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.

You can play the offerings on a featured player or download them for free.

Under the Global Jukebox label, Cultural Equity will continue to release more complete tracks and collections for free download.

Tracks are already available on the site for listening, but most are not downloadable, aside from the birthday sampler. Plans are also in the works to release CDs of some of these collections.

Global Jukebox gets its name from Lomax's recording mission, to assemble a global jukebox that allows listeners to understand what we have in common as a species through our musical undertakings, as well as understanding the different solutions we've come up with musically to adapt to our surroundings and answer the big questions of human life.

Lomax began recording on bulky tape machines around the South in the Thirties, visiting locally famous, but nationally unknown, musicians, like Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, to capture the unique vocabulary of American music. He continued his recordings, as well as lectures and writing, until his death in 2002. For a large chunk of his life he was dogged by the F.B.I., who interpreted his devotion to cultural equity as an element of the Communist threat.

Photo of Alan Lomax recording in Dominica, 1962 by Antoinette Marchand from ACE.

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.

The terrorist attacks against the United States in September of 2001 left a lasting impression on the country and changes that came from that moment rippled out across the globe. We humans use whatever we can to understand what we've gone through and this year, mobile technology grew in leaps and bounds. It was inevitable that we used that technology to address our own feelings on the 10th anniversary of the attack.

Broadcastr, a Brooklyn-based mobile start-up, has struck an agreement with National September 11 Memorial and Museum to make 50 oral histories of first-responders available via smart phone and online.

When Broadcastr leaves beta In February, it will welcome the collection of additional cell-recorded oral histories it is hoping users will gather. Interviewers can also geolocate the interview.

9. Mapping the Dead Zones

As our population continues to increase and, as a species, we continue to claw at the world, technology keeps pace in an attempt to understand and roll back the damage.

The World Resources Institute and the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences have teamed to create an interactive map of eutrophication and hypoxia in the world's coastal areas.

There are 530 areas identified as suffering from low oxygen - that's hypoxia - and 228 more suffering eutrophication, or excessive fertilization, usually from run-off. Identifying problem spots is job one for anyone hoping to slow, stop or reverse these sorts of marine declines.

8. New Software Helps Rebuild Ancient Cities

The natural world is not the only victim of our weight on the planet. Our own cultural patrimony and history suffers from neglect and abuse. Added to that, time, which is an intrinsic part of the environment, does nothing beneficial to the artifacts of our societies. But academics are hoping that advances in the sensitivity and data capacity of new technology will allow them to rebuild, in mind if not in fact, the physical remains of our past, specifically, the buildings that defined our relationship to the world. It's an effort, as it were, to resurrect our ancestors from their footprints.

The first step in virtualizing a building is tracing it. That's a tough and time-consuming activity. It can be creative but it can also produce inaccuracies. Now scientists at the University of East Anglia have developed a software that can capture and restore destroyed buildings from old maps.

Professor Stephen Laycock and his team have created a tool that will automatically extract dimensions and relationships from colored maps. Users can extract black and white maps by directing a cursor within the building's mapped edges.

7. Using 3D Printing to Repair Rodin's Thinker

3D printing is increasing in popularity as it decreases in cost. Makers fairs are increasing in frequency and small personal 3D printers are a bit more common, in offices, if not at the kitchen table. But it's still largely the purview of dedicated companies. In 2010, Dutch firm Materialise worked with Egypt's Council of Antiquities to "print" a picture-perfect Tut for traveling exhibits.

This year, Cornell University has begun to employ it to create safe-to-handle exact replicas of cuneiform, the ancient Near Eastern writing system, used on now-fragile clay tablets. But Materialise's experience repairing the famous Thinker sculpture by the French sculptor Rodin, is a good picture of the so-what of 3D.

In 2007, the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands, where The Thinker resided, was burglarized. The meatheads who broke in did so not to steal the art, but to steal the metal. They made off with seven sculptures and started to try to chop them up to sell for scrap.

The Singer Laren needed to figure out how to deal with the butchered figure. iMaterialise had an idea. They did a CT scan of the damaged figure. Then they scanned the original mold retained by the Musee Rodin in Paris. They printed out a full-sized copy from the original on their Mammoth 3D printer. The conservators at the Singer Laren have used that and the scans of the original to re-fabricate and lay in the missing and damaged parts of the statue.

