Monday 17 January 2011

The (Just After The) Weekend Links Post: No. 34

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. A little late this week, following some 24-hour live-blogging (32 hours awake, in all, but definitely worth it):

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).

As smartphones get smarter, how will their innovations transform our lives and the 'social web'?

Evgeny Morozov explains his new book The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World; plus, Tom Chatfield's review.

Who can you trust on Twitter? Peer Index releases list of most authoritative journalists on Twitter.

Universal and Sony Music to make new singles available as soon as they hit the radio - only highlighting exactly how slow the big record labels have been at facing piracy and the shift to MP3s.

Clay Shirky on the birth of Wikipedia and its 10th birthday.

Social Media

Tunisia: the revolution that's being ignored by social media. More here.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The 2010 Digital Book World Publishing Innovation Awards 2010: the longlist.

Electric Literature's very literal approach to the question: "Can a book save your life?"



Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Search Engine Blacklist: remove content-farms and other spam results from your Google searches [Chrome extension]. (Also see: Marco Arment of Instapaper on the problem of Google search spam.)

Music

Gogoyoko: DRM-free, ethical online music store and social network - with free album streaming.

The Recombinant DNA of the Mash-Up: an interactive timeline of the major milestones of the past 104 years.

Games & Other Distractions

But That Was Yesterday: interactive art game about moving on from painful memories (the beginning seems impossible at first, but you'll figure it out soon enough).

Miscellaneous

From a theremin wristwatch to a violin playing cockroach: a rundown of The 2010 Kickstarter Awards.

Collective buying power: a new trend in crowdsourcing?

"One need not agree with WikiLeaks' modus operandi to acknowledge its service to democracy": Twelve theses on WikiLeaks.