ReadWriteWeb

Anyone with an abiding interest in American music will have heard of Alan Lomax. His travels around the U.S. and through other countries recording "folk music" was almost single-handedly responsible for how we think about Americana and world music both. But only a small amount of his recordings were available online, with few available for download. The Association for Cultural Equity is changing that.

His archives include "5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts," according to the New York Times. By the end of February, 17,000 tracks will be available for free download. But today, a collection of 16 field recordings is being released for free download to celebrate what would have been Lomax's 97th birthday.

Technology is frequently examined as though it were the reason for its own being, a kind of byte-driven tautology or spectacularly dry religious sect. But technology is a means to address questions. In that spirit, here are the top 10 stories about how we've employed the social web to ask and answer questions about our lives. These are "top" stories in the sense that they are representative, not exhaustive.

I'm focusing on culture, specifically on the humanities and science. I'm leaving politics and free speech to the side for the moment, since I've reviewed that aspect of tech a couple of times this month. Here are stories of how tech has been used to uncover our past, conserve our present and preserve our future. They are organized by date of publication, oldest to latest.

OpenCulture has put together an astonishing collection of audio and video of 230 cultural icons. The media allows us to see and hear mythic contributors to culture as the men and women they were and are.

This collection extends from audio of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire reading his poem "Le pont Mirabeau" from the book Alcools in 1913 to video of Nelson Mandela's first TV interview in 1961 to Steve Jobs demoing the first Mac in 1984 to video of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle talking about the origin of Sherlock Holmes.

Australia has begun employing the Web as a major tool in gathering, preserving and sharing the cultural traditions of its native peoples. The religious, personal and individual stories of Australia's native peoples, their visual art and worldviews are globally acknowledged to have a powerful presence. However, as with most now-minority peoples around the world, the forces of centralization and modernization have taken their toll.

Now, Web technologies are allowing the peoples in question to dynamically capture and pass on the wisdom and experiences of their culture as a whole and those of their elders in particular. Here are two particularly exciting examples of how technology has been used in Australia to achieve these goals.

Facebook use is growing faster in Africa than on any other continent, and the Chinese are some of the most active social media users in the world.

The first fact comes from Socialbakers, a Facebook analytics company, which found that Africa gained more than 50% of its Facebook users in the last six months. The company also looks at other growing markets. The second comes from a Memeburn article by Thomas Crampton, which points out that although many Western social media services are blocked, the Chinese equivalents are extremely popular. And, according to Crampton, "A recent study by OgilvyOne in China found that 55 percent of China's netizens had initiated or participated in online discussions about companies."

New York cultural periodical the Village Voice has named @discographies, an anonymous Twitter account that publishes 140-character reviews of the life work of musicians and bands, as its music critic of the year.

Twitter spokesperson Matt Graves called it a "milestone"; whether he's serious or not, ("dead serious," he later said) @discographies certainly carries a certain seriousness throughout today's interview in the Village Voice. "Twitter," the account holder says, "may be the first mass communications system that also functions as a meritocracy: it actively promotes good ideas and good content, regardless of where they come from."

Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. The latest installment is the top 10 stories of the culture of technology.

These are the stories that answer that question you sometimes hear from tech skeptics or those who mistake advances in computing and communications for Beanie Babies and Segways. The question is "So what?" Here's what.

Above: Boutique book publisher and geek James Bridle has printed the 12,000 edits made to the controversial Wikipedia entry for Iraq War between December 2004 to November 2009 as a 7,000 page, 12 volume set of books.

"This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

"And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future." -James Bridle

When the first immersive 3D games came out, I asked a programmer if he knew of anyone who had used that technology to create a Virtual Ancient Rome or Virtual Ancient Athens. I loved the idea of walking around in a place whose current face was changed out of all recognition from its golden age. He shook his head. Creating virtual worlds was way too time consuming and required too much specialist knowledge and so was too expensive. A virtual Rome wouldn't create the profit that Doom did.

Fast forward a decade and the programming necessary becomes easier to do and the number of people who know how to do it have increased substantially. The costs involved in creating a virtual world have decreased at the same time that academic and scholarly institutions have become much more willing to invest in it.

Last year, we ruffled a few feathers when we posted some OKCupid data on dating and race. We're sure this latest news is going to be equally unpopular, but the data support the conclusions, so here we go.

Women users of the online dating site state a range of preferred ages for partners that is relatively normal, and when it comes to reaching out to other users, they stay pretty strictly within their own self-imposed guidelines. However, men on the site continue to state a preference for 20-something girls well into their later years. And even when male users state a cut-off age, they continue to contact women who are below that age.