6. Using Twitter to Preserve Minority Languages

Languages, like rain forests, have the potential to contain answers to questions we may not even have had to form yet, or information that will guide us or remedies for what ails us. But the same technological tools that allow us to throw our voices halfway across the world - television, film, telephones - have pressured us to use the same language to exercise it. Centralization has meant standardization.

But new communications technologies, the social web and its mobile technology, may have provided us with an avenue back to Babel. (It can be a confusing, clamorous place, but it offers a fecundity that homogeneity does not.)

Of the approximately 6,000 languages alive in the world today, 60 percent or more are said to be dying out. The majority of the world's languages are, in fact, "minority" languages, used in the shadow of a more politically powerful tongue.

On St. Patrick's Day, Prof. Kevin Scannell of St. Louis University launched a project called Indigenous Tweets. Using a web-crawling statistical software he wrote called An Crúbadán, Scannell identifies which minority languages are being tweeted, by whom and how.

Next page: Geospatial Technologies

5. Geospatial Humanities: Using Location Tech to Rebuild the Past

Geotechnology is being used in an ever-increasing number of places and situations to understand where we come from and how we behave when we get there. As distributed as are our points of contact in the era of the social web, it still counts when a publication (still) as central to the national (and global) conversation as the New York Times recognizes it. It means it has moved from the realm of the specialist to that of the educated layman.

It's not just the NYT who recognize how these technologies are changing the way we orient ourselves. The University of California, Los Angeles has opened a Center for Digital Humanities, that awards an interdisciplinary minor in Digital Humanities, the use of new technology for non-technological study.

Here are some examples of from the New York Times of how geotech is being used to understand where we came from.

• Gettysburg: rebuilding the topography of the battlefield as it existed at the time
• Salem: the geography of the witch trials
• The Dust Bowl: extent and reason for erosion during the Great Depression
• Eastcheap: the lay of the land and the location of the taverns where Shakespeare's Prince Hal and Falstaff prowled

4. ARKive to Document Every Species on Earth

I am a fan of archives and I am especially keen on any archive, whether physical or digital, that takes access as an important elements of its mission. And I don't just like archives of books and manuscript, I also dig archives that have nothing to do with the written word. For instance, if you haven't marveled, drop-jawed, at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, do.

Coming a close second to that in my personal pantheon of parchment-free archives is a digital project called ARKive.

Their goal: no less than the capture and preservation of a photographic record of every species under the sun. The group's immediate goal is the completion of audio-visual profiles for all of the threatened species on the IUCN Red List.

The materials can be browsed by species group or eco-region or can be searched. Additional information includes topics like climate change and geography. Also on offer is an educational menu tailored to specific age groups. The photos themselves can be viewed individually or as slideshows and each species' photo gallery is accompanied by a detailed description of the animal or plant.

3. Scientists Use Google Earth to Understand Mysterious Giant Wheels

Over the last several years, Google Earth, and other large-scale search tools with a geographical function, have helped archaeologists and others to identify history which was too large to be seen. In the past, such technology has identified lost cities, revealed ghost towns to be imperial capitols and unearthed hundreds of invisible Egyptian pyramids, temples and towns.

This year's triumph was the revelation of hundreds of large-scale prehistoric earth-art installations spread all about the Arabian peninsula.

Thousands of geoglyph "wheels," almost completely unknown to the public, are now part of public knowledge thanks to advances in technology, both photographic and social. These wheels are scattered across the deserts of Jordan and adjacent countries.

Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia has been using Google Earth and aerial photography to study the structures, which were first reported in 1927 by British Royal Air Force fliers who were making mail runs over the area.

Image copyright of, and drawn by, Stafford Smith, APAAME.

2. Afro Nerd Superstar Explosion: How the Future of 1 Billion People is in the Hands of a Bunch of Nerd Girls and Poindexters

In October, I spent several weeks in East Africa, speaking with executives, government officials and, most interestingly, developers. I visited three incubators in Nairobi devoted to startups in the social space. Given the emphasis in Kenya on mobile - as many as 60% of Kenyans pack mobile phones but as few as 5% have Internet connectivity via laptop or desktop computers - the development also focused on mobile, though not exclusively.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a region with 1 billion people, over 60% of whom are under 30 years old. High tech has been a primary driver of East Africa's 40% growth over the last decade and small and medium-sized enterprises are poised to take over a great deal more of that growth going forward. Anyone who is not paying attention to the continent, and paying attention to it as a forge, not just as a market, is going to be sorry. The "developing world" is making the not-so-slow transformation from market to makers. Africa is right out front of that translation, having moved recently into the #2 position in the global mobile market.

