See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

• “I have never used Twitter” — Are Politicians ill-advised to let their Advisors do the Tweeting? | media140.org: Paul Farrell looks at politicians and their tweets following Malcolm Turnbull’s revelation at Media Sydney that his staffer Thomas Tudehope sometimes tweeted on his behalf, and Barack Obama’s admission that he’s never used Twitter at all.
• Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs | Boing Boing: If you have working knowledge of English, basic computer skills and an Internet connection, then you can get a job anywhere in the world.
• cufón — fonts for the people: A JavaScript-based tool for using any typeface you like in web pages. I haven’t explored it myself, but I do know Crikey‘s website uses it.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted Because Only 0.027% of Iranians Are on Twitter | Gawker: Some reality-check commentary on the “Twitter revolutionised Iran” meme.
• Sources of subsidy in the production of news: a list | Quote and Comment: How can we pay for journalism? Here’s Jay Rosen’s list of possibilities, assembled for the conference “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?”
• Someday You’ll Remember I Said This | Daily Patricia: Entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel says Twitter isn’t microblogging. She differentiates between “publishing” and “person-to-person communications” and reckons Twitter’s in the second category, not the first. That, she reckons, is leading people to over-value Twitter monetarily.
• How to play piano like Philip Glass | YouTube: Torley explains in just 10 minutes how to compose and play music like Philip Glass.
• The Naked Truth About Social v Broadcast Media | newmatilda.com: Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong, looks at the #PwnedNudieRun interaction between ABC TV’s Media Watch and folks on Twitter. I particularly like his “lesson for the low-rent McLuhans who see social media succeeding broadcast media in some simple transition”. Many insights.
• Declassified Blog | Newsweek.com: A new blog by investigative correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball with contributions from other Newsweek journalists. It will focus on national security, intelligence and law enforcement issues.
• Judge Bans Twitter From Court | CBS News: While in some jurisdictions journalists have been permitted to tweet form courtrooms, US District Judge Clay Land in Georgia has ruled that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibit “broadcasting” and that Twitter is a broadcast medium. This decision will doubtless annoy som of the social media evangelists who see “broadcast” as a swear word.
• Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media | bronwen clune: Bronwen Clune’s presentation from Media140 Sydney.
• The Future Of Journalism Needs Journalists | newmatilda.com: Marni Cordell, editor of newmatilda.com, expresses some concerns about the ABC’s vision of community-based media, as outlined by managing director Mark Scott at Media140 Sydney.
• Media140 Sydney: Future Of Journalism In The Social Media Age | jjprojects: John Johnston’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• Twitter as a Journalistic Tool: Drilling Beneath the Rhetoric | J-scribe: The second half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• It’s a Revolution, Not a War | J-scribe: The first half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository: Al Jazeera has put all their raw camera footage from the War on Gaza online under a Creative Commons license, “Attribution”, which allows for commercial and non-commercial use. “This means that news outlets, filmmakers and bloggers will be able to easily share, remix, subtitle or reuse our footage.” They so get it.
• Sky News – Interview with Rupert Murdoch | YouTube: The full 37-minute interview with Rupert Murdoch, in which he suggests he’ll block Google from indexing News Corporation news sites.
• Media140 Sydney | Public Opinion: Gary Sauer-Thompson’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• No Strings Attached: Public Broadcaster Seeks Relationships for Collaboration, Conversation and New Ideas: The Media140 Sydney keynote speech from ABC managing director Mark Scott. This is the PDF of his slides with his speaking notes. It includes a look at some of the ABC’s plans for pro-am media creation.
• Claiming to be unbiased is a patronising fairytale, so let’s just own up to our agendas | mUmBRELLA: In this guest post about Media140 Sydney, Cathie McGinn argues there’s no such thing as total objectivity, so better to disclose your agenda.
• My Two Francs Worth: Media 140 | LinenSuave: A parable of sorts about Media140 Sydney, and the pointlessness of the whole bloggers versus journalists debate.
• Journalism and blogging at Media140 | Barry Saunders: “Investigative journalism — while a very valuable form of journalism, and one we need more of — is a very minor part of journalism as it exists, and an over-focus on investigative journalism as the dominant form of journalism obscures vast bodies of journalistic output.”
• Media140 handouts | Claire’s posterous: The BBC’s Claire Wardle presents a beginners guide to using Twitter (including links to other good introductions to Twitter sites), and a general basic handout which covers some of the other social media tools she discussed in her Media140 Sydney workshop.
• Media140 | Flickr: Wolf Cocklin’s photos from Media140 Sydney.
• Call Recorder for Skype | Ecamm Network: This is the OS X tool I mentioned at Media140 Sydney for recording your Skype conversations, both audio and video. Cheap and extremely useful.
• Too tired to tweet | ABC News: ABC political correspondent Lyndal Curtis has been following Media140 Sydney but doesn’t know where people get the time to participate. I really should write a response to this, as I reckon there’s a very clear counter-argument.
• Journalists on Twitter need to ‘be human’ | Renai LeMay: The Media140 Sydney presentation from Renai LeMay, News Editor at ZDNet Australia.
• Congratulations to the ABC | Telstra Exchange: A post on Telstra’s new Exchange corporate blog about the ABC’s new social media policy from Telstra’s Group Managing Director, Public Policy & Communications, David Quilty. Includes links to Telstra’s own social media policies.
• The ABC of social media use | ABC News: The ABC News story that includes the announcement of the ABC’s new social media policy for staff, presented at Media140 Sydney by Managing Director Mark Scott.
• Alex Hawke Liberal Party Downfall | YouTube: The video which supposedly caused Thomas Tudehope to resign from Malcolm Turnbull’s staff.
• YouTube video sinks Turnbull minder | ABC News: Malcolm Turnbull’s staffer Thomas Tudehope has been forced to resign after reports of his involvement in the distribution of a satirical video about the Liberal Party’s factional battles.
• “How would history have recorded the holocaust if there had been I-phones in the concentration camps?” | Paul Farrell: SBS’s head of news and current affairs Paul Cutler asked this provocative question at Media140 Sydney, pointing out that despite the supposed breakthroughs of social media, the genocide in Sri Lanka is failing to get much media coverage.
• Riyaad Minty: Sydney’s Speaker Pash (International Social Media Case Studies) | Media140: Paul Farrell’s commentary on the Media140 Sydney presentation by Al Jazeera’s head of social media, Riyaad Minty. Minty was one of the event’s highlights, in my opinion.
