links for 2011-09-16

Andy Budd on the cost and value of large conferences. We keep London IA free and community driven and in a deliberately small venue precisely to avoid the headaches that becoming a mid-sized event would cause.

Interesting survey that features plenty of "Its complicated" in the pie charts

A brilliant and scathing piece about what Johann Hari's fate tells us about the state of British journalism.

"The newspaper business - or, more generally, the written-word business - is different from the music and the movie business. Generally speaking, a news story is a lot more fungible than a song or a film. When I want to hear a particular song, no other song is going to be a satisfying substitute, but when I want to read about the outcome of a Congressional vote, I'm a whole lot less fussy about which story supplies the details. And whereas people may listen to a song a lot of times and watch a movie quite a few times, it's rare for a person to read a news story more than once. Such differences have led some observers to argue that, even if other media products find a price online, news stories never will. People will just never pay for what newspapers produce."

"I do have a very personal, intense dislike of bureaucracy and lack of common sense. So even though there are plenty of great websites and online resources offered by the US Government, there are also a whole lot of silly online sites as well. In some cases, the waste of resources is so blatant that US taxpayers should be outraged."

"Martin Belam (@currybet) du @guardian invite les trolls à s'exprimer bit.ly/r5XhGE" - who knew 'troll' was 'les trolls' in French, eh?

Make a responsive web design in just 10k. Most traditional publishers would struggle to do it without the size constraint!