I've come to the conclusion that no one is waiting for the government to wise up. They all seem powered, to various degrees, by the nerd catechism of "think it, code it, build it, sell it - NOW."

That is hardly to say that government interest in such a top-heavy country as Kenya is unimportant to these groups, it just seems they have little hope of great support anytime soon. And, instead of despairing, they have all created different ways of reaching out to, and beyond, Kenyan society. In fact, one of my primary impressions was how these developers, as focused as they are on their own markets and the needs of their own society, are nonetheless well versed in global development issues and best practices and are in constant contact not just with each other, but with their peers and with corporations as far flung as Finland and the Silicon Valley.

1. 100 Years of Dance Music = Data With a Beat

Hey, people? It's been a rugged year. Let's face facts. There's been political unrest like there hasn't been in decades. The economy has been a sick mess. Our shared stress level has been high enough to interfere with the magnetosphere. (I made up that last bit but the sad fact is that it seems possible.) So let's end this year in a massive, shared shaking of our groove things, alright?

The travel geeks at Thomson have created a data visualization you can dance to. They tracked the top-level dance genres over the past century, and expressed the data as an animated map that moves from parent genre to descendant, proliferating over time.

The mapmakers used data from the books Bass Culture, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and The All Music Guide to Electronica, as well as Wikipedia. They marked the birth of each genre in five year periods.

Can I ask you to do one thing for me, as this grisly year draws to a close? Would you mind terribly getting down on it? Would you get down on it? Get your back up off the wall? Now you've got it. See you next year. (Inch'Allah.)

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.

Ian Fleming, British creator of James Bond, interviews Raymond Chandler, American creator of Philip Marlowe.

American poet Sylvia Plath reading her poem "Daddy." (Editor's note: HOLY CRAP!)

American musician Patti Smith talks about photographer Robert Mapplethorpe

Spanish painter Pablo Picasso painting on glass

John Coltrane plays "My Favorite Things."

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.

The Ara Irititja Project.

"The aim of Ara Irititja is to bring back home materials of cultural and historical significance to Anangu. These include photographs, films, sound recordings and documents. Ara Irititja has designed a purpose-built computer archive that digitally stores repatriated materials and other contemporary items."

It's a deep indicator of the importance of both culture and the technology that has been brought to bear in its service that the focus of the project is in building a cultural database accessible by all via the Web. The Anangu approach to melding the two is eye-opening.

"Anangu have managed complex cultural information systems for thousands of years, restricting access to some knowledge on the basis of seniority and gender. Ara Irititja has integrated these cultural priorities into the design of its digital archive."

What the Anangu are doing is so complex and multifarious that proper coverage of their efforts could easily fill a book. Chapters might include physical archiving, language preservation and teaching, gathering living voices, culturally-based software development, helping other groups make the transition to the Web, creating multimedia expressions of cultural concerns, exhibition creation and developing protocols for the sharing of information with outsiders. Of particular interest, I think, is the way the Anangu inflect their use of communications technologies to reflect their cultural values. In other words, technology remains a tool in their hands, not vice versa.

Mission Voices.

These oral histories were gathered in conjunction with the Koorie Heritage Trust. The Koorie are a people of New South Wales and Victoria, in the southeast of the country. The emphasis is information from and about "missions and reserves," the rough equivalent of "Indian reservations" in the United States. These reserves include Ebenezer, Lake Tyers, Coranderrk, Cummeragunja, Framlingham and Lake Condah.

According to the website, the human emphasis was on Australian Aboriginal elders.

"Elders were invited from across Victoria to be a part of the project. There are many more Elders across this state and country that have an important contribution to make with the telling of their story. This site is only representative of a section of the history of missions and reserves in Victoria and only some of the voices."

Readers can navigate the site by reserve or by subjects, such as spirituality, justice and living culture; or by, as the site itself puts it, "the land and the theme." From this context-building information, including video presentations, the visitor can drill down to individual voices, such as Uncle Jack, a Wotjobaluk and World War II vet.

