Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Happy New Year everyone.  Here is a little batch of Friday stuff:

• Brandon Olson's Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean celebrated its one year anniversary this week.  He blames me.  Brandon is a long-standing member of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and a graduate student at Penn State.  He did one of his M.A. degrees with me at the University of North Dakota.  He'll present part of his research at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America next weekend.
• This is an ominous and interesting tease on Digital History Hacks.  For the past three years he has presented his research in a blog based format.  From what I can gather he is moving to a wiki.  I've been tempted to experiment with wiki's more systematically.  In fact, we used a wiki last year to work to organize PKAP and I use wiki's in my History 101 class.  In some ways a wiki is superior for the presentation of ongoing research.  It's easy to update and allows a user to navigate in a more topic oriented manner (familiar to so much scholarly inquiry).  The public face of a wiki erodes however (or at least de-emphasizes) the linear narrative structure that a blog imparts (understanding, of course, that one can view every edit to a wiki and see the very process of construction).
• The 2008 Cliopatria Awards were announced.  Archaeology of the Mediterranean World was once again snubbed.  In fact, I was so snubbed as to not even be nominated.  I feel like Kanye West.  But some great blogs were recognized including one of my regular reads, Tenured Radical, for her post: "What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do? A Few Meditations on Women's History and Women in History." Congrats!!!
• I get enough spam both on my blog's comment pages and in my various email accounts to have a skeptical eye toward all of it.  That being said I did get this link recently and it seems more or less harmless and perhaps even useful. 
• A quick reminder, the Archaeological Institute of America's Medieval and Post Medieval Archaeology Interest Group will meet from 7:00 AM - 8:30 AM  on Sunday January 11th at the AIA Annual Meeting.  See you all there!

Finally, if you were miffed by my Merry Christmas post, rest assured that it was -15 this morning (not the -18 announced on the Weather Channel) and we are expecting 4-6 inches of snow.  I am back in North Dakota and all is right with the world.