er­ties that ques­tions the thresh­olds of recog­ni­tion, per­cpetion, and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion we rely on every day.