We’re two weeks into Australia’s federal election campaign, and of course the unhinging continues.
Continue reading “The 9pm Election Unhinging: Week the Second”The 9pm Election Unhinging: Week the Second
Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009:
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.
Continue reading “Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009”
Links for 22 October 2009 through 27 October 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 22 October 2009 through 27 October 2009, published after far too long a break. I really, really do need to work out a better way of doing this…
- 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.
Links for 15 October 2009 through 19 October 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 15 October 2009 through 19 October 2009, gathered with bile and soaked in vinegar:
- 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?
Links for 30 September 2009 through 13 October 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 30 September 2009 through 13 October 2009, gathered automatically but then left to languish for two weeks before publication.
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?
Continue reading “Links for 30 September 2009 through 13 October 2009”
Links for 22 September 2009 through 26 September 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 22 September 2009 through 26 September 2009, gathered intermittently and posted with a lack of attention to detail:
- 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?