Stilgherrian » news

Links for 23 September 2008 through 25 September 2008

del.icio.us — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:37:51 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 23 September 2008 through 25 September 2008, scrubbed up with a wire brush:

Australia: Twitter statistics | Laurel Papworth: Twitter usage is up 518.12% in Australia, if you believe (1) that website traffic is the relevant metric, and (2) you can possibly measure this stuff to 5 significant figures.
Wotnews Australian News Search: Wotnews used to be called Plugger, but they’re now associated with Wotif in some way. Wotnews harvests news from over 3500 different sources including mainstream publishers, niche blogs, direct from companies and government bodies as well as from the relentless stream of company announcements coming out of the Australian Stock Exchange.
Tax Plans (that’s one for you, nineteen for me) | chartjunk: Viveka Weiley’s re-drawing of charts comparing John McCain and Barack Obama’s tax plans. The difference is pretty obvious.
Text Messages Seen as Dangerously Distracting | NYTimes.com: “The act of texting automatically removes 10 I.Q. points” and many other scare-quotes.

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Links for 21 July 2008 through 25 July 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:49:30 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 21 July 2008 through 25 July 2008, gathered by a small, well-trained pig, washed by hand and exposed to cool, dry air:

The Changing Newsroom | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ): A detailed analysis of the American daily newspaper of 2008, incuding the role of citizen journalist and a look to the future.
Google Maps (Part I of "The Googling") | YouTube: The first of 5 short films about a Google-run world gone scary.
How to Think | Ed Boyden's blog:: "I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. I've listed them here, followed by some practical advice on implementation."
2055: Voyage to Mars | YouTube: 9 minutes of animation by David Ross, with no CGI whatsoever. A fine tribute to an almost-lost craft.
Font Conference | CollegeHumor video: It's not often I can tag a video both "typography" and "humour", but here it is…
Manned spaceship design unveiled | BBC News: The first official image of a Russian-European manned spacecraft has been released. It is designed to replace the Soyuz vehicle currently in use by Russia.
Afghanistan. 1986-1987. It is photographed by the pilot of the helicopter. | Military Photos: My crusty Cold War correspondent writes: "Militaryphotos.net is frequented by Walter Mittyish paintball types, but they occasionally post material of real interest." Like a Soviet helicopter pilot's personal photos from his 1986-87 tour of Afghanistan.
Privacy | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: After Mark Pesce's offhand remark that privacy was a construct of the Enlightenment, I decided to do some reading. This is where I started.

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Links for 04 June 2008 through 11 June 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:10:53 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 04 June 2008 through 11 June 2008, collected semi-automatically:

The Big Picture | Boston.com: "News stories in photographs", it says. Daily photo-essays of about 15 images, nice and big.
Earth's Seasons | US Naval Observatory: The times of the Summer and Winter Solstices, Aphelion and Perihelion for every year until 2020.
Stories We've Seen Too Often | Strange Horizons: A list of story plots and themes which this online publisher has seen far too often. Tr�s amusement.
The Sassy Uterus: Someone on Twitter said this was the best blog title he'd seen in ages. I visited and found myself reading post after witty post about… childbirth and raising a baby. Like I'd normally care!
Writing Style for Print vs Web | Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Linear vs. non-linear. Author-driven vs. reader-driven. Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content. Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data. Sentences vs. fragments.
Graffletopia: A massive collection of stencils (templates) for the OS X diagram/graphics tool OmniGraffle.
Waiting for the Rapture | IEEE Spectrum: The singularitarians believe that in the next several decades we?ll have computers into which you?ll be able to upload your consciousness: immortality.

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Links for 07 May 2008

del.icio.us — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:50:51 +0000

Here are the web links I’ve found for 07 May 2008, posted automatically.

Is Your Consumer Using Social Media? | Advertising Age: Nine Profiles of Who Your Targets Are and Where They Might Be Online
Staralicious: The guy behind this Australian-run celebrity gossip site was interviewed by 2web Crew today. The podcast should be online soon
RedZee: A new search engine (still in Beta) with a very cute animation on the home page and an interesting visualisation technique inside. Will this slow things down and annoy regular users? Or does it actually provide something of value? No time to explore today
The Inquisitr: a new website about "Tech, Pop and Penguins", or something, from former TechCrunch writer and damn nice guy Duncan Riley. good luck, mate!
the global microbrand rant | gapingvoid: Hugh MacLeod's excellent overview of how you can leverage yourself into a global brand using The Power of he Internet.
How Little Do Users Read? | Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

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Links for 27 April 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:44:07 +0000

I’ve decided to have another go at publishing the links I find online. So, thanks to del.icio.us and some mild semi-automation, here’s today’s batch.

The Newseum: The interactive museum of news, including "today's front pages" for 500+ world newspapers.
TV Fugly Awards: An "alternative" to Australia's Logie awards for TV.
Eurovision Song Contest - Belgrade 2008: Official website of the Eurovision Song Contest.
The Bugle | Times Online: Weekly news satire audio podcast from the UK.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics: Richard Hofstadter's article from Harper's Magazine, November 1964. Paranoia Politics isn't new.
Twitter Rulez! (via Todd Langowski) | Newick: An apt sign spotted in workplace.
Plugger: Australian Business News: A customisable aggregator for Australian business news.
Secondary DNS Service: An inexpensive service which provides secondary domain name servers.
The seriously inconvenient truth on drugs | the Daily Mail: UK Daily Mail columnist Andrew Alexander puts a cogent case for the decriminalisation of recreational drugs.
A second summer of love: 20th anniversary of acid house: The Guardian's retrospective on the acid house Summer of Love of 1988.
The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report 2008: A 20-page report on the state of the open source software world in Australia. A freely downloadable PDF and is redistributable under a Creative Commons BY-ND license.

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The Pointlessness of News

Stilgherrian — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 23:50:48 +0000

When I posted about the astronaut attempted kidnapping story the other day, I hadn’t realised it had already become a major global story. Now Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner asks: Why?

I realize the story represents a sort of perfect storm of media stickiness — a female perp and a female victim, lust, revenge, NASA, pepper spray, and of course the diaper — but I have to confess that I am overwhelmed that this has become such a round-the-clock story. Who cares, and why? They were even talking about the story on the two ESPN shows I saw pieces of last night (SportsCenter and Pardon the Interruption); in each case, the anchors sheepishly acknowledged that the story had zero to do with sports but… they simply couldn’t resist.

With 63 comments so far, there’s plenty of interesting ideas. Well worth the read. The highlights for me…

High-brow tip o’the hat to the guy who quoted Henry David Thoreau:

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Media-awareness hat-tip to:

In this internet age, news organizations have a built-in focus group. If they post this on their site and gets lots of page views (people clicked to read the article), they know it is a “winner” so they cover it more.

And the low-brow hat-tip to the very first comment:

A woman in diapers pretty much does it for me. If you don’t understand this story then I suggest that you are sexually dead.

God I love the Internet…