links for 2009-07-30

"Facebook is the primary content-sharing method for internet users, though e-mail remains popular. Recent findings by AddToAny, provided as a Business Insider 'Chart of the Day', broke down the various ways that people share content on the Web, finding that nearly a quarter of them use Facebook. Applications such as Digg, Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon are among other options, but each accounts for less than 6% of the content-sharing usage."

"MSN, Microsoft's news and entertainment portal, is looking at partnering with regional newspapers to serve hyper-local feeds, while it revamps several parts of the site."

"On average, US traffic is 36.8% of the UK traffic (ie there is just over one US visitor for every 3 UK visitors). The figure for the Telegraph is slightly higher (44.5%) and for the Mail it's a massive 62.5%."

I find The Times Archive blog to be constant delight - this post looks at critical reaction to the BBC's "Desperate Romantics" and compares it to original Times reporting on the artists themselves.

"The Waltham Forest Guardian have revealed the best places in their catchment area for swingers, doggers and uninhibited sexmongers to congregate. Well, we say 'revealed'. They simply compiled a list based on readily Google-able web sites. Nevertheless, it makes uncomfortable reading for much of the local populace."

"At hack day last year Huma Islam and I decided that we wanted to come up with a hack that didn't involve writing a single line of code. Most of the hackers were expert developers and we didn't want our efforts to be instantly outshone by everyone else. There's a wide range of tools for wannabe developers available all over the web that don't require programming expertise. Hack day was a brilliant opportunity to play with them and get to know what they could do."

"Why didn’t Bush take into account those mystic Afghans and their Taliban super-powers? Now we’re stuck fighting magical shape-shifting animals with the camouflage powers of a chameleon, the strength, tree-swinging ability and hit-and-run tactics of a gorilla, the teleportation powers of an octopus and the constantly-varying numbers of a swarm of killer bees of indeterminate size."

"Overall, this study provides useful support for the early treatment of pregnant women. Although the analytical methods in this study did not assess the idea that pregnant women should be given priority for vaccination, such a move is supported by the researchers."

You can't help wondering where the Mail would stand on police officers flouting their uniform regulations to have a little badge saying "Allah is great" on it, eh?

"If you think for a minute that such a standard [hNews] prevents pirates from copying and distributing your content, you're either smoking something, or you're a technologically ignorant. Filtering out microformats is child's play. If you're a pirate, you will have no qualms in doing so. So we have on the floor a proposal. From the perspective of building a better Internet, it's a good idea. From the perspective of stopping bad people from stealing, it's utterly ineffective. We should understand what it really does, and adopt it for what it really is, and drop the silly posturing about how it's going to make all our financial troubles vanish."

Yeah, way to credit my Star Wars Lego IA figures, guys. Nice. I mean, not that I obviously had permission from LucasArts or Lego of course, but come on...

The Yahoo! Grids CSS can save you time and effort if you are building a front-end for your hack from scratch...

...as can the Blueprint CSS