links for 2008-03-21

"In 1961 a cruise ship called the Queen Frederica set out from the US to visit Crete. On board were a large number of American Cretans coming to see their homeland. Luckily, one man had what we used to call a Super 8 movie camera".

"The BBC Micro...inspired a generation of children to teach themselves computer programming and get really good at it, which has had huge knock-on effects for business and academia in the UK". It is the main reason you are reading this today.

"On Wednesday, trade unions said millions of people took part in the general strike, paralysing train and bus services across Greece and confining ships to ports". Seemed like chaos in Athens, but it passed us completely by in Crete.

"URLs are important. They are at the very heart of the idea behind Linked Data, the semantic web and Web 2.0 because if you can’t point to a resource on the web then it might as well not exist and this means URLs need to be persistent".

"Shane Richie will star in a new drama about the media's obsession with celebrity culture for ITV1". Never mind all the misery in the world, that has to be the most depressing sentence I've read on the internet all day.

"The brightest burst of light ever seen - which peaked at a few hundred million billion times the brightness of our Sun - has been witnessed by astronomers. Gamma-Ray Bursts are the most powerful bangs in the cosmos".

Excellent use of multimedia to tell the story online

"When you are active on multiple social media sites, you make it more difficult to reach a level of authority. You are simply chasing too many rabbits. Social media users who want to build strong profiles should limit diversification".

"What happened next isn’t clear. Perhaps a director at the BBC was showing off his new iPhone and, upon realising that the iPlayer didn’t work, demanded satisfaction from his minions. I don’t know. I’m making it up".