links for 2009-10-22

"This piece of research from the Chitika network is worth noting. The main destination from Twitter is news websites (28%), followed by movie sites (23%). This links into something I posted about the other day, that there is pretty much a 3-4 hour news cycle between things breaking online and hitting mainstream media, and that's the window you have to take control of events."

"Many, including myself, dismissed the move as yet another empty election promise made by a ruling party rapidly losing popular support. It seems that I was wrong about that as the first computers make their way into the hands of students I teach. Despite this good news I think that the move is still little more than a publicity stunt and that in order for the country to drag it's antiquated education system out of the 19th century a lot more has to be done than dump a load of cheap netbooks onto the market. While providing students with PCs is an admirable thing, the policy, like so many educational polices before it is based on garnering good publicity rather than improving fundamentals."

"Netizens from Macau discovered that the largest forum in Macau, cyberctm, has activated keyword filtering mechanism and filtered away the term 'Chief Executive' as well as its substitution 'Chief Thief'".

"Well, 'Bye Bye Bayou' totally leaked everywhere, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, since anything that exists is essentially all over the internet in 5 minutes—but it wasn’t actually supposed to come out until November 7th (that indie store vinyl day), so we’ve asked and Parlophone have given us 20,000 free downloads to give away to the first, well, 20,000 people. one per customer. or downloader. or avatar or whatever". Hey if your track has already leaked, you might as well enrich your email database whilst giving it away for free

"I'm a little surprised two of the candidates are commenting on a story neither of them has read. It's the most-complained about single item of journalism in the history of the PCC - surely it would be worth taking all of 5 minutes to find it online and read it, so you can reply with better knowledge of the background?"

"Whatever you make of their politics, one truth is beyond doubt about the BNP: their data management skills are awful. The raw list, as leaked, would make any DB administrator wince. The names given to fields were unclear, sometimes data for the one field appeared in another field. Sometimes data appeared twice. A lot of data was missing". Is there no accusation the liberal conspiracy of the media won't throw at the BNP - now even their DBA skillz are in the firing line ;-)