Here’s an idea for a great Google web application – an online archive where you can tag, sort, and store all of your used-to-be-paper documents, i.e., PDFs – and to share the same documents with other people, or even everybody.

I use many, many applications that perform a similar service with the PDFs on my hard drive; Yep!, Papers, Zotero, Scrivener, Evernote. And I use Dropbox to backup and sync my PDFs between machines. I also use Scribd to read PDFs and share them with the world. But Google could easily offer a service that does everything these applications do and more. They’re already offering a web-reader for PDFs. What they need is something that actually lets you USE them.

Here’s how I imagine this goes. Let’s say someone emails you a PDF to your Gmail account, or appends a PDF to a feed you read in Google Reader. Instead of downloading it onto your computer (or, egads, a public machine), you have the opportunity to load it into Docs. Just like that, it’s in your archive. You can also have Google Desktop scan for and index your PDFs and auto-load them into your archive, too.

Once you import it, you don’t have to do anything else. It’ll either pull the text — or if there’s no text layer, it’ll OCR the document FOR you. You can auto-tag it or add your own tags to help you sort your docs together. It can also pull metadata, like Zotero. And you can create smart collections that link PDFs with text documents, emails, and stuff from Google Books, Scholar, even Maps or Groups.

You can also customize levels of privacy and security. Some files you might want to have public, like on Scribd. Maybe you’ll even create RSS channels so folks can receive your new images/PDFs/ebooks/XML documents automatically. Others you want to share with specified users, like Dropbox or Groups. Still others (tax and employment info, etc.), you’ll encrypt with extra passwords.

In fact, this is awfully close to the vision two enterprising chaps passed off years ago of the Google Grid.

Seriously; Google says it wants to index the world’s information. Well, let me tell you – I’m chock full of information that I don’t know what to do with. Why can’t it start by taking some of mine – and giving me some tools so that I can do things with it as payment?

A link, and then a long digression (or several).

Andrew Robinson at the Oxford University Press blog writes about attempts at universal languages:

In the mid-1970s, with increasing international travel, the American Institute of Graphic Arts cooperated with the United States Department of Transportation to design a set of symbols for airports and other travel facilities that would be clear both to travellers in a hurry and those without a command of English. They invented 34 iconic symbols. The design committee made a significant observation:

I’ve been an independent contractor for the past year, and my boyfriend’s been unemployed. So I’ve been getting acquainted with the intricacies of the US health care system outside of employer-provided care, the universe affectionately known as the Wild West. Firsthand familiarity led me to seek a bit more policy familiarity – reading some books and think tank reports, following the health reform battle as it wends its way through Congress. And I’ve been itching for a while to create something that I hadn’t been able to find – a stark, straightforward overview of why health reform is happening and where it’s heading.

This week, when the hysteria seemed to reach a fever pitch, seemed like the right time to get this project done. So starting Tuesday night, I put together a quick little site, on the order of The Money Meltdown: DeathPanels.org.

Hope you enjoy it. Please send it to your crazy grandpa.

Hey look!

My new short story, The Writer & the Witch, is now available on the Kindle (and the Kindle iPhone app, too, of course).

More details here. I’m using the ransom model for this one; after 100 Kindle copies are sold, I’ll post the free web version. So grab a copy, or tell a Kindle-owning friend to check it out.

Tom Devaney, a terrific poet and friend of mine, teaches a perennial seminar at Penn on writing about food, variously titled “Food For Thought” or (in the advanced version) “The Art of Eating.” The University of Pennsylvania Libraries recently put together a book based on writing and research from his courses, making use of a unique archive:

The boxes contain more than 3,000 recipe booklets from church organizations, small to mid-sized companies, food manufacture PR departments, and far-flung community groups. Every sturdy box is labeled with the implacable title, Victus Populi. The items in each box are not high-end cookbooks, but are all over the map: stapled together mimeograph copies, eye-catching (often kitschy) promotional pamphlets, one-off recipe booklets.

The boxes intrigued me. Each Victus Populi case was an archive in its particular a category: Bread, Fruits, Nuts & Olives, Seafood, Cheese, Meats, International Foods, Condiments: Herbs & Spices, Salads & Sandwiches, Health & Diets, Leftovers: Quick & Easy, Chocolate, Ice Cream, and one devoted solely to JELL-O.

