links for 2011-02-21

Lauren Rabaino with a list of some things about tech culture that translates well to the newsroom environment.

"DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer" which sounds dreadfully geeky but is most likely *a good thing*

Mary Hamilton's talk about running massive multi-player real life and real time zombie games, which tell us something interesting about the way that people enjoy story-telling.

Only captures the bad episodes though.

"Google has total control over how search results are presented and is also the largest purveyor of paid search advertising on the planet. One way to guarantee getting your links on the first page of Google, is to pay Google loads of Adwords money. So if it's not unethical for Google to sell access to top search results, why is it unethical for Forbes to allow its customers to back into their page rank for money and improve their own score on Google?"

"News apps aren’t like other kinds of journalism, and they’re not like other kinds of programming. Editors who understand how to craft compelling narratives can’t necessarily envision an engaging, useful news app. IT departments set up to support the manufacturing and distribution of a daily newspaper may not know how to handle deadline-driven software. And although computer-assisted reporting — which has been around for years — is in news apps’ DNA, many journalists don’t really understand what developers do."

And Bella should know. She is one of the people who appears in the TV programme style credits gallery on the soon-to-be-deleted BBC Politics 97 website.

I felt a bit sorry for Tim. He posts up a review that basically starts "I've only heard it once and here is my first impression", and then immediately gets slated in the comments by a buzz of loyalist Radiohead fans saying how *dare* you post your first impressions of the album being lukewarm, because *my* first impressions of it being the most awesome thing in recorded history are more accurate than yours...