links for 2011-01-04

Dan Catt with a look at how we use our 'microapp cache' to embed content from third party services into guardian.co.uk, and not have them be completely knocked over by the volume of traffic we send their way. Includes diagrams with happy and unhappy computers, so you pretty much can't go wrong. Or... "patronizing" and "badly written" according to the Guardian commenters style police. YMMV ;-)

My colleague Peter Martin uses metadata to reveal the institutional Guardian bias against reporting on San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Palau and Comoros.

"It’s very difficult to give exact estimates on how many new data sets on the semantic web appear per week or month but it’s really high…..That data is important, data on the web is important, and handling and working with data on the web is important as a trend. There are zillions of small technical details on how this should be done, what format and do you do it with HTML or not, but the overall trend is very clear and I don’t think it can be stopped." - Ivan Herman

From the "If you missed it in the Xmas rush files": 'One of the themes from News Foo that continues to resonate with me is the importance of data journalism. That skillset has received renewed attention this winter after Tim Berners-Lee called analyzing data the future of journalism.'

A truly fantastic piece by Relly Annett-Baker listing a whole load of housekeeping work that probably needs to be done on your website too. The concept of "continuous improvement" means you don't have to think you missed your chance if you didn't do these task over Xmas - start now and think of it as an early spring clean

I must be getting old, I read through these and found several of them to be distinctly unappealing visions of the future rather than my usual knee-jerk "Wahay! Technology will make every better!" reaction. And *still* no hover cars or jetpacks.

A sad tale of when online communitites go toxic