links for 2010-08-31

This article alerted me to the fact...

...that The Times style guide is still outside "The Great Paywall". Smashing Magazine also list The Guardian's style guide - something I rather think I should refer to more often.

"Hello. I'm an online post moderator for the ABC Drum Unleashed website". Predictable vitriol against moderators in the comments thread here validates most of the points about the downside of the job...

"The nub of Carr’s argument is that every link in a text imposes 'a little cognitive load' that makes reading less efficient. Each link forces us to ask, 'Should I click?' As a result, Carr wrote in the 'delinkification' post, 'People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form.' This appearance of the word 'hypertext' is a tipoff to one of the big problems with Carr’s argument: it mixes up two quite different visions of linking."

"So, Jack Wilshere. You're a young Premiership player, you've just made your England debut and the world is at your feet. Where is the worst possible place in the world to get caught up in a random post-clubbing brawl at 2.30am"...outside the Daily Mail's offices

"The links to external sites that appear on these pages are supplied by a company called Nielsen Online. They provide access to a service which automatically trawls over 125 million blogs every few hours, and filters out any spam or inappropriate content. We then query this service for any links to iPlayer or TV and radio programme websites, and publish the results as links on these pages."

"We don't have a policy that firm but we would frown heavily on people going in and changing things in Wikipedia". Really? In this case, the added link to a satirical site would have been inappropriate, but should we really be stopping staff at newspapers from improving accuracty on Wikipedia if they come across mistakes?

"If you're going to launch a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Flickr group or some such as part of your news operation, then you need to track and monitor what people are saying to you via those channels. And you need to respond. More and more of my day is taken up with this, but it can be extremely beneficial. Feedback often lets me know when something on the site isn't displaying correctly or if someone has a problem registering, commenting or taking part in something we're offering. You want your audience to be more involved with what you are doing otherwise you wouldn't have launched these social media offshoots in the first place."

A very bullish blog post from Andy Wilman over the HarperCollins / Top Gear / The Stig case. I wonder how many times it had to go through legal?

Very late to this, but it was the quote "The PCC has quasi-judicial status in the UK" from Times ombudsman Bob Tyrer that stood out

I wouldn't expect to do much blogging this week as I'm spending most of it heading to and from Berlin in order to give a presentation at the '1st Data Journalism Meetup'