• 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.

• The sexual habits of British men and women over 40 years old | Wiley InterScience: A large population-based study which provides the first report on the frequency and timing of sexual activity in British men and women. Over 40.
• saving paradise: Liz Mwambui’s blog, written for Nature Seychelles, is a great example of “personal voice” in an NGO’s corporate blog.
• Washing/Moscow Hot Line: A history of the direct communications link which went into service in 1963.
• Encyclopedia Astronautica: A wonderful compendium of information about spacecraft — actual, projected and mythical.
• Google Flu Trends: Google has found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.
• Nirvana vs Rick Astley: Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit Up | YouTube: A very fine (and scary!) mashup by German-based DJ Morgoth. I’ve had to play it several times now, it’s that good.
• Narcissism and Social Networking Web Sites | Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: Research by Laura E Buffardi and W Keith Campbell at the University of Georgia (US) shows that people using social media sites like Facebook can actually tell, just by looking at a person's profile, whether they're narcissistic or not.
• Totally Wasted | Mother Jones: A major feature on America’s War on Drugs. Plenty to ingest. I mean digest.
• The folly of pretence | Daniel Dennett | The Guardian: One of the greatest philosophers of the mind, a man I’ve actually had the pleasure of meeting, explains why everyone needs to move on from “the God question” — including the militant atheists.

• Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warns of surveillance culture | Times Online: Laws that allow officials to monitor the behaviour of millions of Britons risk “hardwiring surveillance” into the British way of life, the country’s privacy watchdog has warned.
• Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers | New Scientist: “Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” says researcher Benjamin Edelman.
• Chatham House Rule | Wikipedia: A rule for running a meeting where people can speak freely but their confidentiality is respected. The rule itself is: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” The Wikipedia article gives the background.
• Australian Internet Filtering Debate at Kickstart 2009 | Midnight Update: A video of the Internet Filtering debate at Kickstart 09 from the weekend, including Bernadette McMenamin from Child Wise, Anthony Pillion from Webshield, Geordie Guy from EFA, and Mark Newton. I’ll write more upon this later, maybe.
• Internet Study 2007 | ipoque: A report on the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, Voice over IP, Skype, Joost, instant messaging, media streaming such as YouTube, from a traffic point of view.

There’s lots and lots of good material to read here, but I don’t want it to dominate my home page so they’re all over the jump.

