Saturday 15 May 2010

The Weekly Links Post: No. 9

Apologies for last week's illness-enforced break in transmissions. Health and verticality have been restored. We now return you to Episode 9 of our scheduled programme:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology
(Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Twitter predicts the election results. Or at least does somewhat better than most of the established polls.

Why some of the best election data came from amateurs.

Paul Chambers on the Twitter joke that got him a criminal record. (For the full story, see Social Media links below).

Apparently, it's not just me who's irritated by Facebook's ever-changing privacy settings.

Social Media

Careful what you write on Twitter - and pretty much anywhere online.

Jack of Kent explains why he believes the legislation used to convict Paul Chambers is flawed, illiberal and dangerously open to misuse.

Paul Chambers' partner tells her half of the story.

Wired calls for an open source alternative to Facebook.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Only 3% of all books published in the US (and UK) are works in translation - hence the excellent Three Percent blog, which aims to highlight the best in translated fiction and poetry published in America. It's also home to the Best Translated Book Award.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

SeeSaw.com: a new TV catch-up site, offering BBC, 4oD and Five all in one place.

Not keen on the recent changes to Google? You can still go back to the old search page - for now.

Music

CODEORGAN: find out what any website sounds like as music - even this blogpost.

Games & Other Distractions

"When a certain Kafka story, named Before The Law, awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, it found itself transformed... into a short browser-based interactive Flash thing."

Miscellaneous

Scientific study finds that maybe we just shouldn't be giving knives to robots.

BBC Radio 4's archive of In Our Time is now available online - as well as over 500 radio documentaries from the World Service, ranging from Afghan Bloggers to Mexico's Missing Island to The Virtual Revolution.

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