• Malcolm Turnbull | Twitter: The tweet when Australia’s opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull announced that he’d start identifying whether it was he tweeting personally, or a staffer. This came less than three hours after he was asked at Media140 whether there wasn’t an ethical issue with lack of disclosure, especially since Prime MInister Kevin Rudd made the distinction clear in his own tweets.
• The Spin Fails Here: Day One At #Media140 Sydney | The Inquisitr: The Inquisitor‘s editor Duncan Riley wasn’t happy with what he heard at Media140 Sydney, especially that Problogger creator Darren Rowse is the only Australian making money online. There is much bitterness here.
• Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging | Woolly Days: Thoughts on Media140 Sydney from Brisbane-based journalist, blogger and QUT researcher Derek Barry.
• Why the future of African journalism lies in mobile social networks | Slideshare: More solid support for the idea that the future of the African internet is mobile. Plenty of stats and some important observations from Jude Mathurine, who heads up the New Media lab at South Africa’s Rhodes University.
• Apparently editors nurture their journalists by telling them it’s okay to get stuff wrong | mUmBRELLA: One section of Laurel Papworth’s presentation at Media140 Sydney didn’t go down so well at mUmBRELLA…
• Media140 today | Visible Procrastinations: A collection of links to commentary about Media140 Sydney’s first day. I have yet to go though them, but when I do I’ll add the relevant ones to my own Delicious feed.
• Media140 Sydney: Social Media Twitter & Journalism | Laurel Papworth: Laurel Papworth’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, in which she positions social media as the people taking back control and ownership of their stories. Word and video available.
• Media140 Sydney 2009 | Flickr: Neerav Bhatt’s photos of Media140 Sydney. He seems to have captured every speaker.
• Malcolm Turnbull on the (social) media. With Fran Kelly | SlowTV: Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull is interviews by the ABC’s Fran Kelly about his use of social media in the political context, including a little bit of point-scoring.
• How social media is changing political reporting | SlowTV: The full Media140 Sydney session “How Social Media is Changing Political Reporting” with Annabel Crabb, Bernard Keane (Crikey), Chris Uhlmann (ABC), John Kerrison (Nine) and Caroline Overington (The Australian).
• Caroline Overington takes on Mark Scott and the free digital news proponents | YouTube: A 4-minute extract from Overington’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, which turned into a massive anti-ABC pro-Murdoch rant.
• Conceptual Confusion and Journalistic Process — My Highlights and Lowlights of Media 140 | The Content Makers: “The low lights came from conceptual confusions, it seemed to me. Namely the several highly respected and competent journalists who, quite apart from being clearly terrified by the arrival of the audience in the news making process, also can’t tell the difference between… a platform, and a process… [and] objectivity and integrity.”
• So what’s the “cool new toy”? | The Content Makers: Speculation about News Corporation’s plans for some digital news device. Is Apple involved? An iRupert? A RuPod? The SunKindle?
• Caroline Overington Gives Some Hints on Rupert’s Plans (and tangles with Annabel Crabb) | The Content Makers: Margaret Simons’ original report on the rather strange Media140 Sydney presentation by News Limited journalist Caroline Overington and her stoush with Annabel Crabb, who’s moving from Fairfax to the ABC.
• The ABC Springs Leaks in the Porous Digital Age. Mark Scott AGAIN. | The Content Makers: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons covers some of the announcements made my Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, at Media140 Sydney.
• Can Social Media Save Iran? | newmatilda.com: A Media140 presentation by Dr Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong. A nice debunking of some of the social media over-hype.
• John Bergin’s Media 140 Speech | The Content Makers: John runs “digital online stuff” for Sky News Australia, on the pay TV networks. This is his presentation from Media140 Sydney. Some good points about listening as well as speaking.
• Off Air: Iran, Twitter and the new media world. | Off Air: The presentation to Media140 Sydney by the highly-respected journalist Mark Colvin, presenter of ABC Radio National’s PM program.
• Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media | Quote and Comment: Jay Rosen’s presentation at Media140 covered 10 key sound-bites and what they mean for the future of journalism. Here are those ten points, with links to further material on each one.
• freesound: “The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs.” I’ve used this to source sound effects myself, and it’s wonderful.
• “I Can’t Believe We Still Have to Protest This Crap.” | Flickr: A photo taken in Washington, DC during the 27 January 2007 anti-war march. This was used by Barry Saunders in his Media140 presentation.
• Journalism — a defence | Corporate Engagement: Trevor Cook took exception to my Media140 presentation and spend a few hundred words saying so. I added a little to the discussion, and will add more later when I get time.
• Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS): This is the software which Al Jazeera and friends developed for that “War on Gaza” experiment in crowdsourced crisis information mapping. Yes, it’s free open-source software.
• War on Gaza – Experimental Beta | Al Jazeera Labs: An intriguing experiment from Al Jazeera. Anyone can post reports such as casualty counts directly to the site. all of them are then mapped categorised.
• Media140: I am the bastard child of old & new media…| The Digital Wing: The Media140 presentation from Valerio Veo, who’s been in charge of SBS News& Current Affairs Online since 2006.
• Bleating innocents or matted satans: the goat in art | guardian.co.uk: “Jonathan Jones shepherds us through goat art,” it says. Maybe that should be “goatherds us”.
• Sunday Thoughts about Journalism | Stilgherrian: Another long essay from me in September 2008 which is perhaps a prelude to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• “Trouble at t’paper” | Stilgherrian: My essay from September 2008 which formed some of the background to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• Changing spaces in media | Aide-Memoire: Kate Carruthers’ observations form Media140 Sydney. “The first thing that struck me was the level of fear and fear-mongering by some of the print journalists on day one… There seemed to be little idea amongst these panellists that changing media platforms might reinvigorate media and create new revenue or career opportunities.”
• Get with the times, Jay Rosen tells journos | ABC News: A report on Jay Rosen’s keynote from Media140 Sydney. “He says journalists should stop expecting ‘open’ platforms like blogging and Twitter to behave like traditional production systems. Instead, he emphasised the value of listening to the public and being transparent about journalistic processes.”
• Sydney Media140 sessions: The program for Media140 Sydney, held 5 to 6 November 2009, with brief speaker bios, photos and links to their Twitter profiles.

