My bookmarks of the year 2007

For some time now I have been toying with the idea of integrating my del.icio.us feed into either the main blog or the main RSS feed. A couple of the blogs I read (Martin Stabe and Robin Hamman for example) do it really effectively. I'm not convinced at the moment that I've got the required self-discipline to do it well. There may be an element of chicken-and-egg scenario here though, as unless I know I am publishing it, I probably won't take due care.

As part of weighing up this issue or not, I had a good look through the sorts of things that I bookmarked on del.icio.us this year, so as part of my 'review of the year', I thought I would post some of my favourite bookmarks and links here.

Oh, and if you are only getting around to reading this on your first day back in the office after the holidays, why not kick of your shoes, and have a quick surf around with my links before getting back to that pile of unwanted email...

When one of my friends discovered Because Midway Still Aren't Coming Back, they emailed to ask if I was behind it. I'm not, but it does appear to be one man's quest to recreate in mp3 downloads my late 80s and early 90s collection of mediocre indie vinyl...

"for every Pixies, there's a Bob; for every Stone Roses, there's a Family Cat. As much as possible is rare, some is practically unique, most of it will only be remembered by 35 year-old ex-indie kids who spent too much time at indie clubs in the early 1990s and reading the NME from cover to cover."

Yes, I am indeed the exact target audience.

As well as unsuccessful indie music, I'm also a big Buffy fan, so I was very interested in this tale of clumsy corporate reputation management: 'Twas not the vampires that killed Buffy after all (just a bunch of blood-sucking lawyers).

Fox had decided that sing-a-long showings of the Buffy musical episode didn't form part of the licence for showing episodes in a theatre, and so had them stopped for no readily apparent reason but being big meanies.

Torrentfreak's Inside the Mind of a 9 Year Old File-Sharer is inspired reading of the 'out of the mouths of babes' persuasion, about how a 9 year old internet user perceives downloading music and films. Take this for example:

Torrentfreak: Do you think its legal or illegal to copy a CD or DVD?
Hannah: Some men right, they sell you a DVD at the market but when you get home it doesn't play, that's illegal.
Torrentfreak. Why is it illegal?
Hannah: Duh!! Because they tell you it works and when you get it home it's rubbish and jumps in the middle and its a waste of money!

Talking of children, this post - MySpace Banning Sex Offenders: Online Predator Paranoia - has some excellent statistics about how the threat of online predators to children is wildly over-stated by the media, in preference to confronting society with how it is usually trusted family members who abuse children.

The Open Rights Group wiki on just how all-powerful the proposed UK Government database on children also makes for an interesting read - Children's Digital Rights. And of course, we know exactly how safe our data is in the hands of politicians and civil servants in the UK.

From my Daily Mail files: Facebook reveals the BBC as a liberal hotbed. I rather liked the idea that this survey of self-selecting people (i.e. those who expressed a preference) from self-selecting people (i.e. those who had joined Facebook) was seen as representative. I'm also surprised the Facebook litmus test hasn't also been applied to the sexual preference and religious beliefs settings to prove that the BBC is liberal and gay and anti-Christian.

Earlier in the year the witch-hunt was on to find out who had designed that logo. The Telegraph went in for the kind of treatment usually reserved for child rapists who have escaped justice in the News Of The World - Revealed: the ad men behind the logo fiasco:

Yesterday, however, there was no sign of Mr Cox, who is in his forties, at the London home he is understood to share with his wife and two children. 'I haven't seen him for four or five days,' said one neighbour, 'pretty much since that awful logo was released.'

Newsbusters published an interesting collection of cuttings from newspapers suggesting that the press have been drumming up climate change scare stories since the 1850s. The site claims to be 'Exposing and Combating Liberal Bias Media', which isn't even a proper sentence in my book. I suspect in this case they've just stumbled upon further evidence that newspapers generally haven't done science very well for some time.

As an ex-BECTU member, and someone who once went on strike whilst at the BBC, I had a lot of sympathy with Greenslade's article Why I'm saying farewell to the NUJ. It seems to me that all too often in the media at the moment, unions have become more interested in protecting the staus quo position of the union, rather than promoting opportunities for their members.

One rant I wasn't too keen on about technology in the media was The geeks just don't get IT. It was patronising, at times factually inaccurate, in places sexist, and it fails the substitution test - if you put a religious, ethnic or gender group in as the recipient of this rant instead of desktop IT support, you'd never allow it to be published in a reputable newspaper.

I mentioned Paleo-Future in my round-up of my favourite blogs, but I also specifically bookmarked this amazing story of the Tulsa Time Capsule. In 1957 a time capsule was buried, and contestants who were guessing what the population of the town would be in 2007 were set to win the dividends of a $100 trust fund when it was unearthed. It turned out this year that the winner, Raymond Humbertson, was already dead - but it didn't matter much because the fund had been lost with the bankruptcy of a savings bank in the 90s. The car that had been buried as the capsule didn't look too peachy either.

Elsewhere on a similar theme I bookmarked these fantastic images of "how Moscow might have evolved, if communists had not come to power in 1917 (and the laws of physics had been more forgiving)..."

They were published in 1900, and reproduced on Dark Roasted Blend

Below is a smattering of other links that I bookmarked this year, but since they pretty much do exactly what it says in the title, I don't think there is a need for any commentary:

• What the Google Intranet Looks Like
• Free Wifi in London...Mapped
• Why do people write documentation?
• London Transport poster collection
• Watch Manic Miner loading on a ZX Spectrum
• The goat news story that just won't die
• Memorable front pages from the British Library Front Page exhibition
• Photo galleries of lost cities
• Download 'The Power of Nightmares'

Tomorrow I'll be looking at some more of my bookmarks of the year, but today I thought I'd finish with this. With all of the debate about the iPlayer, DRM, formats and licences I've been involved in (or subjected to) this year, it is always helpful to bear this in mind - 'Remember, when you program Open Source, you're programming communism'