I was poking around in the all-but-defunct (but nevertheless still cool) Mappa Mundi magazine where I came across a review of the wonderwalker by Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg. Martin Wattenberg is one of my heroes, plus I like the concept of wunderkammern, so off I went. The actual wonderwalker applet isn’t so impressive, but the motivation and ambition it shows are admirable. These are very good ideas that are going to work somewhere real soon.
Wunderkammern, or wonder-cabinets, are collections of oddities or, more ambitiously, concrete classifications of knowledge in compact form. They were popular in the Renaissance (see Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theater) and they make an appealing metaphor for the web. For a modern wunderkammer, check out the
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 