• Nature Child | San Juan Islander: “According to family studies professor, Sandra Hofferth of the University of Maryland, there was a 50% decline between 1997 to 2003 in the proportion of children 9 to 12 who spent time in outdoor activities (hiking, walking, fishing, beach play and gardening).”
• FreeRangeKids: “At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail.”
• How far did you roam as a child? | Watershed: Educator John Larkin continues the thoughts about wrapping our kids in cotton wool.
• How children lost the right to roam in four generations | Mail Online: In 1919, an 8yo was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing. Today, an 8yo isn’t allowed past the end of the street without parental escort. This article from 2007 triggered many thoughts, and I’ve glad I found it again.
• Forget the young pretenders, Humans 1.0 can lead the way | The Observer: John Naughton riffs off the idea that teenagers don’t know everything and some parts of cyberspace (ugh!) are teenager-free. Although the article then says that “only” 11% of Twitter’s users are under 17 years old. And what proportion of the literate population is under 17yo? 11%? More? Less?
• Podcasting Equipment Guide (2009) | Hivelogic: A nice guide to the tools needed to podcast on a budget. Yes, there’s a reason I’m looking at this. Stay tuned, as they say.
• Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network | Parliament of Australia: Full transcripts of the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network public hearings, which I’m tagging for my own reference later.
• What Information is “Personally Identifiable”? | Electronic Frontier Foundation: Gender, ZIP code and birth date are enough to uniquely identify about 87% of the US population. This has massive implications for publishing data sets, and for privacy policies that claim not to collect “personally identifiable” information.
• Nine News twittered by seagull | TV Tonight: It’s nothing to do with Twitter, but there is a seagull. A very big seagull.
• Apology for singing shop worker | BBC News: Shop assistant Sandra Burt, 56, from Clackmannanshire, was threatened with a fine for singing without a license by the Performing Right Society. However they’ve now apologised and sent flowers.
• Online Ads Not Working for You? Blame the Creative | Advertising Age: A study by Dynamic Logic says that obsession about optimisation and placement is less important.
• We can’t turn back the tide of internet piracy, says TV boss | Herald Scotland: “Internet piracy is merely demand where appropriate supply does not exist,” says the commissioning editor for education at the UK’s Channel 4.
• Court tweets sustained but paper still lurks | ZDNet Australia: Liam Tung, who tweeted from the AFACT v iiNet trial in the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney, reflects on the gaps in courtroom IT.
• Beats and Tweets: Journalistic Guidelines for the Facebook Era | NPR: Yet another exploration of ethics an journalism. One point in here I really do not like, though: “You must not advocate for political or other polarizing issues online. This extends to joining online groups or using social media in any form (including your Facebook page or a personal blog) to express personal views on a political or other controversial issue that you could not write for the air or post on NPR.org.” Sorry? Work for NPR and you lose your right to participate in democracy?
• Poles, Politeness and Politics in the age of Twitter | The New Adventures of Stephen Fry: Another fine if perhaps rambling essay from Mr Fry about the meaning of “influence” and accidentally gaining same. Worth a leisurely read.
• Why journalism's all a-Twitter | The Walkley Foundation: The editorial chief of Sydney’s forthcoming Media140 conference goes beyond the obvious “Is Twitter journalism?” and mechanical how-to issues and explores the ethical issues of journalists using Twitter.
• Twitter in the court: Federal judge gets it | CNET News: Another article about using Twitter in courtrooms, from the US an from March 2009.
• Call For Opinions | Blackbeard Blog: Tom Ewing’s collection of opinions on market research and social media, “quite unsupported by anything other than grumpiness and prejudice”. The first is that “insights” aren’t Zen koans. “If you can express something that briefly, it’s probably banal.”
• The internet doesn’t exist | Business Spectator: Ah, Alan Kohler! I do so love your commentaries! Here’s more of his sensible thoughts on the matter of paying for “content” on the Internet.
• How Safe is the HPV vaccine? | Information Is Beautiful: A brilliantly simple infographic showing the incredibly low risk of associated with the Human Papillomavirus compared with various everyday activities.
• Ultimate Goat Fansite: Do I need to explain? I thought not.

• 50 Years of Space Exploration | Flickr: A brilliant infographic summarising interplanetary exploration. In an excellent demonstration of Chaos, the landing on asteroid 443 Eros is accidentally tagged as “443 Eris”. All hail Discordia!
• They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They: Susannah Breslin’s fascinating and somewhat challenging feature article on the recession-hit US porn industry.
• ISP in file-sharing wi-fi theft | BBC News: UK ISP TalkTalk staged a wireless stunt, illustrating why it thinks Lord Mandelson’s plans to disconnect illegal file sharers is “naive”. It’s easy to blame others just by hacking WiFi connections.
• Prince Philip tussles with technology | ABC News: This story is a few days old, however I found it curious that a perfectly good story about the design of technology was tagged as “offbeat” and the teaser written to make Prince Phillip look like a silly old man.
• NPR News Staff Social Media Policy: Another example of a good corporate social media policy. There’s plenty of these policies around now, so there’s no excuse for any big organisation not to have caught up.
• Federal Court of Australia Judgements: Some judgements have been recorded on video. “The Court is keen to continue to improve public access with the use of live streaming video/audio. Further live and archived broadcasts of judgement summaries are posted on this page as they become available.”
• Televised Patel trial an Australian first | ABC News: The trial of Dr Jayent Patel for manslaughter to be held in a Brisbane court will be shown in Bundaberg, where the deaths happened, via closed-circuit TV. Given this “local interest”, one wonders why it couldn’t also be available anywhere there were interested parties.
• Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work: Maier was a Chicago street photographer from the 1950s to 1970s who died earlier this year. Some 40,000 negatives have been found, and they’e now being blogged.
• 100 years of Big Content fearing technology — in its own words | Ars Technica: Copyright-holders have objected to pretty much every advance in media technology, it seems.
• Mac Sales Spike When A New Version Of Windows Comes Out | Business Insider: A curious interpretation of the figures, but they reckon that when Microsoft releases a new version of Windows it drives people to buy Macs instead.
• The Federal Trade Commission’s Coming War on Bloggers | Valleywag: While I normally don’t read Valleyway, I caught someone mentioning this article and was caught by one useful new term: conceptual gerrymandering. If the US FTC wants to give tax breaks to “news organisations” they’ll have to define what they are. Could it be old journalists versus bloggers battle writ large?

