links for 2009-06-01

Whilst everyone gets very excited, a little bit of a sobering thought in the comments from Allen Sale "What will be interesting to see is how quickly Google adopts current accessibility standards for this product. This is a chance for the company to innovate how online communication reaches a broader audience; especially those of us who rely on assistive technology. The glaring problem I note so far is the "drag and drop" file feature. Also, proper labeling or keyboard key assignment will be important as it moves forward. Great for the masses but a headache for screen-reading software". The future is bright, but is a bright future accessible?

"However, when I tried this, by limiting to Albanian the first result was a page from the Guardian website about the Bronte sisters. So - not Albanian OR about the hubble telescope. Genius Microsoft, utter genius!". I must memorise this example for the next time someone takes me to task over the quality of Guardian site search. A scathing review of Bing from Phil.

"Now, leave aside the fact that Charles Dickens' work is now out-of-copyright and perfectly right, proper and good to share. It's some deep level of digital ignorance that thinks that in terms of file size the order goes music > video > text. Do these folks not use email? This is a soundbite drop-in: false but designed to be easily repeatable". Great article. What he said.

5 session tracks to download from Ane Brun - highly recommended.

"The Guardian has revealed the first set of traffic figures for its mobile site after regaining its position as the most visited newspaper site in last week's ABCE results. The direct-to-consumer mobile site, which launched in February with platform provider Bluestar Mobile, [had] 101,000 unique users.

"The blog had an audience, and suddenly I didn’t really know what I was supposed to write about. Coming from journalism training that teaches you that there is a form and structure to the way you write, a empty blog page was a bit of a nightmare. There was no convention to cling to. It was entirely up to me what I wrote...I began to realise that it was only journalists who thought they always had to finish the stories by themselves. On blogs there was collaboration, often a story would remain open-ended. I started to think about why that wasn’t being applied in the same way to news".

"To put it bluntly, there was more attention in the UK media for the recent US elections then for the upcoming EU elections."

"I suspect something rather more subtle is going on. It has long been bad form in England to talk about religion, or to be overtly religious".

"Yes, there were sessions which quite honestly might as well have been delivered in Greek for all the understanding I could get, but perhaps that's also got value in its own way. A reminder that there's plenty going on which isn’t easily understood, that requires expertise and encouragement."