Berkeley Lecture Podcast.

Sweet! Free access to lectures from the berkeley campus as they take place, all via RSS. Foundations of American Cyberculture anyone?

Bookcrossing.

At the store the other day, a friend of mine found a book that wasn't for sale. The book was free, but with the requirement that the reader leave it in a public place for someone else to find when they finished. Inside the cover of the book was a tracking label, and a website address: Bookcrossing.com The website contains a "journal" for the discussion of books by people who have handled them, as well as forums, tracking tools and other services to aid the spread of public literary information.

And they say that the internet discourages serious reading. Bookcrossing.com is a wonderful application of internet-based social networking which has been applied to the world of the literati. Picture wheresgeorge.com for books.

Johnny Panic.

For those of you who have read and enjoyed 'The Sandman', by Neil Gaiman ( and also for those who haven't ), I present to you the tale of 'Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams', a magnificent jewel of altered perspective, as fashioned by Sylvia Plath in 1958.

101bananas.com has a nice library of interesting stories, essays and varied texts in the public domain.

I am a dilettante.

Dilettante. Don't know what the word means? Neither did I. I had to look it up. According to this article, that's exactly what I am. A dabbler who knows enough to be dangerous, but not enough to really make a difference. In fact, the article goes on to suggest that due to increased internet and blog consumption, we are increasingly becoming a society of dilettantes.

Want to know why? This article will tell you that web users are reading actual books less and less. Upon reflection, I can see that I have actually decreased my book reading quite a bit in the last ten years or so, excluding periods without net access.

Perhaps it's time to curtail my web usage and casual studies in favor of more specific research. Is it better to be a specialist or a generalist? Is it possible to become both, to reach for the renaissance ideal?