There’s so many of these links this time that I’ll publish them over the fold. I think I need to get over my fear of the link being published automatically without my checking them first, and my concern that my website won’t look nice if the first post is just a list of links.

Maybe I should just stick these Delicious-generated links in a sidebar? Or do you like having them in the main stream and RSS feed?

• INFOWAR vs. CORPORATIONS | Global Guerrillas: John Robb’s essay outlines a potential strategy for conducting infowar against corporations — most of which looks to me like it’d be illegal. I suppose that’s what war is about, eh? The comments stream is somewhat amusing.
• “Artists Should Be Compensated For Their Work” | QuestionCopyright.org: Nina Paley’s controversial-looking essay which posits that artists are not entitled to be paid for their art, only for their work. She’s using these and other terms in quite specific ways, so it’s worth reading carefully before passing judgement.
• Post-Medium Publishing | Paul Graham: In amongst the various current discussions of charging for news content online, Paul Graham makes an important point. “Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?”
• Americans on Tailored Advertising: DO NOT WANT | denialism blog: No, Americans do not want tailored advertising on the Internet, even less so when told how their activities are monitored to make it work.
• A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare | Central Intelligence Agency: This eminently readable CIA monograph puts the Stanislav Petrov incident into perspective, explaining how and why the Soviet leadership feared a US first strike.
• The Man Who Prevented WWIII | DivineCaroline: In 1983, Stanislav Petrov was in charge of Soviet monitoring systems watching the US for signs of a nuclear first strike. One night he chose not to react to an alert, suspecting it was a false alarm. He was right, and a potential global nuclear exchange was avoided.
• The Fiction Generator | Wondermark: The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000 makes writers’ chores a breeze!
• Against Transparency | The New Republic: This essay on the perils of some “open government” initiatives is a pleasantly nuanced read.
• Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch | vanityfair.com: Wolff wrote a biography of Murdoch, and presumably knows the man. My take on this fascinating article is that the old guy simply doesn't understand what’s happening online, perhaps because you can inoly understand the online world if you participate in it.
• The News Manual: A free resource for journalists, would-be journalists, educators and people interested in the media. It was developed from a three-volume book The News Manual, published with the help of UNESCO as a practical guide to people entering the profession and to support mid-career journalists wanting to improve their skills.
• Televising Court Proceedings | SSRN: A 1993 paper by Ian Ramsay, then of the University of Melbourne Law School, setting out the main arguments for and against televising the proceedings of courts, and suggests an experimental program to evaluate the arguments in practice.
• The Law of Defamation | Arts Law Centre of Australia: A good introductory overview of how Australia’s tough anti-defamation laws work.
• chiropractic – The Skeptic’s Dictionary: When I was pointed to this article critical of chiropractic, I noted that it used some fallacious arguments which Science itself would not permit. I’m tagging it as an example of the hypocrisy of some perhaps only a few?) bold defenders of Science because it may form the basis of a future post.
• 55 Twitter tips | SmartCompany: While many of these tips for business aren’t entirely new, it’s a reasonable-enough compilation.
• Captain Kirk has taken too much fucking LSD | DoseNation: A nice bit o’music editing by Fall On Your Sword.
• How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half | Derek Powazek: Powazek published a photomag of images from Sydney’s dust storm, sourced from Flickr, without leaving his California base. This is a great step-by-step how-to.
• A history of the English marriage | Telegraph: It seems many of our current “norms” about marriage were invented by the Victorians.
• MoD “How to stop leaks” guide leaks | The Register: In a supreme act of irony, the UK’s Ministry of Defence document Defence Manual of Security has been leaked into Wikileaks. All 2300 pages.
• Twitter and the norm police | Woolly Days: Derek Barry sums up a recent discussion on Twitter, defamation and what constitutes “publication”. I’m tagging it because I want to respond at some point.
• Mash-up: A Short History of the Media Future | The Monthly: While perhaps not completely groundbreaking, this essay by John Birmingham is an excellent backgrounder on the issues facing traditional media companies.
• AUSTLANG: A new database of Australian indigenous languages, cross-linked to Google Maps.
• Uncle Bobby’s Wedding | myliblog: An American library was asked to remove or restrict access to a children’s book about gay relationships. The librarian wrote a detailed and well-reasoned response explaining why it stays.
• Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies | Chief Information Officers Council: What it says. The first version of new rules for US federal agencies.
• Hyperconnectivity | Wikipedia: The term “hyperconnectivity” now has its own Wikipedia entry. Where’s mine?
• 99 Led Balloons: Social Media Blunders | digitalOZ: A nice list of classic social media traps for young players. A shame 90% of businesses entering the world of social media will end up making quite a few of them.
• The Moguls’ New Clothes | The Atlantic: There is much sense in this analysis of Big Media and how that Internet thing is changing everything.
• Eureka moments | The Economist: How the mobile phone became a key tool for third-world development.
• jQuery Carousel: This is the code that Jeff Waugh used for the rotating carousel of featured stories on the Crikey home page. He reckons he wouldn’t necessarily use it again. But this is my bookmark.

