links for 2011-04-12

Everybody knows redesigns can be bumpy, but you don't often get emails saying "You've made my five year old cry"...This is a really good post from Phil with before and after shots of the website, explaining how they tried to make the process tear-free for the children

Soundcloud makes another move towards becoming an all-round audio platform, not *just* a place to share tracks. Talking of which...

There is precious little evidence on the interwebs of me ever having made music - but seeing as how today is all about Yuri Gagarin, here is a track I made in 2002 which prominently features a recording of Radio Moscow's original announcement of his spaceflight.

"Christopher Riley describes the making of First Orbit, which uses footage shot from the International Space Station and original mission audio to recreate Yuri Gagarin's historic first space flight"

"The most obvious mistake investors and analysts make is to ignore the black swan and the fact that anything really important that happens will be a discontinuity - something that makes extrapolations based on historical trends not merely meaningless but dangerously misleading. Newspapers have had their steady decline for long enough that it looks like business as usual. But it's not, and it won't be."

"But how can research and writing maintain its value when it has become so easy? It took me only two clicks to find that "parajournalism" is not, in fact, a new word". Not that Kevin Marsh was, I think, claiming it was, but it is nonetheless true that our audiences can join the digital dots just as quick as we can.

"While I took his point [Phillip Schindler of Google] about the volumes of data we produce, it bothered me for several reasons that he seemed to be sharing this data as a kind of achievement. For one, the basic adage of “quality over quantity” is surely applicable here – how much of that data is made up of self-indulgent tweets or spam content farms? Secondly, the sheer informational arrogance of attempting to set a size limit on the sum total of mankind’s data was astounding"

"The BBC had a very large role in standardising formats that are now in use across the whole of the broadcasting industry. In the web space, I think the BBC should play the same role as for more traditional broadcasting technologies - it should promote open standards, contribute to their development, and champion them."

I'm not sure Damon makes the argument here - seems more like Bing's new app *might* be a newspaper *if* they push it in a certain direction *and* it gains mass traction...

See...the Victoria Line IS interesting [via @boxman and @solle]