Popping out of review and archiving mode for a quick mention of bkkeepr, a new project recently out of stealth mode. Based around Twitter and ISBN data, it creates a timeline of who's reading what.
The feed provides intriguing browsing, even in its current relatively sparsely-populated state. As usage picks up, I love the idea of individual books getting timeline pages.
A project of James Bridle's lit-futures endeavor booktwo, bkkeepr is one of a new crop of technologies weaving together real-world and digital media: neither pushing the transhuman agenda of uploading us all to a mainframe, nor agitating for a return to the analog past. It's still a bit fiddly for lazy bookmarkers such as myself to update (you have to send the ISBN number to bkkeepr, which is tricky if your edition is older than 1972) but promises an appealing, if skewed, map of what Twitter's compulsive lifebloggers are reading in paper form.
The historic takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which could come as soon as this weekend, moved to the forefront of the presidential campaign Saturday.
In the arena that night, the whole last minute was drowned out by cheers — and then when the soaring music swelled, the confetti rained down as the harbinger of balloons and the hopeful first family took the stage, forget about it — it was a perfect end to a convention that last Monday, no one even knew if it would happen. But it did, and I'm so glad to have been there.
