This is how cool stuff is found: I post to rec.arts.books soliciting information about jazz literature and history. Among the responses is a pointer by Jorn Barger (whose weblog Robot Wisdom is a daily stop) to his early jazz resource A One Page History of Jazz. This page is an interesting amalgam of FAQ, timeline, and links list. A ton of info, very useful, easily digestible (in terms of design, or lack thereof). Because his name is on my mind at the moment, I see a post just a little further down in the group with the subject Building the Necessary Web that explains both the format of that Early Jazz page and posits a good idea about building such resources. This has been cross-posted to a group called comp.ai.nat-lang that I have never encountered. Turns out he posts interesting bits there regularly, and I discover pointers to a whole lot of good stuff about web information presentation (for lack of a better term– I am not a natural language or AI theorist), and some great resources like the James Joyce portal, Iris Murdoch resource page, an AI wing that actually makes some of that stuff understandable to mere mortals like myself, and a wealth of material about content-centered web design, something that has been on my mind more and more often as of late.

Oh, and there’s an interesting FAQ about the Robot Wisdom weblog, including an overview of his sources. He does all this by hand? I always assumed there was some kind of automated scraping and ranking going on, with perhaps some human editorializing. Amazing.