I don’t know who these people are, the designers and coders behind the How Many of Me? website, or what their mission is. Perhaps it’s to design a website that no one can hear about without going to, and maybe telling a friend about.

How Many of Me? uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau to tell you how many people in the country share a given name.

For example: “Smith” is — sacre bleu! — actually statistically the most popular surname in the United States. “Larry” is the 45th most popular first name. There are 9,038 individuals in the U.S. named Larry Smith.

“Sharpe” is the 888th most popular name in the country (tied with 74 other last names). “Katherine” is the 119th most popular first name. There are 61 people in the U.S. named Katherine Sharpe.

Last time I checked, though, I HAD THE BIGGEST INTERNET FOOTPRINT OF ANY OF THEM. That’s right, Katherine Sharpes. Where are you? Bring the noise. I mean, it’s not like you have better things to do than saturating the web with yourselves, um, right?

Hat tip: the ScienceBloggers

I can’t help but feel that we’re living in an interesting time for media. While blogs have proved that they’re here to stay, it’s still a bit of a free-for-all as bloggers, the public, and the mavens of established media decide how to use them. Blogging software and HTML code provide new ways to organize words and pictures, and we’re sill very much, well, playing with them. “Play” is the right word; so is “explore.” It feels like a frontier town out here sometimes, or the early days of a gold rush.

It’s always a pleasure to run across another novel scheme for dealing with the gobs of information that seem to be the most abundant substance in this modern world of ours. The latest one such I’ve found is the Blogs With A Face project, which claims to be the “World’s Largest Collage of Bloggers.”

Blogs With A Face = a new take on the biggest blogroll imaginable, with clickable thumbs of about a kermillion bloggers’ faces (and nothing else). It takes as long to load as you might expect, but is worth a look. And if you maintain a site, of course, it appears that they have space for more bloggy visages.

Earlier today, I was reading my way around the Internet and I came across the following quote in a post on the fine public health blog, Effect Measure:

“Now I know from what Mrs. R. says and my own knowledge that personal diaries are commonly kept by young girls. They are extremely private, kept hidden and often destroyed post adolescence out of embarrassment or fear of discovery (boys don’t keep diaries; I’m not sure why).” (Full post here.)

The author was writing about blogging in general, and speculating about who blogs, and why. He made some interesting points, many drawn from the Pew Survey on bloggers, from this July.

But the thing that grabbed me was the assertion that young girls keep diaries but young boys don’t. I never thought about it before, but anecdotally in my experience, it’s true.

It got me wondering why. Why do girls but not boys keep diaries? What, if any, are the consequences? How, then, do boys document their experiences, or don’t they?

Are there any men out there who did keep diaries as boys? Ladies? Do you remember why you started, at the time?

If the weather holds (and it’s certainly shaping up to be a lovelier Saturday than the forecasters expected), I’m thinking of heading down to the Conflux Festival in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Conflux, if you don’t know, is “the annual NYC festival for contemporary psychogeography.” And psychogeography, as I think you can be excused for not knowing, is “the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice.” Like classic punk rock, psychogeography is influenced by Situationism.

I see that I have already missed the meeting of the “Smell Committee,” which occurred yesterday at 2pm. But if I hurry, I can still make the “Wayward Plant Registry,” a “City Reliquary Museum Tour,” and a talk entitled “Killing the Fathers, or: If You Meet Jane Jacobs On The Road…”

I might just drop everything and go, and if I do, I will report back to you.

Conflux is headquartered out of the McCaig-Welles Gallery at 129 Roebling Street in Williamsburg. Their website is www.confluxfestival.org.

In the post-Labor Day crush of gallery openings, there’s one that personal media-heads will not want to miss.

On Tuesday the 12th, Lucas Samaras: iMovies premieres at the PaceWildenstein gallery (534 West 25th Street in Chelsea).

The 69-year-old Greek-born Samaras has been involved with portraiture for decades; for his 1979-1981 Sittings series, he invited friends and acquaintances to his studio, where he cajoled them into stripping nude and striking poses for a large-format Polaroid camera. Since the dawn of the century, Samaras has gone digital, and in his exhibition at PaceWildenstein, the tables have turned. The Sittings photos showed a clothed Samaras looking on at the antics of his unclothed friends. The current work is a 25-channel video installation; the focal point is a five-minute iMovie called Ecdysiast, in which Samaras himself removes his clothes and mugs for the camera’s distorting lens. The 24 other videos in the installation show footage of Samaras’s friends and acquaintances — including famous art-world figures like Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, and Claes Oldenburg — as they watch Ecdysiast.

Five other video works in the show are each made up of between four and six short films apiece. Many of these flms were shot in Samaras’s 62nd-floor Midtown apartment, and offer takes on slices of ordinary life.

I want to see this show for several reasons. First, because although Samaras doesn’t enjoy the wide name-recognition of Close, Johns, or Oldenburg, he’s been influential in certain art circles for decades. Second, he’s made particularly deep footprints in self-portraiture; the New York Times points out that he was photographing himself in various costumes and identities long before Cindy Sherman achieved fame for her similar approach. Thirdly, I’m beyond intrigued by the assertion that Samaras used the “Bump” filter on iMovie to distort the image of himself in the Ecdysiast movie. Is this the same filter that everyone I know is obsessed with using to take funhouse-mirror pictures of themselves with the built-in “Photo Booth” feature on their MacBooks? If so, I’ll be tickled to the core to see how this dorky popular fad translates to a high-art setting.