Do your people use the Web to preserve and pass on their culture? Do you work on such a project? Or is there simply a project of that description from which you gained something by interacting? If so, please share it with us and your fellow readers in the comments.

Top photo from Ara Irititja | other illustrations and photos from Mission Voices | special thanks to @debrockstroh

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."

Says the interviewee:

"Skeptics might think that the brevity of 140 characters would foster a kind of surface-y and impersonal interaction, but I think it does exactly the opposite: it forces you to communicate in a way that's more signal than noise. Those are two really powerful functions--spreading ideas and connecting people--embedded in one convenient place. And I think we're just beginning to discover what the combination of those things might yield. I'm not a starry-eyed futurist, really; I'm just someone using technology to find newer, better ways of expressing my ancient disdain for Alanis Morissette...."

On the album and discography in the era of the single song sold online:

"Since we're now at a point where it costs virtually nothing to acquire and store someone's life work the one truly valuable commodity that still surrounds music consumption is the expenditure of time necessary to hear all the stuff you've downloaded.

If our hypothetical 15 year old has just BitTorrented Neil Young's entire corpus of work onto her computer, she'll probably be a lot happier if the first album she plays isn't Old Ways, but who's going to tell her that? That's where I see @Discographies as having real utility above and beyond whatever entertainment value it may possess. If I can steer just one person away from This Note's For You and towards Tonight's The Night, it will all have been worthwhile."

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.

Wikleaks

Wikileaks was not a story, but an ongoing continuum of stories. It started with release by the wiki-based whistle-blowing site in April of a video that seemed to show a U.S. helicopter gunship killing a number of Reuters journalists. We picked up the story when Wikileaks released 91,000 documents pertaining to the Afghanistan War. We followed with its release of 400,000 Iraq War documents and the recent release of classified U.S. diplomatic cables.

Wikileaks, the site and the group behind it, could not have happened until the social web did. Leaks have happened for decades but the penetration and the mass of documents only became possible recently. Websites, email, wikis, blogs, microblogs and social networks created a network of avenues for leaks to come in and to spread out again.

The stories that the overall Wikileaks story gave birth to included criticism of the group and its founder. Questions arose. Was transparency desirable for its own sake? Is the principal of transparency worth men's lives and countries' safety? Did it make our world more safe by requiring governments to face up or less safe by uncovering things that are not necessarily illegal or immoral but secret to maintain lives? It's a story that is destined to keep on giving.

Online Tyranny

The level of oppression against users of social media and other online tools reached a stupendous level in 2010. As a look at our weekly feature "This Week in Online Tyranny" shows, men and women were arrested, sentenced, beaten and tortured every single week. The fear and anger those who hate dissent show to anyone who didn't roll over doubled and redoubled as social media gained more and more users around the globe.

Low-lights include the sentencing of Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan to almost 20 years in prison in Iran; the release, after additional torture, of the longest-serving imprisoned blogger, Kareem Amer; and the passage by the United Nations of a resolution that provides justification for blasphemy-based imprisonment and torture.

Having covered the increasing sophistication of online oppression since January of 2005, I would be lying if I claimed to see anything positive developing. Repressive governments around the world have proven much quicker to understand and accept the power of the social web than the world's media or business leaders have. Want to know where the online world is headed? Watch the internal police services of China, Iran and Egypt. They know.

Computer Warfare on Industrial Targets

Outside of the security field, the idea of a computer virus tailored to a specific country and a specific undertaking was the stuff of paranoid thrillers. This year, the reality of country-to-country viral warfare was brought home with the unleashing of the Stuxnet virus.

As the story played out, a number of eye-widening facts came to light. The virus was made by a highest-level digital team over a prolonged period. It was aimed solely at supervisory control and data acquisition systems, used only on large industrial machinery. Further, it was aimed directly at particular frequency converter drives from specific vendors. Those vendors exist only in Finland and Iran. It was designed, in fact, to change motor speed on, among other things, uranium processing facilities in Iran.

The ubiquity of digital communication pathways mean that this is only the most dramatic event in governments targeting each other in this manner, not the last one.

