Inspired by Britta's interesting annotation of her top 10 del.icio.us tags, I took a look at mine.

1. internet (200): Mostly articles or sites about the internet, ranging in quality from silly meta jokes to heady philosophical articles.
2. culture (170): Culture is pretty tough to define. I'd say these are links about the way people interact: online, through advertising, and in life generally. Occasionally a link that's sort of…uh…"cultured" will slip in there too, such as New York Magazine's NYC Books Canon.
3. humor (157): I spend a lot of time clicking on funny stuff on the internet, ok people?
4. technology (146): Lots of web-related links here too, but these also include non-internet tech, like the Phoenix Mars Mission's discovery of ice or—more importantly—sheep sculptures made of telephones.
5. art (134): Weird art I've seen on the WWWs.
6. funny (104): This is mostly redundant to my humor tag. When I first started using del.icio.us I didn't like the idea of adjectives as tags, but I've loosened up with the last 104 funny things I bookmarked.
7. design (98): These links have some crossover with art (in fact 57 of my links share the two tags) but tend to be more about graphic or web design and don't include conceptual art.
8. history (94): I'm a nerd.
9. politics (86): Mostly interesting articles about whatever's going on at the time.
10. news (83): I'm a little surprised that this appears in my top 10, since I don't think of myself as a real news hound.

Of course, most of my dominant tags were pretty clear when I bookmarked del.icio.us/kenspeckle wordle art a few months back. Also interesting is that my top 4 tags cover this blog's supposed topics.

More compelling than my top 10 tags, however, is the top 10 for all of del.icio.us. Oddly enough, my top 10 list doesn't overlap at all with the 10 most popular tags for all users:

1. design
2. blog
3. video
4. software
5. tools
6. music
7. programming
8. webdesign
9. reference
10. tutorial

The moral of the story being that most people bookmark much more useful stuff than I do.

My coworker and about page glamour-shot photographer James told me yesterday that Silverback, which we had oohhhed and ahhhed over a few months ago when it was just a holding page with a very cool (albeit almost unnoticeable) parallax effect, has released some hot new usability testing software for Mac.

I tried it out today at work while testing a microsite I've been plugging away at for awhile and it's absolutely incredible!

Silverback unobtrusively records all actions on the screen and the tester's facial expressions and comments (through iSight) and lets you mark important moments in the video using the Mac remote. After testing is over, it combines the two videos into one file—the screen capture is the main image with an inset video of the user's face—and exports as QuickTime so you can share the results without a plethora of software licenses.

Four absolute best things about Silverback:

1. It completely hides itself during recording so the user isn't distracted by his own image in the corner of the screen somewhere.
2. It subtly highlights every click with a little bubble in the final video file.
3. Fifty. Dollars. That's it.
4. Gorilla scientist logo, OMG!

The only problem is that you're not "supposed" to do usability testing on a Mac, since it's (still!) not the platform of choice for most people. But I think that if you're sure your site works the same in Firefox or Safari as it does on IE, this is definitely the way to go. At $50 for this much functionality, you pretty much can't go wrong.

Check their demo. This embedding of it starts mid-way through, skipping the overview to show how the recorded session will look when exported:

Embedded video doesn't work in all RSS readers, so you may have to visit the actual post.

By the way, Silverback is the creation of an English web design and consultancy group called Clearleft.

So the American Museum of Natural History has put online some archival photos of its exhibits being built and viewed from about the turn of the century to the mid-1960s [ok, ok, via kottke, he finds everything!].

And as this fellow Pruned points out the creepy/surreal shots of the dioramas being built are by far the best. He (she?) plucked a bunch out for you to ponder if you so choose, but I also like the snapshots of AMNH visitors gazing on the dioramas when they were new and marvelous instead of musty and quaint as they seem today.

Something about the combination of morbidly realistic taxidermy with observers so old-fashioned they seem fictional in these shots makes the dioramas seem more real—or the visitors seem less real—or maybe both. Especially if you crop out the borders of the dioramas. See what I mean?

Visitor viewing Mako Shark diorama, Hall of Fishes, 1948

Visitors viewing Olympic Forest Group, Hall of North American Forestry, 1958

Visitors viewing Moa Group diorama, Whitney Hall, 1952

Freaky. Ok, I'll also give you with just one incredibly spooky photo of a diorama in the making that didn't make Pruned's…eh…cut:

Working on Condor Group diorama, Birds of the World Hall, 1963

More important than any possible Krishnamurtian significance of the meta-voyeurism of these photos (sorry Sean!) is this: The Museum of Natural History is just the most recent in a long series of the "traditional" institutions that serve as the public storehouses of our cultural memory to start releasing its incredible store of content to the big, bad internet in easily consumable form.

In recent memory, the Library of Congress went and got itself a flickr account, then the Smithsonian had to get one too, and the New York Public Library's excellent Digital Gallery, which has actually been around for some time now, is about to launch a nice redesign that's been in beta for awhile. The Museum of Modern Art, The Met, and now the Guggenheim have online databases too, but they aren't quite as accessible and blogger-friendly as the NYPL's (and their flickr accounts are sadly just event photos).

So, other grand, historical, intellectual institutions…who's next?

Wordsmith.org's A.Word.A.Day e-newsletter has had some awesome themes lately. First, there was words from the Irish in honor of Bloomsday, and this week they sent out five meta-words — words describing words and language — along with this great quote from John Locke:

So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.

