Sophie Blackall: Missed Connections

Chance encounters, momentary glimmers of hope for a new friend or lover—Sophie Blackall's blog Missed Connections illustrates the random interactions had by strangers and their quest to reconnect via Craisglist New York City. Originally an advice columnist, the Australian-born illustrator is seemingly the perfect talent for such a project, combining her thoughtful nature with her superlative drawing skills to create an endearing and hopeful blog. …

Significant Objects

Drawing on the rich sense of history of thrift store objects, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn founded SignificantObjects.com. The site is a collaborative experiment pairing cheap thrift store/yard sale finds with creative writers who create a unique personality for it. Items include cat figurines printed with chilis (above left), ceramic hot dogs (above right), smiling coffee mugs and buttons lauding professional "necking." These random objects, …

Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine

Touted as a threat to Google's search-engine dominance, Wolfram Alpha doesn't warrant the comparison. The site is a different beast altogether, considered a "computational knowledge engine" by British founder Stephen Wolfram. It's more of an answer-engine that relies on its curated knowledge base of data, rather than rounding up websites based on keywords. Boasting north of 10 trillion pieces of data and over 50,000 algorithms, …