links for 2009-03-08

"From the small city government to the pentagon, our country needs to be organized for the information age. Newspapers need to make that re-invention as well and I believe they are aware of it. We aren't sure what a news organization looks like in the information age. It might even be the case that there is no news 'organization' but rather - news platforms. We are still waiting to find out. One could say that Google is the first great company to make this shift. In that sense they are positioned to be the Ford of the information age."

"Whenever I think of sceptics, I think of two groups of people. The first I was reminded of a couple of days ago when I met a man who worked on the launch of bbc.co.uk. He told me that there was some opposition to the BBC using the internet at all. I wonder how those opposers feel now". I suspect a lot of the people who were really against the BBC being on the Internet are probably still dead against it.

Any blog post which includes the phrase: "Mmm, sturgeon swimbladders" is worth reading in my book ;-)

"According to Vasserman the attempt to cut the [male] kiss came as a result of the fact that the members of the orchestra had voted to not play in the event of it being included. However the director refused to comply which lead to musicians handing out leaflets last night saying that the 'degenerate' scene 'tainted the central hero with homosexual tendencies' and was 'extreme'....Attempts by activists to read out a statement of protest over censorship was prevented when musicians, technicians and security staff attacked members of the group and journalists present."

"It is funny, though: the RIAA insist all their battles for extra revenue from downloads is done to benefit the artists - and yet when the artists ask for some of the money, they end up having to go to court to have it argued why they can't get any."

"The Times however, rather than admitting to a mistake - simply took the page off their website. Unfortunately for them, Google has cached the page (at time of writing) and that lets people see the original article as written by The Times. The newspaper would get more kudos if it admitted the error occurred than trying to cover up their mistake by simply deleting the story and hoping no one would notice."

"The BNP put a leaflet out in my ward with a picture of Sara Payne on it and the words your local Labour councillors support paedophiles". They've used the same smear on Lib Dems in Waltham Forest. They are certainly a classy bunch.

"Design for the web is considerably different to designing for print. This post discusses ten ways they differ and explains how we at Distilled design for the web."