When Old Communist Apparatchiks Think You've Gone Too Far, You've Gone Too Far

China is the gold standard for censorship. Pioneering what one specialist called "networked authoritarianism," the leadership of the country knows it cannot flick a switch and shut down criticism. The Internet, especially China's, is too big to scientifically restrict, so in a sense terror must be used. It employs a combination of technical filtering, legal restrictions on free speech and social restrictions.

• Technical: filters and search feeds on "problematic" terms.
• Legal: rules against criticizing the regime and various vague types of libel.
• Social: strong-arming and threats against both individuals, such as writers and activists, and groups, such as publications and Internet cafe owners.

A sort of social terror keeps the population in line enough for its Internet police to stomp down on real trouble-makers.

Well, now "real trouble-makers" include folks like Cheng Jianping. She added a sarcastic RT to a post on her Twitter account, was arrested and is now spending what should be her first year of married life in a forced labor camp. Perhaps it is the Orwellian singularity Chinese censorship is heading toward that has driven a large group of influential, retired old guard communist leaders to put their collective foot down.

What does it mean that such an august group publicly upbraids the wise guys of Chinese Internet policy? Maybe nothing. But maybe shame and a sense of betrayal will succeed where words, words, words have not.

A Privacy Intrusion of Mammoth Proportions

When India, the second largest country, and the largest democracy, on Earth starts up an allegedly elective, and practically mandatory, public ID program, the fiction of the Internet as liberator sinks right in.

India's record on privacy was not great prior to this announcement. It has demanded, for instance, that Blackberry-maker RIM decrypt its user records for the government or it will be thrown out. They extended this demand to every device-maker that uses encryption. But the project to force every one of its one billion citizens to carry a card or other device linked to a central record, or risk denial of everything from housing loans to water, is one step beyond.

Regardless of whether it is a practical undertaking given the state of the country's sorry digital infrastructure, it is a Brobdingnagian object-lesson in just how little regard a country can have for this fragile fiction of right of privacy. Maybe Zuckerberg was right and privacy is dead. But if so, as India will no doubt show us, anything we might call us dies with it.

After the jump, Google Street View, computers made of brains, the Oxford English Dictionary and more.

Google Investigated, Sued for Privacy Offenses

When it was revealed that software in Google's Street View photo cars gathered not just general information on Wi-Fi locations for Google Maps, but also private information such as photos and emails, all hell broke loose for the company.

In quick succession, the company was investigated by Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Canada, Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and South Korea. Attorneys General from over two-thirds of the states in the U.S. even met to arrange concerted action against Google. Oh, and there were private suits too of course.

Google eventually agreed to start sharing information on their collection process and software. Although the U.K. found the company innocent of criminal wrong-doing, investigations led to the ability of Germans to opt out of inclusion in the mapping service.

And the global tug-of-war over privacy goes on.

Better. Stronger. Faster.

As much as technology is said to change and as operant as Moore's law may be, the basic nuts and bolts of computing haven't seemed radically different to the vast majority of users for who knows how long. If you put a iPad next to an '84 Macintosh, sure, you can see a difference, but under the hood it's basically the same.

Now, however, work is being done that is leading to, and in some cases has already led to, a whole different kettle of computational fish. First, there's graphene and water. Some mad scientists created graphene using - my hand to G-d - some Scotch tape and a pencil. Now it's the strongest, thinnest, most conducive material on earth. Its potential for exponentially speeding up computing centers on using (how am I not making this shit up?) water. Take a wafer of graphene and slap it onto one of silicon and silicon dioxide, then send water into the tiny space between the two; the water backs away from the silicon toward the graphene, de-conducting the water, and breaking the connection.

OK. Now, IBM has thrown the giant Frankenstein-switch on its Watson Research Center for a five-year quantum computing project. Using a superconducting material like rhenium or niobium and cooling it to absolute zero they create quickly burnt-out qubits for quantum computing. They use standard electronic manufacturing to create resonators that allow for the entanglement of qubits, creating much more computational force.

Finally, they are now making computers out of brains. A Columbia University group is using "cortically coupled computer vision" and an EEG cap to united those things the brain does better than a computer and those thing a computer does better than a human brain. It works.

In a generation, the inside of a computer may bear as much resemblance to those we use now as what's under a car hood does to what's beneath a horse's ribcage.

