links for 2009-01-22

"Tomorrow (Friday Jan 23rd) is the centenary of this Outrage in Tottenham and to commemorate it a group of interested parties plan to walk the route of the chase discussing events of the day, their origins and their legacies. Meet corner of Chestnut Road and Tottenham High road (next to police stn) 11am."

"So, here are screen grabs from those four sites [CNN, ABC, Yahoo News, WSJ], taken within just a couple minutes of each other. Click on each to take a look at how similar they are in design and, to some extent, content. Now, the question is - have all these sites found the optimal design and definition of what’s news?"

"To me, the most interesting sign of online interest in the inauguration is a chart Google provided that shows a dramatic drop in search activity while the President was giving his speech. As I sat in front of the TV with my laptop, I noticed something similar: While I usually get a never-ending stream of incoming email, I only received two during Obama’s 20-minute speech. I don’t recall him promising to help reduce Inbox Clutter, but that might be a platform to think about in 2012."

Fantastic guest post by Dominic Travers about the value of usage data on mobile devices, especially around listening to music. His point is only slightly under-mined by a graph showing a high personal frequency of listening to 2 Unlimited.

"Dutch politician Geert Wilders is to be prosecuted for 'hate speech' following the publication last year of his anti-Islam/immigration film Fitna...he is the author of only a tiny fraction of the script contained in his film. The vast majority - over 90%, and by far the most hateful portion - comes directly from the Koran and the mouths of imams."

"There have been several anti-Semitic attacks in Greece over the past few weeks. These attacks have involved the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Athens, defacing a Holocaust monument in Corfu, attacks on synagogues and anti-Semitic articles in the Greek media. The latest outrage occurred a few days ago in Ioannina with another desecration of a Jewish cemetery. All these incidents are made more shocking because of the inaction of the authorities and the almost complete silence on the subject on the part of the media."

"It often seems to me that the true reason for men's fixation on their first love is that they are so pathetically grateful that any reasonably comely female allowed them to have sex in the first place, that they can never quite get over it."

"Make no mistake. This is new, and it reflects the fact that the Internet generation expects information to be made available, and they expect to be able to make up their own minds, not be spoon fed the views of others. This campaign was always about more than receipts, it was about changing the direction of travel, away from secrecy and towards openness."