links for 2008-11-20

"Unfortunately due to the sheer volume of comments, plus the high number of new people who wish to join the conversation, the Strictly Come Dancing messageboard will be closing tonight at 10 p.m.". If in doubt, duck!

"Like them, he has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the competition. Of course it's not a dance competition; it's no more about dancing than the Eurovision song contest is about songs. It's an entertainment show: and Sergeant was the primary entertainment."

"The financial crisis is grim enough without the Financial Times panicking; yet last week the paper committed the worst online redesign I have ever seen...It is ugly, uninformative and actively confusing. Instead of presenting a lot of information quickly and quietly, it presents very little, slowly, and with maximum confusion...It's like Powerpoint that has been dropped into a blender...It looks as if it has been aimed at people who don't want to read...As the world dives into the biggest financial crisis since 1945, the redesign suggests that FT readers, who will largely be the people who get us out of it, now can't or don't handle chunks of information more than a couple of hundred words long. In that case, we really are all doomed". Come on Andrew, say what you mean! Honestly, the redesign isn't *that* bad - the one tweak I'd make is to keep pink branding borders but have a white background behind the text for ease of reading.

"As a follow-up to our research on newspaper websites that we published recently, we decided to break out a list of the best examples of 'good' newspaper websites."

Going out for drinks with some of my old BBC team tonight, but sadly a notable absentee will be Doug, who died nearly exactly two years ago.

"Here's the story of how a hack day project in the office coupled with a data leak from the BNP allowed us to easily present an interactive view of news events to our readers". Awesome representation of the BNP membership data that didn't invade privacy but provided context. Love to see other political parties voluntarily release anonymous postcode or constituency level membership data for comparison.

Day-by-day set of blog posts from Nik Silver looking at elements of the huge CMS build and migration project that The Guardian has been busy with over the last couple of years.

Not the best copy-editing on the BBC site: "Are you a member of the BNP party? Were your details published online? Contact us using the form below. Your contact details will not be published". I mean, surely the fact that the contact details *have* been published *is* the story...

"A big home for all facts and figures around social media - because I'm fed up of trawling around for them and I'm also sure that I'm not the only one who gets asked 'how many users does Facebook have?' every hour of every day. It's not the snazziest name for a project ever. Oh well". Big respect for this.

"Given that the list is going up and down all over the shop, how long before people start adding in other names to it as a prank, Black PR op, revenge or some other reason? Sadly that's the sort of prank that could have nasty repercussions."

Great bit of UGC in the comments: "Rape is the ONLY crime where people are likely to suggest that the criminal is innocent - how many of you have seen an article about a burglary suspect and defended him, because you know, maybe the homeowner made it up?"