The Ongoing Dialogue Between New Tech and Legacy Tech

The outcry when we published a story titled, "Oxford English Dictionary May Never Be Published Again" was profound from a group of techies probably reading the story on their brain implants. It was a microcosm of the back-and-forth between new ways of doing old things and the old ways of doing them. "As for the advantages of a paper version, they are undeniable but ultimately replicable," said one reader, with another countering "Nothing beats a hardcopy backup."

This dialogue even happens internally here. Richard MacManus, the founder and editor, wrote one post titled "5 Ways That eBooks Are Better Than Paper Books" and had to follow it up the next day with a post titled, "5 Ways That Paper Books Are Better Than eBooks."

And when I canvassed all the "early adopters" I'm surrounded by here for a post called "The Truth About Legacy Technology" I discovered that almost every single one of them regularly used, and loved, both the very latest communications tech and absolute antiques - like pen and paper.

A lot of consciousness of web technologies was born to the gospel of "disruption." That note is so strong it's become our tonic. But it's not the whole picture. There is always an impassioned conversation going on between the past and the future...in the present. And the present is where we live.

Social Media and Politics in the Developing World

Between the controversies surrounding Wikileaks and the perpetual cycle of arrests under repressive regimes, it's easy to forgot what a tool the social web can be in the hands of people historically under-represented in the global discussion. Two examples this year of the latter are the Kenyan and Nigerian elections.

During this year's Kenyan legislative elections mobile technologies and social media were used to bring a degree of transparency and peace in short supply during the previous elections. Journalists, polling observers and the men and women on the streets used a combination of online sites and mobile phones to follow the vote counts, and keep the participants honest. Kenyan voter Samuel Ochanji waxed rhapsodic when he spoke to ReadWriteWeb.

"It's a revolution from our past shambles where votes were cast in the day and counted (read manipulated) in the night. The electoral system has been completely decentralized (which) minimizes chance for fraud and increases Kenyans' trust in the electoral process!"

In Nigeria, acting president Goodluck Jonathan declared his candidacy for the nation's highest office on Facebook, the first time such a thing had been done anywhere. Zuzeeko Abeng, a blogger from neighboring Cameroon thought the move was fantastic.

"Pundits would term the creation of a Facebook page a 'tactic' and an attempt to score political points, but without going into politics, permit me to reiterate that by creating a Facebook page, Goodluck Jonathan has demonstrated skills of good governance, leadership, transparency and accountability."

YouTube Grows Up

It may seem like a rough thing to say, but it may be that a technology like photo-sharing can only be said to really grow when it comes face to face with the ugly realities of life. And no reality of life is uglier than death. And no death uglier than murder.

Last month, a drug gang from the Mexican state of Guerrero placed a video on YouTube showing members of a rival gang bound, confessing to the murders of a more than a dozen tourists from the neighboring state of Michoacan, whom they had mistaken for members of yet another gang. If a bunch of inbred criminal thugs know about you, yours is no longer a developing technology. It is a grown-up technology in a grown-up world that is too often every bit as ugly as it is beautiful. And it's awfully beautiful.

The Culture of Technology

The culture of technology in 2010 has been an acting out of notion that "argument is the road to knowledge.' Privacy has struggled with transparency, transparency with liberty, liberty with life and life with death.

If the thesis and antithesis in each encounter is fairly clear, the synthesis is not. The closest we may come as the year nears a close is the knowledge that tidy resolutions happen in fiction, not in real life. And technology is a part of real life. The American poet Walt Whitman spoke of the resolute untidiness of life with some hope.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large--I contain multitudes.)

"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

Of the printed collection, Bridle says: "It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a dickhead'."

Of Wikipedia, Bridle says: "It's not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot."

I think that's pretty awesome.

Below: Bridle's talk at dConstruct, The Value of Ruins. Audio thanks to the wonderful podcast curation tool HuffDuffer. (Which, incidentally, was built by Jeremy Keith, author of HTML5 for Web Designers, who recently shook hands with James Bridle himself.)

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.

Rome Reborn
Working with international partners, the Virtual Heritage Laboratory at the University of Virginia has created a series of "3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlement in the late Bronze Age (ca. 1000 B.C.) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 550)." They stared with Rome in 320 A.D., after which date few civic buildings were added to the city. Click through for a video tour of the city.