• How Twitter works in theory | Epeus’ epigone: There is much in this commentary of Twitter which I support, particularly the concepts of flow and the overlapping social networks. Read and learn.
• Industry cooperation looming on filtering? | CommsDay: There have been rumours, from reliable sources, that Senator Conroy is hoping Australia’s Internet industry will come up with its own answer to censorship.
• Dear Associated Press: Come On, Attribution is Not That Hard | Whatever: John Scalzi is annoyed that AP cited him as “another user” on Twitter, when his name is just a click away. This fits with something I hinted at in Crikey this week. More about that another time.
• How journalists and media brands can get the maximum benefit from Twitter | Write, edit, blog: A nice collection of thoughts about… well, what the title says.
• Public Radio Exchange: “An online marketplace for distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming.” Free registration means you can listen to this stuff yourself. Hours and hours of it.
• Programmatic specificity: what is Rudd talking about? | En Passant: An earlier essay, from July, with another take on Ruddspeak.
• Rudd's robust language is not the problem | Woolly Days: A nice analysis of why Prime Minister Kevin Rudd using the f-word really of little consequence, whereas bureaucratic evasiveness like “detailed programmatic specificity” is.
• Caring for Your Introvert | The Atlantic (March 2003): An oldie but a goodie. Kind of. If you’re an introvert, it might be worth showing this to those extroverts who are pissing you off.
• LIFE photo archive hosted by Google: All of the photos from LIFE magazine from 1936 to 1972 are on Google Images. This isn’t new — the archive was created in 2008 — but I was reminded of it this week.
• WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin | OMNINOGGIN: A different message is displayed to blog visitors, depending on how they found you. Do I have a use for this, or it it just another annoyance to maintain?
• Is the Internet melting our brains? | Salon Books: Despite the provocative headline, this interview with linguist Dennis Baron from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a sensible debunking of the fears.
• The Interregnum Revisited | Jon Taplin’ Blog: This essay deserves slow and careful reading. It links the themes of the cyclic nature of right-wing fear-mongering and paranoia with longer-term US political history — with some disturbing conclusions.
• Can Sheepdogs Round Up Magpies? | BitingTheDust: A great story from Robbo, currently in the Gibson Desert. And a great photo.
• MacSpeech Dictate 1.5: I’d been meaning to find decent dictation software for OS X, and John Birmingham mentioned this one. Must check it out.
• Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003 | WebSiteOptimization.com: Web pages now average more than 300KB and 50 objects per page. I know my own attitude has been that everyone now has broadband. But what about mobile devices and the Third World?

• REAPER | Audio Production Without Limits: I haven’t encountered this audio/music production tool before. It’s perhaps worth a look.
• Experts look to Australia’s Aborigines for weather help: As it happens, the Aboriginal tribes of the Sydney basin recognised six season, not the European four.
• The 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer: This was published back in March, but it’ll show you how trust in various things has changed over time.
• Salvage Techniques for Wet Electronics | Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA): The title says what it is. Yes, I have wet electronics. I dropped my phone in a “moist environment” and it’s now sitting with silica gel and probably never working again. Read this guide now so you know the drill for the future.
• For SEC, tech-savvy fans might be biggest threats to media exclusivity | St Petersburg Times: The US Southeastern Conference of college sports is trying to stop fans communicating about the game in the most stringent restrictions ever seem. A pity they can’t possibly work.
• User driven service bingo | Doc Searls Weblog: A checklist of activities to see whether some web service or other is truly “user driven”. Does this apply to organisations too?
• Electronic Warfare: Airborne electronic attack – a new offensive role for the RAAF | ADM: Someone took me to task for suggesting the RAAF buying F/A-18 Super Hornets was a waste. He suggested the electronic warfare capability of the “Growler” model was a worthwhile addition to Australia’s defence capability.
• Stop Using the Word “We” | Ted Dziuba: A plea for more direct communication within the corporation. Yes please.
• Economics is not a Natural Science by Douglas Rushkoff | Edge: “Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.”
• Impatient CEOs are all of a Twitter, but it doesn’t work like that | The Observer: John Naughton points out a real dilemma: CEOs have to generate profits to a quarterly cycle, but the business benefits of “social media” (or whatever it’s called next month) will take decades to emerge.
• Draft Open Access and Licensing Framework released | In Development: The New Zealand government’s draft policy recommends that government agencies use the most liberal Creative Commons licensing possible.
• Stark realisation: I no longer depend on Google to find stuff | Alex J Campbell: Alex differentiates between “finding” and “locating”, and along the way observes that the changes in the way we do these things has profound implications for businesses trying to get customers online.
• Words for Webstock – Bruce Sterling: Bruce Sterling sees the Future, and it’s banal. Just like today.
• Last Year’s Model: “It’s totally normal to lust after the hottest new geeky gadgets. It’s also cool to put some thought into what we buy, and what we throw away. So this is a place to show the world that a lot of us are choosing to use Last Year’s Model.” Their slogan is “Saving the planet through sheer laziness”, but it’s also a call for a more informed choice about consuming less.
• OSX Timemachine and Samba/Windows share | Hupio’s Weblog: How to use Apple’s OS X 10.5.2 Time Machine backup software with a Linux server, Windows server or Windows network share. It presumably works just as well with later versions.
• The next 100 years | New Statesman: An extract from Stratfor founder George Friedman’s book of the same name. Can you imagine a war between a Japan-Turkey alliance and US-Poland?
• Depression’s Evolutionary Roots | Scientific American: New research seems to indicate that depression isn’t something “broken”, but rather the brain going into an altered state so that “deep rumination” can be uninterrupted, leading to better analysis of a complex problem. If so, doesn’t that mean anti-depressant medications are preventing the problem being solved?
• John Thompson-Mills: John was the producer of Club Escape, the dance music program I presented with Scott Thompson on Triple J back in 1990 or whenever it was. Happy to have stumbled across this.
• CHART OF THE DAY: Actually, Kids Don’t Hate Twitter Anymore! | Silicon Valley Insider: “While Twitter’s user base historically favored older users, people between ages 12-24 have been Twitter’s fastest growing age group of late. And now that age group is actually disproportionately visiting Twitter, according to comScore.”