"WORDS" by flickr user feuillu

You tell 'em, Locke. And a few of the words we use in an attempt to show those meanings and imperfections:

grammatolatry (gram-uh-TOL-uh-tree): The worship of words: Regard for the letter while ignoring the spirit of something.

catachresis (kat-uh-KREE-sis): The misuse of words.

parapraxis (par-uh-PRAK-sis): A slip of the tongue (or pen) that reveals the unconscious mind.

lingua franca (LING-gwuh FRANGK-uh): A language that is widely used by speakers of different languages to communicate with one another.

orthoepy (or-THO-uh-pee, OR-tho-ep-ee): 1) Study of the pronunciation of words. 2) Customary pronunciation of a language.

"more than words" by flickr user J.Salmoral

Some other great meta-words from Wordie user John's list of Word Words:

metathesis (muh-TATH-uh-sis): A linguistic process of transposition of sounds or syllables within a word or words within a sentence.

orthography (awr-THOG-ruh-fee): A method of representing the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols.

verbum dicendi: A word that expresses speech, introduces a quotation, or marks a transition to speech which may be considered non-standard.

onomatomania: Obsession with a particular word which the person uses repeatedly or which intrudes into consciousness. [ed. note: A year ago, I commented on the wordie page for onomatomania that I have this condition for kenspeckle.]

"lost words" by flickr user kool skatkat

And even more meta-words from Wordie user alguien's list Words About Words:

hyperbaton: Reversal of normal word order.

chiasmus: Inversion in the second of two parallel phrases.

aposiopesis: Breaking off in the middle of a sentence.

zeugma: Use of a word to govern two or more words though appropriate to only one.

polyptoton: Repetition of a word in a different case or inflection in the same sentence.

tmesis: Separation of a word into two parts with other words occurring between them.

Banksy's denial of his alleged unmasking by the Daily Mail is pretty clever.

But if I was Banksy (and, PS, I'm totally not!) I would definitely be claiming the unmasking as a planted piece of performance art making a Barthian commentary on the keen interest in my "true" identity. The plaque next to the gallery exhibition would say: "Planted Unmasking, irony and photograph on news media."

This explanation would work even better if the Mail really nailed him than if it didn't, as I twittered today to my friend @metaeuphoria. Dontcha think?

Christoph Niemann's adorably illustrated story about his sons' obsession with the NYC Subway System [via kottke] reminded me of the pictures I took last summer at the NYC Transit Museum.

The best part of the subterranean museum is by far the tracks with dozens of retired subway cars dating back to the old El lines. It's like a giant jungle gym that adults are actually allowed into, complete with an amazing collection vintage ads, such as:

Who Will Be "Miss Subways"?

Miss Subways was a sort of print-ad American Idol-style beauty pageant for NYC subway-riding women only, which went on from 1941 through 1976 according to wikipedia. Ads like this ran in the subways, and riders called in to vote on their favorite subway-riding gal. Some things never change!

Bet You Do Better in a Hat

Since there's no branding on this poster, I'm not sure if it's an advertisement or a public service announcement for lonely male subway riders. You know, the types that can nowadays be found on missed connections.

Recipe for Better Beer

I don't think any comment is needed on this on, huh?

Deepest Subway

The predecessors to the current ho-hum SubTalk posters brought much more interesting information than how many people "saw something and said something" last year. Instead they provided juicy transit factoids, such as the location of the deepest part of the subway, then the BRT Broadway as it passed under the East River. These days the BRT Broadway line is the N/R/W, and the deepest part of the subway system is the 191st Street Station on the 1/9.

Subway nerds who can't get down to the Transit Museum can always get their fix at wikipedia, which has exhaustive subway info, and NYCsubway.org, which seems to have a photo of every train ever to set its wheels on the tracks of the NYC subway system.

glory photo from wikipedia

No, I'm not about to get all socio-philosophical on you. I actually saw an optical illusion called a glory about a month ago and didn't even realize it until today!

Earlier this afternoon I was reading up on the science behind rainbows and wound up at the wikipedia article for glory—a tiny circular rainbow, which wikipedia explains is "most commonly observed while airborne, with the glory surrounding the airplane's shadow on clouds."

Sounded like an awesome sight, but I didn't think much of it until a few hours later as I was going to add a soundtrack to some silly airplane-window footage I shot about a month ago on a plane ride back to New York after visiting my folks in Florida. And would you guess what I saw reflected on the clouds for about 8 seconds of my video? A glory!

Check it out: Very faintly expressed, but decidedly visible just to the right of the center of this screenshot. If you can't see it, lean back from the monitor and try to look for the plane shadow first, then the rainbowy aura around it.

Much harder to see in the video, but take a look anyway. It helps to view full screen and lean back from the monitor a bit. The rainbowy awesomeness is most obvious around 0:05 and 0:06.

glory in the clouds from Lauren Sperber on Vimeo.

Embedded video doesn't work in some RSS readers, so you may have to visit the actual post to see the video

So much for my brush with glory. Here are a few spectacular glory photos from Atmosphere Optics, a site devoted to the pretty illusions created from water and light:

by Franz Kerschbaum

by Jonathan Lansey

But even the best pictures of glories shot from planes pale in comparison to the utterly religious spookiness of those taken by lucky hikers, such as these:

by Menno Boermans

by Dave Newton

Atmospheric Optics has even more glory photos and some hilarious glory videos. The people who shot the first video were totally psyched!

Those of you so inclined should also check out this in-depth explanation of how glories are formed.