Sunday, 31 October 2010

The Weekend Links Post: No. 28

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

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).

UK's £100bn internet economy now "more valuable to the country than transport, construction or the utilities industries."

LimeWire shut down by US federal court; not that it probably makes much difference.

UK MPs have got it in for Google, over privacy and Street View.

MySpace becomes Myspace, and has a redesign (all of which the UK will have to wait 'til mid-November to ignore).

Social Media

What Facebook's "Top News" feed decides to show you and why.

Social games developer Zynga's estimated worth now surpasses Electronic Arts.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The real demand for pirated e-books - a re-examination of recent figures.

Struggling with writer's block? One Page Per Day presents you with a simple blank page to fill - with something, anything - every day. (And here are some glimpses of what users have written already.)

Electric Literature: a literary journal with expansive, innovative ambitions for digital literature.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Spoon: run popular desktop applications within a browser and without installation (very handy if you're away from your usual machine).

Scrivener: the formerly Mac-only award-winning program for writers is now available in a free public beta version for Windows (full release due in early 2011).

Music

Ten Tracks: download a new curated mixtape of ten tracks every month, with all artists fairly remunerated.

Games & Other Distractions

Scrabb.ly: a massively multiplayer online Scrabble game, that Hasbro hasn't had closed down yet. (Here its creator describes how the idea came about, and its development).

Miscellaneous

One for Halloween: some of the strangest tombstones in the world.

Rewritable pillows - probably best not to fall asleep on one though, if you don't want a rewritable face.

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