Alt Wire  is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Readerville creator Karen Templer.

One of my central preoccupations these days is the act of curation, and its increasing significance in our everyday world. Which means also thinking about curation's fraternal-twin concept, the museum. Our collective rush to document our lives and world (in words, pictures, and video) has prompted and necessitated a simultaneous rise in the curation impulse, so has the world begun to redefine the museum. Here's a shortlist of some of my favorite nontraditional museum-related web offerings.

A Loft Filled with Dirt and the Man Who's Cared for it for 19 Years: The New York Earth Room is basically a museum with a single exhibit: a room full of dirt. Photography of any kind is not allowed, so this short video focuses instead on Bill Dilworth, the guy who's been tending the dirt and tracking the visitors—in a surprisingly interesting way—for the past 19 years. (The Earth Room has been there since 1977.)

The Museum of Whatnot: I love this short story by Kevin Wilson, and imagine Bill Dilworth would too: "I am thirty-one years old. I have a degree in museum science from Dartmouth. I keep to myself. I am the caretaker and sole employee of the Carl Jensen Museum of Whatnot. We, and by we, I mean me, call it the MOW. We sell T-shirts but no one's buying. The MOW is the only museum in the world dedicated solely to the acquisition and preservation of the everyday made unique. Things that are ordinarily junk but not junk because someone, somewhere, made it more than that by their collecting, hoarding, and preserving it. ..."

Europeana: Still in the formative stages, Europeana is a joint effort between the major museums and libraries of Europe—including the likes of the Rijksmuseum, the British Library and the Louvre. They're literally all uploading their collections into a single massive, multimedia exhibition. For example, the Darwin collection comprises 11,000 texts; 67,869 images; 803 videos; 42 sounds.

Tomorrow Museum: Joanne McNeil's blog is hard to define. Even her own summary doesn't quite get at the heart of it: "The Tomorrow Museum is a collection of images and speculative essays exploring how technology, science, and economics are affecting the fine arts."

Museum of Online Museums: Among the many great things on offer from the master curators at Coudal Partners is this collection—they call it the Museum of Online Museums—of links to the best exhibitions online, encompassing everything from Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art to Van Gogh's Letters to The Grocery List Collection. It even keeps track of which ones you've visited.

Bio: Karen Templer is a writer, editor, web developer, and the creator of Readerville.com (may it rest in peace). Follow @karentempler on Twitter.

 Alt Wire  is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Believer editor Andrew Leland.

I first used an internet search engine around 1994, when as a 13-year-old I had a dial-up Internet connection and my own home page, "Uncle Andy's Giggle Shack," which featured SNL- and Simpsons-derived jokes, done up in rudimentary HTML. This was pre-Google, of course, but once I'd gotten the hang of using Webcrawler or Lycos or whatever engine I was using, I began performing what I immediately recognized were impressionistic internet searches. This is to say: rather than searching for relatively utilitarian subjects such as "Tutankhamun," or "Matt Groening biography," I'd feed the Internet strings like "feast of sadness, whispered pumice vampire, jiggles milk" or whatever shards of language I happened to be "feeling" at the time (and as a 13-year-old, as now, these emotional, surrealistic phrases regularly surf into my consciousness—usually on a board carved from hormones).

And then I'd delight in seeing what the rowdy, teeming, brand-new World Wide Web could spit back. (In this sense, the experience resembled a psychedelic, doors-blown-off version of chatting with Eliza, the early "interactive" Freudian psychoanalysis bot.) Most of the hits my impressionistic searches returned would be pages, usually hosted by computer science departments at large research universities, that simply listed (for some arcane database-related reason) every word in Webster's. These pages were interesting enough (at least knowing they existed, and wondering why), but if I refined my search a little, down to just, say, "feast of sadness, whispered pumice," then real strange treasures would wash ashore. These usually came in the form of fan fiction (I recently discovered, for example, the wealth of online erotic fan fiction devoted to Xena: Warrior Princess), full texts of inscrutable books, and heated discussion boards for topics I'd never otherwise have the pleasure of running across—places where text accumulates in eccentric formations.

Bio: Andrew Leland is the managing editor of The Believer and founding editor of Uncle Andy's Giggle Shack, which we would link to if we could.

Alt Wire is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Noemi Martinez of the zine and blog Hermana, Resist and of the organization Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Justice Collective.