• Viral Wedding Video’s 10M Views Drive Chris Brown Buzz and Sales | Nielsen Wire: That “viral” (by which they just mean “popular”) video of a wedding party dancing into the church [was it a church?] reminded everyone of Chris Brown’s tedious autotune’d song again, with the result that it ended up in iTunes’ Top 10. Yet another example of how something being given away increases its sales.
• Who needs newspapers when you have Twitter? | Salon News: A massive troll by Wired editor Chris Anderson, seeking attention for his new book Free, which is not free. He starts by saying he doesn’t use the words “media” or “news” or “journalism”, but doesn’t offer any alternatives. Wanker.
• Techfest 2009 | NICTA: On 12 August 2009, NICTA showcases some of the new ICT research and development they’ree working on at this most-of-the-day event in Sydney. Let me know if you’d like to join me.
• Women In Film | YouTube: A morph-montage of some of the most famous female faces in film. Note how the eyes are so similar.
• Men In Film | YouTube: A morph-montage of some of film’s most famous male faces. It’s a challenge to spot all of them. Note how similar most of the noses are.
• Ashes 09: Hughes’ Twitter drop – Gen Y meets the Baggy Green | Crikey: Twitter, Criket Australia style: “We get the Twitter from Phillip and I feed them into our IT guy.” Somehow I don’t think they get this “personal” and “spontaneous” stuff.
• 栏目（目录): China’s PLA Daily offers free downloads of (military) music, plus some cheesy animated GIFs.
• Real Black Hats Hack Security Experts on Eve of Conference | Wired.com: Infosec “expert” Dan Kaminsky has been pwn3d, and his lame choice for passwords exposed.
• Tesla_Downunder: Some amazing photos of electrical effects from an Australian who’s been building large Tesla coils.
• AdViews: A digital archive of thousands of vintage TV commercials from the 1950s to 1980s, created or collected by ad agency Benton & Bowles or its successor, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B).
• Profile: Gary McKinnon | guardian.co.uk: 43yo Gary McKinnon, diagnosed last August with Asperger’s syndrome, admits to hacking US military computers to fuel his UFO obsession.
• Template Twitter strategy for Government Departments | UK Cabinet Office: The UK has developed a standard 20-page template which departments can use for their own Twitter strategy. I can’t help think that it’ll kill spontaneity before it starts. “All other tweets will be cleared by staff at Information Officer grade and above in the digital media team, consulting relevant colleagues in comms and private offices as necessary.” Gawd.
• The Mind Of A US Army Sniper | newmatilda.com: A fine article on what it means for a soldier, particularly a sniper, to kill a person. And then do it again. Not an easy read, but an important read.
• Reconceptualising “time” and “space” in the era of electronic media and communications | Australian Policy Online: “This paper examines to what extent electronic media and communications have contributed to currently changing concepts of time and space and how crucial their role is in experiencing temporality, spatiality and mobility.”
• Cutthroat Capitalism: An Economic Analysis of the Somali Pirate Business Model | Wired: “Like any business, Somali piracy can be explained in purely economic terms. It flourishes by exploiting the incentives that drive international maritime trade. The other parties involved — shippers, insurers, private security contractors, and numerous national navies — stand to gain more (or at least lose less) by tolerating it than by putting up a serious fight. As for the pirates, their escalating demands are a method of price discovery, a way of gauging how much the market will bear.”
• Mark Thomas Info: I first encountered Mark Thomas by reading his book As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandala: underground adventures in the arms & torture trade. The stand-up comedian and activist for human rights is worth paying attention to.
• The Arms Trade | A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective: Sean Carmody turns his data analysis skills to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfer Database, which I mentioned the other day. This initial foray generates some nice maps.
• The Coming Upstream Revolution. And We Need It | Gigaom: Just as I thought, increasingly two-way communication on the web leads to increased demand for fast uplinks as well as downlinks.
• Metadata for news | BuzzMachine: Jeff Jarvis’ write-up of Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust proposal for a new standard for metadata for news, plus his own thoughts.
• SIPRI Arms Transfers Database | Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: A searchable database of all international transfers in seven categories of major conventional weapons from 1950 to the most recent full calendar year.

• Online Ad Rates Picking Up | The Business Insider: Based on a review of data from 6000 web publishers, it appears that online advertising is up 35% since its low-point of December 2008. Rates climbed 15% between May and June.
• Love is Old-Fashioned, Sex Less So | A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective: Comparing the music in the Triple J Hottest 100 and The Guardian’s recent list of 1000 songs to hear before you die, the Mule comes up with the view that love is out of fashion. Also, chart pr0n.
• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule | Paul Graham: This essay really speaks to me. If you’re a manager, then your schedule consists of those 1-hour blocks to beloved of scheduling software. But it you’re a maker, or someone creative, one hour is barely time to get started. A good discussion of how these two different working styles can be resolved.
• Too much networking? | msnbc.com: A network expert argues that less social networking would produce more radical innovation on the Internet. “An overabundance of connections over which information can travel too cheaply can reduce diversity, foster groupthink, and keep radical ideas from taking hold,” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, writes in this week’s issue of the journal Science.
• Electropulse weapon fear spreads to UK politicos | The Register: A campaign by US right wingers, designed to raise fears of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack they allege could cripple Western nations and lead to chaos, is targeting British politicians, with some success.
• God is not your bitch / This just in: It is hugely unlikely God cares much about your sex life | Mark Morford: A glorious rant about politicians and others exploit God to explain how they’re really, really going to change this time — amongst many other things.
• Best RSS feeds for information graphics | nicolasrapp.com: A collection of feeds which represents a nice mix of information graphics and data visualisations. (Is there a difference between those two terms?)
• Rebooting The News: A weekly podcast on news and technology with Jay Rosen and Dave Winer.
• The atmosphere in the control room gets tense … | Twitpic: This photograph is an overview of the control room as ABC TV’s Insiders is about to be broadcast last Sunday. Even with the combination of roles and reduction of control room staffing levels, broadcast TV is still a complicated beast!
• The Great American Bubble Machine | Rolling Stone: An astoundingly harsh critique of the US economy and, in particular, Goldman Sachs. The piece begins: The worlds most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”
• Why cops should trust the wisdom of the crowds | New Scientist: The “unruly mob” concept is usually taken as read and used as the basis for crowd control measures and evacuation procedures across the world. Yet it is almost entirely a myth.

