links for 2011-02-16
by Martin Belam, 16 February 2011
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Jemima Kiss with a round-up of the winning hacks from the weekends #gsxsw event
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Another view of #gsxsw, including a screenshot of the Articlr interface
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More on that NYTimes SEO piece - worth reading for non-SEOs because I bet these aren't the conclusions that you drew. Also intriguingly suggests they *might* have been the victims of a scam to unseat them from a strong position - there is genuinely no way of knowing who set up the link farms pointing to their website that got them punished by Google.
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Fascinating talk from Joshua, the points he makes include how consumption of news is being time-shifted, why our front pages and Google search increasingly suck, and the new "live-ness" of digital news
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"The fundamental point is that this is a marketplace, and if the exchange does not feel fair, users will move on – as they did with MySpace, and Friendster before that."
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"If hacker's can't create something with the data, they won't do anything with it. The idea of an "army of armchair auditors" becomes a functional paradox, as the people the Government has in mind for the data apparently sit in armchairs, while the hackers sit in cafes, meet in pubs, and generally find comfy chairs far too comfy to code in"
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Comparison between the data visualisation approaches of different papers including The Guardian when handling the Iraq war logs data
Regarding Paul Bradshaw's "not feudalism" article, it's interesting that right below your links post in my reader is Scott Rosenberg's The road to Web serfdom: Huffington’s free-as-in-beer posts vs. the free-as-in-speech Web. Instead of looking at the content per se Rosenberg argues that "it’s about control of the platform that delivers your writing and ownership of any (typically meager) fruits from that labor." While I think Rosenberg is onto something here - that paid employees "writing code instead of copy" generate value - I think he misses the point that it is the sophistication of those platforms which facilitate the broad distribution of content. Wordyard is not HuffPo or the Guardian, not simply because it a single contributor's site, but because it can never compete at an architectural level with enterprise online publications.