• Famous Twits: 50 Celebrities on Twitter | Laurel Papworth: If you’re after “famous people” on Twitter, here’s a good a list as any to start with.
• When Aeroflot Passengers Rejected Their Pilot | Moscow Times: The pilot was drunk. Aeroflot’s reaction? “Meh. He only has to press a button. No problem.” You can’t make this stuff up!
• Facebook, MySpace drive mobile web use | News.com.au: A survey of 500 people by Sweeney Research has shown 31% of Australians access the web via their mobile phone handset. Or, if you prefer, more than two-thirds still don’t.
• P J O’Rourke: How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink: A classic O’Rourke rant from 1986.
• 2nd Annual PR & New Media Summit 2009: There’s a bunch of familiar names presenting at this conference on 3 to 4 March. I doubt I’ll make this one, but you never know.
• Rich man, poor man: study shows body language can indicate socioeconomic status | Physorg.com: A new study in Psychological Science reveals that non-verbal cues can give away a person’s socioeconomic status (SES). Volunteers whose parents were from upper SES backgrounds displayed more disengagement-related behaviors compared to participants from lower SES backgrounds. In addition, when a separate group of observers were shown 60 second clips of the videos, they were able to correctly guess the participants’ SES background, based on their body language.
• So Many iPhone Apps, So Little Time | NYTimes.com: Why the iPhone app store and the Ocarina application in particular represent a whole new wave of software development.
• A Definition Of Piracy In The Digital Age | Link: I’d imagined that the use of the term “piracy” to cover copyright infringement was a recent invention of the music and movie industries. Not so. Rick Welykochy traces it back to 1906.
• Drugs ‘legal in 10 years’ claim | BBC News: The Chief Constable of North Wales reminds us (from just over a year ago) that prohibition doesn’t work. Half of all reported crime is about feeding a drug habit.
• Why telcos should fear Twitter | ZDNet Australia: The short answer is that Twitter can replace SMS with a far more flexible tool. And about time. Telcos have been charging the equivalent of $1 million per gigabyte to send an SMS. It’s a rort.
• How to troubleshoot the POP3 Connector in Windows Small Business Server 2003 | Microsoft: What it says. This article didn’t help me with today’s problem, but it will certainly come in useful.
• Ecstasy ‘no worse than horse riding’ | News.com.au: Professor David Nutt, chairman of the UK Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), is a scientist and can do the maths. “This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates — indeed encourages — certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others such as drug use.”
• Aussies OK pirated software for personal use | CRN Australia: A study commissioned by Microsoft found that almost half of Australians believe it’s OK to use pirated software for personal use. Many can’t tell the difference between genuine and illegal software.
• Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death Search Magazine: American satirist P j O’Rourke writes about his experience of being diagnosed with cancer.
• Your Vision for 2009 | GetUp! Campaign Actions: Political campaigning organisation GetUp! presents the results of its latest survey of members.
• So why is filtering a pointless exercise? | sirchriss: An education technologist outlines why trying to provide a filtered Internet is ultimately self-defeating.
• How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections | PBS MediaShift: Former ABC journalist Julie Posetti describes how her students used Twitter to cover Australian elections.
• Politics and Technology Forum: Campaigning Online | Microsoft Events: The second annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum is in Canberra on 26 February. I’ll be liveblogging it on this website, and there’ll be a special Stilgherrian Live Road Trip on the way. Details soon. Keynote speaker is Joe Trippi, who’s run several (unsuccessful) Democrat US presidential campaigns, and speakers include Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull and Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner.
• Why Teens Don’t Twitter | A Meaningful Life: Marc Lehmann’s take on the reason for the (apparent) older demographic profile of Twitter users.
• Text, text, text | Inside Story: Is the energy, liveliness and to-the-pointness of text-messaging already history, asks Richard Johnstone in this article from October 2008.
• Liam Vickery’s Blog: Top Aussies On Twitter: Liam Vickery’s personal choices for the top Australian twitterers. I don’t know Liam, but have seen him about on Twitter.
• Forgive Us Our Debts | newmatilda.com: Is debt really all that bad? In this extract from her new book, Margaret Atwood measures the changing moral weight of debt.
• Entering the Mobile Ecosystem | Silicon Federation: "Would you like to put your brand on a device that customers can't be without, a device they reach for many times a day?" A seminar on creating an iPhone app for your business.
• Spot the difference? | middleclassgirl.com: Whatever happened to TV presenter Naomi Robson?
• Ten Tweets about Twitter | the [non]billable hour: Some rather good tips to getting your head around Twitter.
• Global recession – where did all the money go? | guardian.co.uk: This set of diagrams steps through the different kinds of money, showing why the global financial system is unstable and, effectively, a giant pyramid scheme.
• Of Time and Twitter | Woolly Days: Another nice overview of Twitter’s rise, with an emphasis on journalism. However I suspect that the story of an “all-Twitter newspaper” from Scotland is a hoax.
• Twitter journalism, beyond happenstance | Almighty Link: “When US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing on the Hudson River, a few non-journalists used their investigative instincts and some basic Twitter tools to find details about the news and share it with the world.” This article is another exploring the boundaries of who is and isn’t “doing journalism”.
• More Silliness: Congressman Wants to Ban “Silent” Cell Phone Cameras | Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: There’s a push of sorts in the US to make all phone cameras make a sound when they take a photo. As Weinstein points out, there’s no evidence there’s actually a problem to address, there are many other kinds of camera smaller than phone cameras, and even phone cameras can shoot in video mode — where a continuous sound would ruin the audio recording.
• Twitter | The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry: Stephen Fry, who now has 88,000+ followers on Twitter and rising rapidly, explains how he uses Twitter at this incredibly high volume — and requests understanding and a bit of self-help.
• Virtual Assistant – Nicole Hammett Business Support: This website isn’t the most brilliant graphic design (it’s a bit generic), but it builds trust in the business for two simple reasons: It explains clearly what this person does, and the rate card says very clearly what it’ll cost. None of this vague “our rates are competitive” and then asking you for all of your contact details. The only real turn-off for me is the generic stock-photography image of a harried office worker (what value does that add?) when it’d be better to have a photo of Nicole herself.