And so the assignment took shape. Each student would choose a box to write about. The student essays would chronicle their journey and search of the primary source materials. They would use both large brush strokes (to provide an overview of the box) and develop one or two finer points in greater detail. To finish, they would find and cull all but two recipes from hundreds in each box.

The Art of the Box Lunch contains four of these essays, plus a generation selection of images from the collection, and a long introductory essay by Tom. I’m really stunned by how gorgeous it is – and also now feeling quite shamed into coming up with a similarly cool project for my seminar students in the fall.

And I know you were waiting for the best part: The Art of the Box Lunch is also now available as a free PDF.

Christopher Hsiang at io9.com just posted what looks like a terrific primer on steampunk novels new and old. This is perfect for someone like me; steampunk has always seemed right up my alley, but I haven’t read much of anything.

Awesome story from MeFi. You know that Nat King Cole song “Nature Boy”? The haunting one that opens and closes Moulin Rouge? Turns out it was written by a vagabond hippie and left in an envelope for Cole after one of his performances. Much more in the thread.

Now that my dissertation is good and filed, I want to share a few fragments of what I’ve been working on, on-and-off, for the past few years.

Here’s a few selected grafs from the first chapter:

The history of Modernism is part of the history of paper. That is, the transformation of literary and visual culture announced by Modernism and the avant-garde is inseparable from the transformation of the largely paper-based communication and information technologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries…

From the daguerrotype to the cinema, the history of photography simultaneously parallels and intersects the development of paper and print. A single image, handmade by an artisan, is succeeded by a continuously-fed reel of industrially-made material. In fact, the chemical treatment of wood pulp cellulose with sulfurous acid to produce paper is only slightly different from the chemical treatment of wood fibers with nitric acid to produce celluloid film. Nitrocellulose (also called guncotton) in ether or acetone yields collodion, the albumen alternative that allowed for glass-plate photography; the evaporation of collodion in turn led to the discovery of celluloid film. Celluloid emerges as a paper alternative with Eastman Kodak, the company credited with the introduction of flexible film and the supplier of continuous film rolls for Edison’s early motion pictures. Kodak had originally used ordinary paper treated with collodion in their famous

It has been indicated, correctly, that I am in possession of two (2) copies of The BLDGBLOG Book. How this came to pass, only Etaoin Shrdlu knows. But two copies is clearly too many for one man; the double-dose of enthusiasm and imagination threatens to consume me.

Therefore, a contest: SNARKMARKITECTURE.

The premise is simple. Imagine Snarkmarket as a physical space. What is it? Where is it? What does it look like? What does it feel like to walk through or around it?

I’m intentionally leaving this open-ended—maybe it’s a gleaming HQ, maybe it’s a storefront, maybe it’s a feral house of Detroit. Maybe it’s like one of those taco trucks…

Leave your pitch in the comments. Focus on creativity and brevity. It can definitely just be a sentence or two—though, by all means, if you want to Etaoin Shrdlu it up, I’m not going to stop you.

The contest ends Sunday, August 9 Monday, August 10 at midnight EST. (Update: I wanted to accommodate non-weekend-readers.) I’ll choose my favorite comment and send its creator a copy of The BLDGBLOG Book. (Be sure to use a real email address in the comment form so I can contact you if you’re the winner!)

Snarkmarket co-bloggers are not eligible to win but they are required to enter.

Snarkmarket as a physical space. Go for it.

Filmmaker John Hughes passed away today, too young at 58. In the 1980s, Hughes had an astonishing run of iconic teen comedies that, almost a quarter century later, hold up as honest-to-goodness movies: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

My generation (I was born in 1979) was too young to see these movies in the theater, and too old for the kiddie comedies Hughes wrote (but didn’t direct) in the 1990s. We ate these movies up on VHS and basic cable, badly cut (to protect US) for broadcast TV, but seeing in them our older brothers, sisters, and cousins, and later, ourselves.

However, since everyone’s talking about these four movies, I want to single out the one great comedy Hughes made for and featuring grownups – Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I saw this movie just last week – and it’s terrific. What’s more, it shows that the world Hughes created in his films, of humiliation and catastrophes offset by unlikely friendships, isn’t just a sympathetic take on kids in fictional midwestern high schools, but a distinct comic take on the world itself. And every buddy comedy from the 1990s just follows this movie’s playbook, with half the brains, a third of the timing, and a quarter of the heart.