links for 2011-07-16

A timely warning from Paul: "At the moment, the history of information is being written without journalists."

"I was amazed, having been a reporter in the US, to discover that all the public records we used routinely to conduct basic verification and investigation were off limits in the UK. Records such as criminal convictions, arrest logs, full court documents and land ownership documents were either illegal or very difficult and expensive to obtain. Even the detailed financial accounts of public bodies were unavailable."

"Will "Digital First" bring home the bacon?"

Nice idea to round-up long form journalism and essays - not least because it includes space shuttles and robots this week.

...a similar API powered regular dose of long-form Guardian journalism

Interesting piece this, but I'm always amused by references like the one to "The Guardian's notorious Corrections and Clarifications section". It is only notorious because nobody else does one.

A bit nerdy on the database side, this article, but includes these jaw-dropping numbers: "During an interview this week, Stonebraker explained to me that Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site’s massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep up with the number of transactions the database must serve."

"We've been so busy exorcising the culture of fear and corruption that we've forgotten that while politicians and celebrities have always been scared of the tabloids, they were often simultaneously enthralled by them."

"Hold on here. So a photograph clearly labelled "Andrew Brown on a lake" actually depicts NEITHER Andrew, NOR a lake????" - I love our reader comments sometimes