Ancient Spaces: Acropolis of Athens
Ancient Spaces is a "a student-built, 'massively multiplayer' world based on classical antiquity" at the University of British Columbia. Among their projects are a set of 3D video tours of areas in classical Athens' Acropolis, including the Parthenon and the Propylaea.

Prof. Antonio Serrato-Combe: Tenochtitlan
University of Utah's Serrato-Combe reconstructed the main public spaces of the Aztec city under Moctezumah. He produced a digital model of the "Great Temple" complex in that city on the eve of the Spanish invasion. Like all good historical digital modeling, the spaces are built on rigorous archaeological and architectural study. Prof. Serrato-Combe's work formed the basis of the British Museum's exhibition "Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler."

IBM and the Palace Museum: The Forbidden City
IBM and the Palace Museum, which oversees this Chinese national treasure, worked together to create a virtual walkable version of the Forbidden City, headquarters of Imperial China from about 1420 to 1912. The City, which requires you download a proprietary client to run the interaction, allows you to create an avatar, talk to other visitors and even practice archery.

In the same way that data visualization can be used to look at statistics and render them more immediate and meaningful, virtual or digital or 3D modeling, whether in graphics or video, can do the same thing for history. The present reality of the artifacts of history can exert a tyranny of their own. For instance, most people don't know that the majority of Greek and Roman statuary was painstakingly painted. Digital models can help elbow aside the dictatorship of the present for a flash of insight into the past.

Sharing these re-imaginings via Web services, from video sharing sites to downloadable models, is a radical distribution model we can only have dreamt of not long ago. In the past.

Column photo by Cliff

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.

Here's what that looks like in a graph format:

Women, on the other hand, display an "admirable openness to both reasonably younger and reasonably older men," with the exception of early-20s young women who generally prefer to date slightly older young men.

Here's where the plot thickens: Stated age preferences are fine and dandy, but how different genders actually interact with potential dates of varying ages belies male users' statements about who they're really looking to meet.

Here's a heat map overlaid with the women's stated age preferences. You can see that, with striking regularity, women mean it when they say they want to find a partner within a given age range:

As you can see, the data show that 29-year-old women generally stop messaging significantly younger men.

Now, here's the data on men's messaging habits:

The men in this study consistently reached out to the youngest of the women in their preference range - which already heavily favors younger women. Moreover, they don't cut themselves off at their stated minimum age preference. "No matter what he's telling himself on his setting page," reads the OKCupid blog, "a 30-year-old man spends as much time messaging 18- and 19-year-olds as he does women his own age."

Taking into account this data about sexual desirability and women's responses to frank questions about sex acts and exploration, the OKCupid researchers determined a socio-sexual sweet spot for men to consider:

To some, this graph might look like an episode of Cougartown. But the folks at OKCupid feel that "older" women get a bad rap in the online dating world - one that they don't necessarily deserve.

What's your experience or opinion on the matter? Let us know in the comments.

A vulgar comment was made by a reader of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website on Friday on an article about the strangest things you've ever eaten. The headline was practically asking for a juvenile response and, thanks to the anonymity of the internet, that's exactly what happened. In the comments section of the article, one user posted a single word response referring to a part of a woman's anatomy. Of course, the site's moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared - obviously this juvenile was intent on having their say.

But this time, instead of just deleting the comment in question, the site's director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum, did a little sleuthing too. He found that the commenter's IP address was coming from a local school...and that's where this story starts to get interesting.

Greenbaum contacted the school and made them aware of the situation. In his defense, he probably thought he was simply tattle-telling on a naughty student who would learn a valuable lesson about internet anonymity and would have to sit through a week's detention or something of the like. Instead, he cost a school employee his job.

Yes, as it turns out, the commenter in question wasn't a juvenile after all, just someone with a juvenile mind. Greenbaum learned of the firing when the school phoned him back six hours later to report their findings. They had confronted the employee and he had resigned.

Crossing the Line? Or Justice Served?

The question being hotly debated now is did Greenbaum go too far? Or did the commenter get what they deserved?

Mathew Ingram, the blogger and communities editor for Toronto's The Globe and Mail, writes on his personal blog that his paper's site has seen hundreds or even thousands of comments, most of which are much worse than the one Greenbaum saw, but he would never - and has never - contacted someone's workplace about them. He calls Greenbaum's actions "over-the-top" and apparently, many commenters on STLtoday.com's website agree, calling out Greenbaum over this incident.

