links for 2008-08-13
by Martin Belam, 13 August 2008
It seems Delicious have increased the character limit for 'notes' from 250 to 1,000. I'm not sure if I didn't actually prefer the enforced brevity of the former...
-
Steven Wells calls 'Lifetime of lost playlists' out as "the antithesis of rock'n'roll". Maybe, but I bet he doesn't know how many times he has played Hugga Wugga in the last couple of years, does he, eh?
-
"Less than an hour later, my spoof sat atop the knot of 332 news articles about the MIT students -- make that 331 news articles, plus one spoof -- that Google News had grouped together and featured on its front page. And there it sat undisturbed by software or human editorial judgment for a good two hours". I don't get the joke myself, but that's not the point is it, it is the fact that Google News didn't get it either.
-
I can clearly see the 'Beta' label in the Number 10 masthead, so it is obviously unfair to criticise. The 'beta' is there to immunise you against high expectations - and the BBC should know!
-
Exactly. I blame all the immigrants. I mean, when do you ever meet a good-old traditional Eadfrith, Wulsig or Leofstan these days?
-
"The two most likely causes seem to be that someone is claiming copyright infringement, or libel," Veksner added. "Of course I understand that they [Blogger] don't want to be hosting illegal content, but it seems a bit unfair that they can shut down the UK's most popular advertising blog without explaining the nature of the allegation". In the real world, an alternative would be not to use someone else's 'free' service which puts you at the mercy of their whims...
-
"The newspaper business needs fresh ideas. It needs people who are willing to take risks and think outside of the box. Writing columns like Sanders does that blame readers for the fall of newspapers is the worst possible use of our time and resources. If I was the publisher of the Chronicle, my first money-saving order of business would be to fire one Debra J. Sanders". Ouch.
Martin - the 'fooling google' story is a bit of an odd one, as really it just proves that the algorithm wouldn't pass the Turing Test. This bloke decided to try and "fool" Google News by posting a spoof to a news site and then got over-pleased with himself when Google didn't see it was a joke.
But then: if we expect Google to somehow know when something is satirical, would we then demand for it to know when, say, the story it's listing is based on unattributed sources? Or from a column which often publishes made-up stuff which it pretends is genuine?
And isn't a satirical jib at a major story a valid piece of reporting on the story anyway?