Lucas Samaras: iMovies runs through October 7.

Last week on YouTube I stumbled across this remarkable three-minute video piece. The filmmaker, Ahree Lee, took a picture of herself in the same pose, before the same white wall, with the same neutral facial expression, every day for three years. In 2004, she strung the images together and compressed each one into a fraction of a second to make the video. It’s a remarkable piece, a simple idea that took a lot of follow-through and discipline to make real.

Watching it, we see hairstyles and glasses come and go, while the artist’s face remains fundamentally the same. The film got me thinking about personal media, and how it can be visual as well as text-based. I’m a writer, and when I think ‘autobiography,’ I
immediately think of something that’s written. But visual self-portraiture has existed as a genre for hundreds if not thousands of years. Ahree Lee’s work is unique because it exemplifies the possibilities that new technologies have opened up for the artistic expression and presentation of the self. And it’s interesting because it’s spread out over time, as opposed to the static, snapshot-like representation that ’self-portrait’ first brings to mind.

In a way, Ahree Lee’s video reminds me of Chuck Close’s oeuvre. And it got me wondering: does anyone know of other examples of self-portraiture that deal with the passage of time?

By now, net neutrality opponent Senator Ted Stevens’ comments bizarrely describing the Internet as a series of tubes that can become clogged have attained near-infamous status in certain tech-savvy circles. (You can read Stevens’ comments, here, or watch Jon Stewart take the piss out of them, there.)

Last week, a friend made me aware of these tee shirts, hand printed by gen-u-ine West Philadelphia activists. Proceeds from sale of the shirts go to support media activism and digital divide groups in Philly, so you know it’s a good cause. Personally, I can’t get over the shirts’ genius conjunction of imagery and message; it has what the French would call a certain “I don’t know what.” Perhaps it’s the residual teenager in me, but there’s something irresistibly subversive about replying to a crusty old senator with a diagram of lady bits. Beyond, or maybe above that, I think the shirts’ creators are way smart to work the connection between feminism and a free media.

Anyway, I’ll be wearing mine to work the moment it arrives.

Rumor has it that THIS BILLBOARD right now graces the corner of 7th Avenue at 54th Street in New York City.

Rumor also has it that the woman who bought the billboard maintains a blog, here, detailing all the things that her husband has done to her (and to be fair, she to him).

The Hoax Museum weblog, among many other blogs, has a post arguing that the billboard is probably viral marketing.

What do you think?

Ever get the sensation your head’s exploding? I got that, but in a good way, earlier today when I first stumbled across We Feel Fine. We Feel Fine is a mind-bogglingly slick feat of coding crafted by web artists Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kaumar. The pair describe We Feel Fine as “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale” and “an artwork authored by everyone.” I would add that it is a damn clever idea, and brilliantly executed.
 
We Feel Fine combs the blogosphere every ten minutes, searching for statements that include the words “I feel” and “I am feeling.” It scoops LiveJournal, MySpace, Flickr, Blogger, Technorati, and more, grabbing the entire sentence in which the “I feel” appears, as well as, in many cases, the feeler’s age, location, and even the weather conditions in the time and place where the feeling was expressed.

Then, the We Feel Fine applet arranges this data in six beautiful, compelling, and interactive formats. The world’s feelings become colored balls bouncing around your screen, waiting to be clicked on and revealed by you, or quivering mounds whose size represents a feeling’s relative prevalence.
 
I don’t know whether to consider the project and its results deeply funny or deeply moving; perhaps it’s possible to be both at the same time. It seems intrinsically hilarious, though more in a thoughtful than a ha-ha way, that I can handily search for instances of people in Ghent, Belgium, who are feeling “able” (for your information, there are three). At its heart, We Feel Fine is Web 2.0, with its characteristic speedy statistical sorting and precision, applied to the world of human emotions – which, as we all know, are about the least precise, least sort-able things in the whole world. Until now. Kind of.
 
In either case, you owe it to yourself to take fifteen minutes right now to check this thing out.

(Hat tip to GrrlScientist)

Hi all.

My name is Katherine, and I’m the newest member of Larry Smith’s ELITE CADRE OF BLOGGERS here at SMITH. When I’m not committing outrageous acts of blogtastic derring-do (which isn’t very often, as even my day job is in the blog sector, believe it or not), I can be found living in a twee part of Brooklyn, sharing a small apartment with a great roommate, negotiating my mid-late-twenties, and trying to fit in a little creativity around said full-time job. In other words, my life is a cliche, and I won’t bore you further with it here. Naw, my purpose at SMITH is to point out all the interesting personal-media goodness I can find, for your delectation.

And I can’t think of a better way to start than by calling out the Peter Arkle News. Peter Arkle is a graphic designer in New York City (you may know his work from his current series of print ads for Bumble & Bumble), who irregularly puts out a well- printed, black-and-white “illustrated newspaper” about the events of his everyday life. His drawings are beguiling, and his blocky, all-caps handwriting reminds me of Aaron Cometbus. I discovered the Peter Arkle News several years ago, after I’d just moved to Brooklyn for the first time, and I remember being charmed to the core by his observations on New York City life. They seemed familiar, and yet also, somehow, better than mine.

The familiarness-yet-betterness of the world through Peter Arkle’s eyes is best experienced by ordering a real, live, hard copy of the Peter Arkle news. You can do that, and also check out samples from past issues, at Arkle’s web site.

I caught up with Peter Arkle the other day on the World Wide Web, and he was game enough to answer four questions for me. (more…)