links for 2010-02-01

"Tom Allan, Hannah Waldram and John Baron [were] based at the Guardian's offices in Kings Place [last] week to undergo training and will be starting work on their beats of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds respectively from next week. The Local blogs will be launched during the first half of this year although no dates have been confirmed."

Has there ever been a more despicable and wrong-headed decision by a sporting authority than CAF's move to punish Togo for being the victims of terrorism? It is comparable to the idea that the IOC might have banned Israel and Egypt from the 1976 and 1980 Olympics for withdrawing their teams after the terrorist atrocity at Munich in 1972. An utter disgrace.

As Piers makes clear here, it seems that all along the main concern of the CAF leadership has been the logistical fall-out from the terrorist attack, not the emotional one.

"After some of the frustations with the accessibility of the iPhone when first launched,  I wondered what people were saying about the accessibility of the iPad.  There’s not masses of commentary yet and doesn’t seem to be any from anyone with any first hand experience (unsurprisingly). This didn’t stop abledbody being unimpressed with the accessibility of the announcement"

Excellent article looking at the difference between big 'D' and little 'd' design - and why sketching is such a valuable tool. Increasingly, I find I mostly want to take photographs of my preferred sketch outcome and show people that, rather than break out the computer toolkit.

"It’s been a very interesting year of R&D work for me. In early 2009 I had the idea for a linked data integration platform, capable of importing and mapping all of the publicly available data sets in the Linked Data cloud into a single repository, represented in a coherent ontology, reconciled and accessible through central APIs. What started out as an idea a year ago now became reality. Today, we have released uberblic.org, a service for integrating the web of data."