Another week down and another starts up. Funny how that works ... No use fighting the endless cycle!

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

What We Lost When We Quit Using Crappy Old Web Forums — A look back at a technology that came before what we now think of as social media, one that took a bit more effort with which to engage. I'm not sure if forums were any better or worse, than social networks. Just different.

From the article:

Maybe we’ll log into a forum and realize what we actually wanted out of our online experience was never the ability to reach everyone, but to reach the small number of people that think kind of like us. Maybe the “collisions” that modern social networks create just make things worse, even if it means we don’t get the occasional ego boost of Patton Oswalt replying to our tweet or whatever.

Schliemann found Troy by destroying it — A look at one of the biggest misses (literally and metaphorically) in the annals of archaeology and how it helped shape both that field and the way in which we look at the ancient European world.

From the article:

The lesson taught in every undergraduate methods course is that Schliemann was right about the place and wrong about almost everything else. He proved Troy existed. He destroyed about half of what he was trying to find. He misdated his most famous discovery by a millennium. He did all this while writing self-mythologising memoirs in which he claimed to have dreamt of finding Troy as a child — a story most modern biographers consider fabricated. He was a businessman who wanted to be a hero, and he became, in the end, both: a man who proved Homer right by methods that would now get him struck off.

Annihilating both time and space: What the telegraph gave email — Another dive into the what's new is old again file, this time around the ideas and conventions from the world of telegraphy that email adopted and embraced.

When every word was literally worth its weight in gold, it was worth investing in ways to say fewer of them. Codes went so far that some stood in for complete sentences, something early email would adopt in a sense with Subject is message header acronyms. And the habit would live on in tech’s love of shortened lingo, and in modern tools like TextExpander to quickly enter sentences or complete template emails from a quick keystroke.

Not just books - how renting a sewing machine from the library can improve democracy — As I've argued in the past, libraries are more than just repositories of books and periodicals. They're also social and educational hubs. Sadly (for all of us) they're also undervalued by certain segments of our society.

From the article:

But the significance of Finnish libraries extends far beyond tools and meeting rooms.

Professors, unemployed and homeless people all use the same library spaces, making libraries a key part of Finland's democratic infrastructure, says Hirvonen. "They're places where anyone can access knowledge, meet others and take part in public debate, regardless of income or background," Hirvonen says.