Maegan "Mamita Mala" Ortiz pointed me in the direction of The Sanctuary, Building Bridges & Breaking Down Walls. Anyone interested or working in/with immigration, (im)migrant rights and civil rights should be turned on to this. 100% pro-migrant, my kind of place. 

Vivir Latino keeps me grounded on what's going on in the land of Latino politics and entertainment, often with that tongue-in-cheek attitude I love.

In zine talk, I'm very excited about Alex Wrekk's second edition of Stolen Sharpie Revolution, and must soon get this in my grubby hands. I'd already been doing zines when it came out years ago, but the sheer wealth of info contained, makes me, well, giddy. When I was tabling with my "traveling zine library" of a couple of hundred zines packed into suitcases, I told zine newbies that Stolen Sharpie Revolution was *the* zine bible.  Alex makes buttons, with that small distro feeling we all love and miss.

I'm in between rented houses, as usual, and half my things are packed including books, posters and suitcases full of zines. But I get by on easily digestible but thought provoking zines with copious amounts of radical love from brokenbeautiful press, Nadia, letter writing, and Raven's Eye (whose posts remind me of radical love that doesn't make it into books).

Bio: Noemi Martinez describes herself as "a Chicana/Boriqua writer & activist spiller of truths and secrets living in the militarized borderland of deep South Texas." She writes the zine Hermana, Resist and blogs at hermanaresist.com.  She's a member of the Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Justice Collective. Being vegan in the land of cabrito and fajitas was not challenging enough, so she organizes Mujerfest, Homenaje a Nuestras Muertas, and Valley Voices against Violence. She's also a "single mami to two kick ass future alternative media makers." You can also find her work on Twitter at @5secondpoems 

Alt Wire is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is RUMINATE editor-in-chief Brianna Van Dyke.

Sand in the Gears: Tony Woodlief's blog is one of the few I blogs I regularly check—aside from my sister's (she lives in Tacoma and I miss her). I am always antsy for the next post from Tony, which could be a sermon or a rant on the misuse of the word "literally" or even fatherly advice intended to rescue his son "from a lifetime of involuntary virginity." Very useful stuff.

Anything and everything: Arts and faith is one of my favorite forums on anything and everything related to the arts (music, film, visual art, literature) and faith.

Behind the curtain: I could spend hours poring over all the publishing market statistics compiled by the editor's of Duotrope's Digest (and they update daily!). With their stats on acceptance and rejection rates, response times, and pay scales, it feels like peeking behind the curtain of the literary magazine world. I also get a kick out of checking the stats on "The Slothful," a list of the publishers with the slowest average response times. The current publisher at the top of the list averages 340 days to respond to a writer...Yikes! 

Finding Traction: I consider myself a connoisseur of editor's notes—they're such fun and quirky little things—and the editor of Agni, Sven Birketts, writes some of my favorites. I especially enjoyed his refreshingly honest note on editing and aesthetics entitled "Finding Traction."

Writer's Block: I recently attended a gallery opening for photographer Cole Thompson's The Ghosts of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Cole is a great artist and completely devoted to the art of black and white photography. I visit his site for inspiration—and it seems to be especially helpful for writer's block. Another helpful muse is Ausie rocker Xavier Rudd.

Bio: is the founder and editor-in-chief of RUMINATE, a literary and arts magazine that engages the Christian faith. Along with the rest of the RUMINATE crew, she contributes to the  editor's blog and also enjoys writing the occasional editor's note.

Alt Wire is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Broken Pencil editor Lindsay Gibb.

I started making zines when I was 15 and I stapled my last page when I was 21. A short run by comparison to other zine-makers who, when one zine is played out, start up a new title, and who foresee no end to the zine as their means of creative output. And while I read new zines on a daily basis, I recently when stumbled upon Teri Vlassopoulos’s blog and was brought back  to the days when I used to make my own. Vlassopoulos was the creator of Melt the Snow. It was one of my favorite zines in the ‘90s, and she uses her blog to talk about zine history, Canadian lit mags and books she’s recently dug into. She also writes about zinemaking in Shameless magazine’s new anthology She’s Shameless which is due out at the end of June.  