• Shorpy Photo Archive | Best Pix on the Net: A vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to the 1950s. I could lose days here.
• Top 10 services you can use so you don’t have to stick to your monitor like “a mouse on cheese” (Jesus, is he gone yet?) | PR Week: Some useful tips on monitoring where you blip up in the social media universe. YMMV.
• Untitled | Pain on the posterior: Are we really living in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? Or is it really Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?
• A New Publication on Media Legislation in Africa | UNESCO-CI: “Media Legislation in Africa: A Comparative Legal Survey” is an overview of existing media legislation in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia, and a comparative analysis, putting the laws in perspective with regional and international standards and best-practices.
• Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter | MediaShift: It is what it says, and not a bad place to launch your own news organisation’s discussions.

• The Age of the Essay | Paul Graham: This essay dates from 2004, but it’s still valid. The essay, the kind that’s about exploring an issue, is a natural form of writing online. Plus I like his comments about disobedience and creativity.
• GLAM | Wikimedia Australia: One for your diaries! A little conference called “Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia: Finding the common ground” at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 6-7 August 2009. Hosted by Wikimedia Australia, with discussions on four themes: Education, Technology, Business, Law. To be opened by Senator Kate Lundy, Senator for the ACT.
• That 180ms is the bane of my life: Network engineer Glen Turner explains why the 180 milliseconds it takes for Internet data to cross the Pacific causes problems. “You’ve got to realise that Australia is almost unique in being a long way from the centre of gravity of its language. Broadly, almost all German-speakers live in Germany, whereas a tiny proportion of English-speakers live in Australia. That has an effect on Internet traffic. Most Internet traffic in Germany stays within Germany. Most Internet traffic in Australia goes offshore.”
• One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t…: Crude but effective.
• Media and Brand Supremacy: Why the New Media Brand Could Be Nike | The Huffington Post: Heidi Sinclair notes that individual journalists and commentators are sometimes bigger news brands than the outlets they work for. There’s plenty here which meshes with my complains that some folks don’t separate the content (“news”) from the container (“newspapers”).
• texts from last night: A scarily funny collection of people’s (allegedly) drunken text messages. Don’t click through unless you’ve got plenty of time to spare.
• Death in Birth – Where Life’s Start Is a Deadly Risk | NYTimes.com: The first of three articles on efforts to lower the death rate in Tanzania. Excellent timing, given Project TOTO. Challenging to read, however
• The Angelina Factor | Bitchy Jones’ Diary: A ranty article which, in language which may be confronting for some, explores the social and psycho-sexual issues around the idea that Angelina Jolie is universally sexually attractive. Just for the record, I do not find her the least bit attractive.
• Rethinking the Global Money Supply: Scientific American: China has proposed that the world move to a more symmetrical monetary system, in which nations peg their currencies to a representative basket of others rather than to the US dollar alone. The article includes a little history, too.
• “We did not know that child abuse was a crime,”says retired Catholic archbishop | the freethinker: The retired Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert G Weakland, says “We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature… [I] Accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it’.” WTF?
• Comedy Thrives in Times of Despair | Spiegel Online: Monty Python’s Michael Palin on what the financial crisis is a boon for comics, and the perils of political correctness.
• Hello Africa | Vimeo: A 42-minute documentary about mobile phone culture in Africa.
• Shell On Trial | newmatilda.com: Next week, Shell will appear before a US federal court on charges of torture, extra-judicial killing and crimes against humanity for incidents which took place in the Niger Delta. Will it be the first multinational found guilty of human rights abuses?
• Genital warts take Shoaib out of Twenty20 World Cup | ABC News: There was a time when someone’s medical history was considered private, even if they played sports professionally. Personally, I reckon the specific of Shoaib’s medical problem are none of anyone else’s business.
• PlugComputer Community: The developer community for Marvell’s Plug Computer.
• Plugging In $40 Computers | NYTimes.com: Marvell Technology Group has created a “plug computer”. A tiny plastic box you plug into an electric outlet. No display, but Gigabit Ethernet and a USB. Inside is a 1.2GHz processor running Linux, 512MB RAM and 512MB Flash memory. US$99 today, probably under US$40 in two years.
• Misguided middle-class moaners | BusinessDay: Ross Gittins explodes a few myths about Australia, class, taxation and social welfare.

• Frame grabbing: The art of drawing great photography from video | Nieman Journalism Lab: As the boundary between video and still camera blurs, photojournalists and other people we’d normally consider “photographers” are using video stills in mainstream media.
• How to kill five hours in Parliament House | Crikey Team: The wond’rously snarky Ruth Brown reports on a day in Australia’s Palace of Democracy. Great fun.
• Internet Meme Database | Know Your Meme: I haven’t explored it properly, but it does seem someone has decided to catalog all the stupid “memes” that proliferate online. Also, I hate this degradation of Richard Dawkin’s concept of memetics to mean “a joke we pass on”. Fuckwits.
• Computing in Melbourne: A Historical Tour: The next one’s on Sunday 31 May 2009, running 9.30am to 5pm, with plenty of tram travel and café-snacking along the way.
• Google outage lesson: Don’t get stuck in a cloud | Macworld: When I see stories like this, warning of the peril of relying on an external party for your IT needs, I often react by asking whether such an outage would be more or less likely on your own systems, given your own current contingency plans. But this piece also points out the interdependency of so many systems.
• Critical Mass, The Road, and a new wave of graphic nuke porn | Slate Magazine: Apparently our thrillers are no longer looking at the “before” and “after” of nuclear war, but more directly at what happens when the bomb drops.
• EWN – The Early Warning Network: The Australian Early Warning Network provides free emergency alerts covering everything from tsunamis through to severe weather, via SMS, pagers, phone (text to voice), web, email and their Desktop ALERT™. (I’m not sure how legit it is to trademark something as obvious as “Desktop ALERT” though.)
• Older Australians less likely to participate in the digital economy | ACMA: Nearly three out of four Australians (73%) have a home Internet connection and 87% of the population have used the Internet. In contrast, only 48% of people aged 65 and over have the Internet at home and 44% have never used the internet
• Anal Bleaching— NOT just for women | best of craigslist: When I posted this to Twitter, a disturbingly large number of people didn’t seem to realise that it was satire.
• 1952: London fog clears after days of chaos | BBC ON THIS DAY: Well, the “on this day” bit is for 9 December. Nevertheless, this has the echo of Kevin Rudd’s further delays in actually starting Australia’s response to global warming. In 1952, London's "Great Fog" killed 4000 people. Drastic action was called for. The Clean Air Act was rushed through… in 1956.
• 25 things about twitter that are pissing me off | The Bloggess: I couldn’t agree with her more. Also, she writes the best blog on the planet.
• China's Commercialization of Censorship | Far Eastern Economic Review: China’s government doesn’t have to do all the hard work of censorship itself, it just bullies commercial operators into doing it for them.

