links for 2009-03-16

"It claimed a number of those who witnessed the Dunblane massacre had 'posted shocking blogs and photographs of themselves on the internet, 13 years after being sheltered from public view in the aftermath of the atrocity'. A PCC spokesman told Media Guardian it had received more than 30 complaints, two from people the story mentioned". I'm with the Express on this one - how dare they have gone through this experience, yet grown up and started acting like the rest of the kids their age, eh?

Malcolm Coles is on blogging fire at the moment!

"It's hard not to miss the melt down in the newspaper sector. No one denies that actual news is a hot commodity but the actual newspaper hard copy format is certainly under enormous stress with more than its share of closings and lay-offs. This should be interesting to libraries on at least two fronts. First, we depend on publishers for much of our content. We are in a state of symbiosis with the publishing industry. If the host is dying, whither libraries?"

A few days old, but this piece about which personality traits dominate local politics is spot on. For Waltham Forest I can name exactly the people that the 'Victor' persona represents.

"The gory details" is not wrong, but this is a good basis for getting to grips with making sure your Apache config isn't leaking your Google juice.

"I'd argue that the BBC has to do some hard rethinking. These are austerity times, so we all need a bit of mindless entertainment. But they are not going to be times in which the BBC can sail on, like a huge stately galleon, its entertainment stars carousing on the quarter deck, while all around frailer vessels capsize and sink. The BBC's greatest strength, its licence fee income, could become its greatest weakness. Corporate grandness is an even bigger threat than rightwing hostility."

"Dirty merchants at comparethemongoose.com can do as they want.Mongoose is about as good to compare as two identical piles of dirt". Great response to some domain name squatting trying to cash-in on the inspired comparethemeerkat campaign.

A somewhat apocalyptic view, but if I was hiring at Twitter right now, I'd be looking for people with some serious experience of working on anti-spam algorithms and mechanisms.

"It's a really nice example of how it's possible to take a branding concept with an interesting name, and develop it across a wide range of social networking resources. Moreover, all of these initiatives support each other - the video being posted on the weblog, the weblog pointing towards Twitter, and tweets refering to activities that they're undertaking elsewhere. It makes such a refreshing change to see all of these things being done, and the impact each initiative can have on all of the rest."

I suspect that for most places Jason nails it in the comments: "I bet you’re seeing re-purposed print content put online by a strapped night staff (or a doubly strapped day staff) with editing-and-publishing software that doesn’t give them much if any help. Too many papers lack systems that let journalists be journalists, and so the paper-to-Web flow is either automated and dumb or manual and exhausting". When you are pushing a deadline, scrabbling around for links isn't a high priority. If you are blogger pushing out one post a day, taking the time to link is a luxury you can afford.

"This morning I tweeted that I rarely read newspapers and instead use the internet as my source for news. This spawned outcries from journalists who lamented that the newspaper is where quality journalism resides and to deny that is ignorance. What many of the commenters failed to realize is the internet is itself made up of online newspapers and broadcast organizations — many of whose award-winning work is available online — in addition to other news sources such as blogs and online-only sites like the Huffington Post". I agree. I read from a much greater variety of newspapers now than ever before. I would have seldom ever read The Guardian, Times and Telegraph in the same day, and definitely not anything from the LA or New York Times. But of course, I'm not paying for any of it...