links for 2009-06-25

"Telegraph.co.uk's coverage of the MPs' expenses scandal had a significant impact on page impressions for May with a record 238 million for the site (up 18 per cent month-on-month). According to a press statement, page views on the site's news channel, which carried the reporting, rose by 69 per cent from April's figures". No surprise there, well done.

"Human remains unearthed during the Crossrail perparatory works at Farringdon are free of both Anthrax and the Bubonic Plague. The biggest threat to the construction of Crossrail appears to remain, therefore, not something that would make a fine storyline for a B-Movie, but the potential for funding cuts after the next general election"

"Since January 2006 I've automated the process of searching for those blogposts. Put simply: collect the links from the section – which I do anyway, stored on a MySQL database on my laptop – then input them into blog search engines via a preconfigured script". Journalist/coder career mash-up in action.

"The slide that sums up the issues around where the professional ends, and the real person begins, I think, is the Twitter one. At 7.18pm I tweet about not giving 'a shit about Spymaster', and at 7.19pm I inform the world of the wonderful online election coverage available on our websites. A complete fluke, and I only noticed when I was trawling back through Twitter looking for good and bad examples of my tweeting habits. Professionalism, ur doin' it rong..."

Another Flickr/Daily Mail interface which reminds me of the fat dog incident. [via Journalism.co.uk]

"There’s a reason i don’t blog about quantum physics or existentialism. It’s because I don’t know enough about them to offer anything worthwhile, and I’d probably end up looking stupid. Somehow that doesn’t seem to apply to The Daily Mail".

"Three days after the Moon Landings collection was released, we received a call from Reg Turnill. He worked for the BBC for nearly 50 years as correspondent on all things space. Anyone who grew up watching Newsround or Blue Peter would recognise him from his various reports over the years. He had a skill in making the incomprehensible instantly accessible. I'd wager it's his voice we hear in our minds every time we hear the word Skylab. Reg had stumbled across our collection thanks to three news reports of his that we'd included, and wanted to offer a small correction as I'd misspelled the name of the astronaut Don Lind. Don's name didn't appear in the original paperwork for the item, nor in our programme database, so thanks to Reg, I was able to amend that programme page and our database. He's 94 years old, he's still contributing to the BBC archive".

"The post I did a few days ago, How not to use Twitter HabitatUK a case study, hit a chord on Social Media Today. It was the most viewed post (more than 22,000 views, 41 comments and 636 RTs, as of this morning) and it obviously struck a chord with the Twitter community as it was tweeted about for days. It was picked up by the Guardian and Sky News. As a consequence, the Habitat press office contacted me this week to apologise for the matter, and asked me to post this on their behalf".