When I’m not reading or writing about zines I’m usually knitting. I’m relatively new to knitting—only 5 years in the game—but the obsession swelled quickly in me. Some of the best social networking sites I’ve found for knitters include Ravelry—where you can share patterns, organize your projects using the sites cataloguing tools and show your latest creations to other users and Men Who Knit—where male knitters can create profiles and blog about their projects. Church of Craft is, of course, a great example of a way to not only connect knitters and other crafters online, but also to lure them off the web and into workshops, craft retreats and stitch and bitch nights in various cities. And whether you care about knitting or not, Thread Banger's recent "DIY Roundup" of the funniest knitting patterns on the net is definitely worth a look.

Since I write about documentary filmmaking on the side, and I’m a David Lynch fan, those two things combined have me interested in Lynch’s Interview Project, in which takes a trip across America to meet regular folks and talk to them about their lives. As Lynch says “it’s something that’s human and you can’t stay away from it.”

I wanted to give an honorable mention to the sites I frequent when I really don’t want to be productive for a half hour: Fuck You Penguin, CakeWrecks and Totally Looks Like.

Bio: Lindsay Gibb is the editor of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts. She is based in Toronto where she is also a staff writer for Realscreen, a trade magazine for documentary filmmakers, and an associate editor and co-founder of Spacing magazine, which examines Toronto’s urban landscape. Watch for Can’tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil, to be published by ECW Press in Fall 2009.

Alt Wire is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Dollars & Sense editor Chris Sturr.

What is “popular economics”? Here are two things it is not:

It’s not the economics that’s popular with most professional economists or econ profs, or among most politicians and policy-makers (yes, including Obama) who rely on the kind of mainstream, pro-free-market economics that not only failed to predict the current financial crisis, but laid the groundwork for it.

And “popular economics” definitely doesn’t refer to popular media coverage of the economy—the business press or personal finance advisors, which either promote “elevator economics” (“the Dow is up!” “the Dow is down!”) or train people to think that their fortune in the economy is entirely an individual matter.

Popular economics is economics education for and by the people, aimed at inspiring action. We all live in the economy, right? So we all know about the economy, and can teach each other about it. And what we would teach each other about the current economic crisis is a far cry from MSNBC, Fox News, or even public radio’s Marketplace. For one thing, we’d tell each other that we’re all in this together, and we’re not going to defeat the people who got us into this by paying attention to the Dow, investing in the right mutual fund, or clipping coupons. We need to organize!

Here’s how:

Workshops: Veteran Boston-area organizer Mike Prokosh has been working with Jobs with Justice in Massachusetts to put together an Economic Crisis Workshop. Steve Schnapp and others at United for a Fair Economy have put one together called Bankers, Brokers, Bubbles, and Bailouts.

Comic Books and Mutual Aid: Comic books are another great vehicle for pop-econ organizing. Chuck Collins of United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies worked with long-time Dollars & Sense cartoonist Nick Thorkelson to put together the comic book Economic Meltdown Funnies. Chuck has also been spreading the word that we’re all in this together through Common Security Clubs.

Prison Crisis: Before the financial crisis, the 2.2 million people in prison or jail and the 6+ million more on probation or parole—plus their families and communities—were coping with the prison crisis. Lois Ahrens of the Real Cost of Prisons Project provides resources—including terrific comic books—to activists and organizers that help explain the impact of mass incarceration. (For more great resources on the prison crisis, check out the Prison Policy Initiative and Prisoners of the Census.)

Summer and Solidarity: The Center for Popular Economics has been running a Summer Institute for years. This year’s will focus on “solidarity economics” as a response to the economic crisis. (Also check out the newly formed U.S. Solidarity Economy Network.) The organization also provides online courses.

Fighting foreclosures: People are protesting around the world, but there’s been little outcry in the United States (tea-baggers notwithstanding). One big exception is City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston. They are standing up to the banks and helping owners and renters forestall foreclosure. Their innovative organizing was featured recently on Bill Moyers.

Toxic Textbooks: How did all those mainstream economists learn to be rigid free-marketeers? It started in the classroom. There’s a growing movement to reverse the right-wing takeover in economics education, including Real-World Economics Review’s Toxic Textbooks campaign and Adbusters’ True Cost Economics campaign. (Dollars &Sense had been covering bias in econ education for years.)

Bio: Chris Sturr is co-editor of Dollars & Sense, which has been providing left economic analysis in plain English for 35 years. Dollars & Sense also publishes (non-toxic!) textbooks. Check out the D&S blog and coverage of the financial crisis.