• VideoLAN: I was surprised to discover quite a few people who didn’ know about this free open source video player. It’s very good, you know, handling both downloaded files and live streams.
• The Iremonger Award | Allen & Unwin: A $10,000 prize for someone who was an idea for a non-fiction book which will “contribute to public debate on a contemporary Australian political, social or cultural issue”. Entries close 1 September 2009.
• Control freaks don’t get it: the web works best in a free-for-all | The Observer: John Naughton says it all on the 50th anniversary of C P Snow’s famous meme, the mutual incomprehensible “two cultures” of science and the “literary intellectuals”. But now, the two cultures are very different.
• Defence needs a plan for the Internet age | Tom Worthington via Link: Tom says the Australian government’s new defence white paper is deficient in not mentioning “Internet” or “web” at all. The section on cyber warfare envisages military personnel and scientists operating a “Cyber Security Operations Centre”. But without civilian support from organisations such as AusCERTt, the ADF will be vulnerable to cyber attack.
• Mogulus Live Broadcast: I’ve been using Ustream.TV to do Stilgherrian Live. This new (?) service still officially in beta offers the full mix of live video streaming, video on demand of previous programs, and 24/7 streaming of pre-sequenced programs. I will definitely be exploring this properly soon!

• Australia 2020: Government Response: A year after the event which seemed so important at the time, we finally have the government’s response.
• Developments in internet filtering technologies and other measures for promoting online safety | ACMA: The second of ACMA’s three annual reports on “developments in internet filtering technologies and other safety initiatives to protect consumers, including minors, who access content on the internet”.
• The Full Story: “The Full Story is a media and information release portal where individuals and organisations can post breaking news, publicity, information or their side of the story on issues of local or national importance — free, as it happens, unedited and in full.”
• Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview | McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: “Course Description: As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.”
• NBN Luddites will be proven wrong | BuddeBlog: Analyst Paul Budde with another thoughtful piece.
• RedR Australia: This organisation provides training for people working in overseas aid and disaster relief, covering everything from logistics to personal protection. Yes, there is a reason this is being bookmarked, but it’s secret.
• Swine flu: Twitter’s power to misinform | Net Effect: Once more, the usual human trait of passing on information which may or may not be true is blamed on Twitter, not on the humans. Fail.

• Noteboek | Vimeo: Evelien Lohbeck’s short film creates a notebook computer out of a paper notebook.
• Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit (8-Bit Remix)” | DoseNation: Somehow, this hugely-successful rock song still sounds good played on cheesey 8-bit synthesisers.
• Towards a Taxonomy of blogs | Creative Economy Online: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons reckons that before we descend into the loggers versus journalists debate then we should define our terms. She proposes a classification of blog types.
• Rooftop STUB | Flickr: Will Hughes’ stills photography of Saturday’s party.
• What is wrong with Strawberry Amyl Nitrate? | Vimeo: Will Hughes took this video at Saturday’s rooftop party in Surry Hills. It contains rather too much of me, and certainly too much of my tongue.
• slow down london: Running from 24 April through to 4 May, this festival about “living life in real time” is striking a chord.
• Is Social Media Too Fast? | Convince & Convert: Jason Baer kicks off a discussion about the incredible pace of social media. “This of course requires me to jump from task to message to task to message like a Russian dancing bear on crack,” he says. Perhaps it’s time to choose to slow down? I’ll definitely have more to say about this anon.
• “One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is A Girl Who Is Not Probably Groomed On All Parts Of Her Body” – Arthur Kade | Jezebel: There is just so much wrong with this man’s worldview that I don’t know where to begin.
• a warning from the newspaper biz | overland literary journal: Can the book industry learn from what’s happening to newspapers? Amongst the great questions asked is: “Will an author’s share of revenue on e-books be a traditional fixed percentage, or a variable, we’re-not-going-to-tell-you-what-we-received-from-your-work-but-here’s-a-quarter-go-buy-yourself-something-nice percentage of advertising revenue that Google might deign to dole out (as it does with ad revenue to site/blog owners)?”

• A Cyber-Attack on an American City | Bruce Perens: On 9 April, people unknown decided to cut the eight fibre optic cables serving the northern Californian city of Morgan Hill. This essay outlines the risks.
• Upbeat office culture fake and creepy, says Alain de Botton | News.com.au: While I’m perhaps jealous of Alain de Botton’s ability to make a living out of this kind of pop philosophy, but he’s got a point.
• Australia’s top 100 Journalists and news media people on Twitter | the earley edition: At least Dave Earley says, “That post title is utter bollocks and mere linkbait. This list does not in any way rank influence, importance or interest, and it contains far more than 100 people. It is also not ‘exhaustive’, since there’s no way I could find and list everyone, just exhausting.”
• Home ownership: real estate dream ‘becoming a complicated nightmare’ | theage.com.au: Hear hear! “For the record, rent money is not dead money. Renters are paying for a service — shelter and protection from the cold. Hardly wasted money. Worse, the deriding of rent as ‘dead money’ incorrectly implies that money spent on mortgage interest payments is somehow ‘alive money’, or a useful investment. Last time I checked, a mortgage holder with a $300,000 mortgage pays $1400 a month in interest payments straight to the pockets of those same banking chiefs we all say we despise.”