• VPNOut: “VPNOut provides secure and anonymous VPN access that can break through firewalls.” And past censorship.
• Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator Video | YouTube: A remarkable “concept video” looking at how we might use computers and the Internet in “the future”, i.e. now.
• EGovernment nets most callers: survey | PS News: A Department of Finance and Deregulation survey has found more Australians now contact the Government via the internet than they do by phone or in person.
• Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about?: Apparently on Twitter I swear “like a George Carlin Wannabe”. I’m ranked 355th in the world, putting me in the very top percentile. I wonder what the stats would look like for Australians only?
• 7 Steps To Build A Startup From Scratch With No Money | YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog: What it says.
• Dark Dungeons | Chick Publications: This book from a well-established evangelistic Christian publisher, points out the evils of role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
• Obituary: Sir John Mortimer | guardian.co.uk: Geoffrey Robertson’s obituary of Sir John Mortimer, creator of fictional lawyer Rumpole of the Bailey and a decent lawyer in his own right. Apparently in his youth Mortimer “encountered with interest the bookshop-owning lesbians who had taken opium with Cocteau, and a prim, elderly lady who had, in her youth, urinated regularly upon pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis.” Goodness me.
• Schapelle Corby Tour: “My name is Eddie Hutauruk and I have been running tours in Bali for over 8 years. Schapelle Corby Tours is our latest venture, and is fully respectful of Schapelle and her situation… Schapelle Corby is a convicted Australian drug runner, and my tours allow people to see Schapelle in her cage at Kerobokan Prison in Bali. Tours can be arranged for most days of the week and pick-up is possible from most Bali hotels.” Very clever.
• Folk Devils and Internet Safety | Daithí mac Sithigh’s blog on cyberlaw & media law: Another view on the report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force which said, amongst other things, that the risks of bullying online are far more important that worrying about the rare instances of adults soliciting for sex.
• A chat with Fake Stephen Conroy | ZDNet Australia: What is says. Rather amusing, I reckon. And no, I am not Fake Stephen Conroy. But I have my suspicions about who it really is…

• Who is watching YouTube? The US courts want to know | ABC News: Are IP addresses personal information? Peter Black's take on the recent YouTube vs Viacom decision. With a lengthy comment by yours truly.
• stripe – what you want on radio: A new multi-channel "Internet radio" service due to go live on 29 July. Subscription model, based in Australia. Investors include Glenn Wheatley and Alan Jones.
• "Is St Isidore of Seville really the Patron Saint of the Internet?": Short answer: Yes.

• Flat Earth News: The official website for Nick Davies' book, which various people have suggested I read.
• Straw man | Wikipedia: "A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position." Tagged as a reminder to certain blog commenters.
• Zappos.com: Who'd have thought that people would buy shoes online? Who'd have thought that a company would use Twitter and other social media to do great customer service (or so I'm told)?
• Journalism: A Toxic Culture? (Or: Why Aren’t We Having More Fun?) | contentious.com: Amy Gahran helps explain why journalists are so defensive about their craft these days, and posits that they have "Priesthood Syndrome".
• The plastic buttons we push | Amit Gupta likes you!: How do you make a living? Is it by pushing plastic buttons all day?
• Is Social Media The Ultimate Buzz Kill? | Awake At The Wheel: Are we becoming so addicted to telling people about what we're experencing that we actually forget to experience it?
• Principia Discordia Hardback | Synaptyclypse Generator: The central Discordian text, "Principia Discordia", is once more available in hardback. I am well pleased.
• DIY carbon change | Unleashed: "Sometime in the last two weeks I stopped believing in government," says Mark Pesce. If governments are failing to respond to this vital issue, then we can ignore them and handle this ourselves.