Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.

Though the Mundaneum was shuttered after the Nazis invaded Belgium, a young grad student in the sixties discovered it and now it's a museum that no one ever visits (probably because the Wiki tells you all you need to know).

“The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum,” said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. “People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?”

Card catalog!

More futurist over-reaching: The Telectroscope as early YouTube.

[New York Times]

So what's with all the Chicago crimespotting? There's no street view for famously crime-ridden Baltimore yet, but what about Brooklyn or L.A.? Somebody please spot something outside of Chicago that's more shocking than a guy falling off a bike.

[Found by Dan Arbaugh]

• In another Google blooper, an Australian man falls off bicycle
• A drug deal caught from every angle

Photo posted by Jef Hudson—via Coudal.

A gorgeous aerial view of Gotham, the computer-generated city of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins.

• The Pit, by Nikola Tamindic
• Midtown at night, enhanced by high dynamic range

Not everybody's so impressed by high dynamic range photography. The relatively novel technique, which produced the gloomy Gotham cityscape we published yesterday, can also be used simply to pump up an image with color. Cheesy. Nikola Tamindzic's first nightlife pictures for Gawker made heavy use of filters in Photoshop, the standard photo manipulation software. But the photographer has gradually weaned himself off Photoshop and eschews HDR programs such as Photomatix. Here's a panorama of downtown New York (from Nikola's Home of the Vain portfolio site) using traditional means.

It's dodging and burning, old skool stuff, like Ansel Adams used to do in the darkroom. You select parts to darken and parts to lighten to approximate the way your brain perceives the scene (rather than what the eye actually sees). The confusion between brain perception and eye vision leads to a lot of purist bullshit from people regarding retouching etc. because they think that what camera sees is true—it's just not. everything gets reinterpreted in our brains, and good post-production (like dodging and burning, or judicious HDR) is pretty much that same thing. Post-production used to excess is like doing acid, haha—perception goes awry, and it's very interesting—but mostly just to the person doing the drug.

[A crowd of paparazzi wait outside a Los Angeles courthouse today, hoping to get footage of Britney Spears, who was due there for a custody hearing. Shockingly, she did not show up. Reports have said that she sent her assistant instead. Image via Splash.]

Update: Rumors have it that Ms. Spears is on the move, possibly on her way to the courthouse. Check here for updates.