And yet Greenbaum seems to show no remorse, responding to one commenter who accused him of hating moderating so much that he decided to get someone fired by saying: "Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com's Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the 'submit' key."

Sixteen pages of comments now follow that initial interaction, and the majority of them seem to agree that Greenbaum crossed a line, save for the occasional concerned parent who didn't like the idea of this vulgarity-posting person hanging around their children instead of doing his job.

Lesson to Be Learned: Watch What You Say!

We can't blame Greenbaum for the sleuthing bit - any blogger will tell you they've been tempted to hunt down the identities of nasty commenters from time to time. But calling someone's work? That's just wrong.

Yet while Greenbaum may have been seriously misguided to do what he did, this should be another sobering reminder to anyone trolling the net that what you type may come back and haunt you one day. There's no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered. In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their "real" name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome. "With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior," he writes.

That may be true, but the fact of the matter is that the STLtoday website allows anonymous comments. When you make that choice, then you have to expect that some of them will need moderation - it's just part of the job. Regardless of the site's policies about vulgarity, phoning the employer seems like an over-reaction to the incident. But that's just our opinion. What do you think?

The Definition of Culture

According to Wikipedia, "culture" is defined as:

"[...]generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance. Cultures can be "understood as systems of symbols and meanings that even their creators contest, that lack fixed boundaries, that are constantly in flux, and that interact and compete with one another"."

Essentially, culture is the way people within a certain group behave and interact with one another.

The Twitter Culture

Technology Enthusiasts
It's no secret that those on Twitter interact and behave differently from other groups. For one, they might be online 24/7. That's a huge difference in itself from the rest of the world. They're normally heavy users of technology, especially web technology, and are on the bleeding edge of these things too. The majority of Twitter is comprised of tech related messages and innocent chatter. From web apps to software reviews, you'll find links to them all on Twitter.

Sharing Is Caring
Never let it be said that Twitter users don't care. They share their little hearts out every chance they get! Links from all over the web are shared on a minute by minute basis. On the same note, developers have taken advantage of all that information by aggregating the plethora of links that are shared across Twitter so that users can find the most popular links of the day or hour on Twitter. Not only do tweeters share links, but also reviews, beta invite codes, advice, stories, insults, and tons more. I've yet to see any credit card numbers or passwords being shared though it may be in the near future.

Vocal Advocates
Surprisingly, users of Twitter are very vocal about things. For example, take a look at the upcoming Presidential elections. I know more about the elections because of Twitter rather than because of the TV or newspapers where one would normally go to be updated on such things. Not only will they let you know what's going on, but also how they feel about it. These are pretty passionate people too. They voice their opinions while also encouraging others to do the same. They're always up for a tough albeit friendly debate. These are today and tomorrow's advocates.

I'm Bored....Twitter!
Those on Twitter are also easily bored. I know that Twitter is only enhancing my ADHD, which in turn is helping me to become bored very easily. There's so much to process on Twitter that when user streams slow down and the party ends they're left wondering what to do next. If Twitter goes down, the world might as well have just stopped. Tweeters just don't know what to do with themselves sometimes. They need constant entertainment because this is the very nature of Twitter and it's what Twitter promotes.

OK, I Dugg and Shared This Article. What's Next?

Never let it be said that Twitter doesn't have culture. There's so much more to the people on Twitter and a ton more to come as Twitter breaks into the masses of mainstream. Tweeters will continue to vocally share all the crazy technology that's available, yet still have an air of boredom around them at the same time. It's unbreakable and quite contagious. Let us know what you think defines the culture on Twitter.

File this under unsurprising, but interesting none the less.

More likely, the research gives reason to believe that online social networking may not be a fad. Beyond its usefulness for communication, personal expression and directory look-ups, the sites are also working in sync with some of the biggest cultural trends at large.

"Social cognitive theory suggests that we are always looking for different ways to behave," primary researcher Michael Stefanone told the U. of Buffalo school paper. "When people on reality TV are rewarded for behaviors such as being the center of attention and gain celebrity from it, it communicates to the audience that these behaviors are good things."

University coverage of the study concludes with the obligatory reminder that your Paris Hilton-style exploits on Facebook today could lose you a job tomorrow. I haven't found that to be true yet myself, but whatever.