links for 2010-05-27

"Privacy chiefs from the EU’s 27 countries are worried that an individual’s search history – the list of all the queries made through search engines – could be compiled to form a comprehensive picture of a user’s lifestyle. They have repeatedly asked for the data to be deleted after six months, or at least for part of the information to be erased so that it cannot be traced back to the individual who made the search queries."

Depeche Mode reference in the title, and a fantastic rejection letter. One of the best spEak You're bRanes entries for a while.

"Gapper writes [in the FT]: "By publishing more content, data and information for its professional readers - lawyers, accountants, civil servants and the like - The Times could make them feel more like members of a subscription club than vaguely interested passers-by'". It isn't a terrible strategy, but the problem always is - how do you let them know what they are missing if you yourself have effectively gone missing from the web?

Have to disagree with a chunk of this blogpost from the normally ever-reliable 10,000 Words. The last bit of the last sentence of the 'design' section is spot on: "even if an online project looks good, it is all for naught if the audience doesn’t know how to interact with it" but I'm not sure I could ever agree with: "An eye for design is, in the author’s opinion, not something you can teach. Unlike computer programming which is based on repeating established steps and processes, design is based on instinct". Where to begin, where to begin...

"Journalism is about asking the right questions. We research stories before we interview subjects so that we can ask pertinent questions whose answers will illuminate the subject. We need to be able to do the same thing with our data – we need to know what questions to ask and how, so that even if we can’t make the tools ourselves we can hand over the task to someone else without asking the impossible or wasting their time."

Points out the real basic: If you base your figures on a self-selecting group of people who did a web survey, you can probably expect a skew towards the web-active

"The report hints that bloggers, in effect, cannot survive without traditional journalism finding and reporting its own version of breaking news stories globally. I beg to differ. What about the countless news items covered and replicated (with minor editorial tweaks) by traditional newsrooms daily from bloggers, social media platforms and the like?". I certainly think the picture feature of 'look at this amazing gallery of spoofs of [insert cultural meme]' would struggle to survive without the input of the usually uncredited b3ta