The Weekend Links Post: No. 25

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).

Paul Chambers' appeal against 'Twitter joke trial' verdict comes to court - the judge and magistrates have retired to consider their ruling.

Bindi Karia: the 'Queen of Startups'.

The Do Lectures 2010 - a sort of mini TED conference for those who don't mind camping.

Lengthy Facebook outage solved by... that's right, turning the whole thing off and on again.

Twitter internet worm affects thousands of users - but damage is limited thanks to its Web 2.0 foundations.

Social Media

Mashable's 29 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed.

Facebook appears to be chipping away at user privacy again with a "de facto 'Follow' feature".

Twitter to become even more useful to business with free real-time analytics dashboard, to be launched before the end of the year.

Why the editor of Wired UK is not on Facebook.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Is interactive fiction the future of books? Design agency IDEO thinks so.

The e-reads.com blog begins a weekly series of posts on e-book piracy (a short post to begin with, but plenty going on in the comments).

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Print Edit: a Firefox add-on that lets you format web pages to print only what you want to print.

Music

Love H.E.R. Madly: free mash-up album, by Figment, blending UK hip-hop tracks with samples from The Doors.

Games & Other Distractions

Find and play old DOS games: MakeUseOf.com lists its seven favourite sites.

Miscellaneous

Internet Week Europe, "celebrating Europe's thriving Internet industry and community", coming to London 8-12 November 2010.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 24

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).

A lesson in how not to handle social media - this time, courtesy of the Royal Opera House .

FTSE Techmark index at highest point since 2001.

Internet Explorer 9 (beta) launches - but how does it measure up?

Google to add more 'social layers' to its services, but not creating a Facebook killer.

The importance of net neutrality, according to Tim Berners-Lee.

Social Media

Twitter is now much easier to use, with a new two-pane layout.

Facebook's location publishing app 'Places' now available in the UK.

The increasing importance of 'social' to 'search'.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

FLOW: The Free Word Festival is currently in progress at the Free Word Centre, London - running 14th September to 5th October 2010.

26 Treasues at the V&A Museum showcases a collection of 62-word reflections on 26 objects within the museum - running 18-26 September 2010.

Watch as 36 authors create a novel, live and online, in six days - from 11-16 October 2010.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Q10: an excellent distraction-free and customisable full-screen text editor.

Music

MusicLink.fm: a faster, simpler way to play full albums on Grooveshark.

Games & Other Distractions

Haiku Hero: write haikus against the clock, with bonus points for meeting various rules and constraints.

Miscellaneous

Carrier pigeon better than broadband for data transfer in some parts of UK.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 23

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).

How will Google Instant affect SEO and Google's own AdWords system?

Steven Poole reviews Born Digital: Understanding The First Generation of Digital Natives - and rebuts Nicholas Carr's pessimism in The Shallows.

The new mapping revolution: the pros and possible cons of today's dynamic, interactive maps.

Whatever happened to Dopplr?

Social Media

How a link spreads through the Twittersphere: depicted in visualisations oddly reminiscent of the creatures in flOw.

Experiments in selling virtual goods to build real world brand awareness.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The first interactive audio novel on Spotify: just open the application and search for "A5M4". Don't Let Go is written by Joe Stretch, and read by Anna Friel with music by Hurts.

Mortal Kiss: the first interactive novel Random House has published on a social network.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Reading Glasses: a Chrome extension that dims everything but the text, for distraction-free online reading.

Can't get a tune out of your head? Replace it with another one at unhearit.

Music

On Friday, the panel of BBC2's The Review Show discussed the future of music - well worth a watch, for those interested.

Games & Other Distractions

Solipskier: draw slopes beneath a stick-man to keep him skiing, speed him up and execute tricks.

The New York Times Magazine investigates the ethics of depicting contemporary conflicts in video games.

Miscellaneous

How to choose the right CMS - including a Top 5, three to watch and one to avoid.

Why 'content farming' sites will prosper only in the short-term.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 22

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).

Ping: does Apple have designs on social networking?

Can the technologies killing long-form journalism, instead, help to promote it?

Web ads have only a quarter of the worth of print ads, according to Enders Analysis (N.B. a proper company, not the research wing of Inside Soap).

Google lays out its new display advertising strategies.

Digg's redesign prompts user protests.

Social Media

MySpace announces Facebook sync, prior to an Autumn redesign.

The success rate of Facebook spam.

YouTube is finally beginning to make money, thanks to ads and profitable partnerships with content creators.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The future of book reviewing? 60-second reviews on YouTube, according to Washington Post's fiction editor.

Mashable profiles Fictionaut, an online writing community / crowd-sourced literary magazine.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

MIT OpenCourseWare: "a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content," free and available to all.

Google Reader has been updated: now, simply hit 'f' for a full-screen view; plus, various other new features and shortcuts.

Music

The Wilderness Downtown by Arcade Fire: not your average music video. An impressive mash-up of HTML5 trickery, interactive drawing and personalised footage from Google Maps and Street View. (If Chrome starts doing odd things, don't worry, that's supposed to happen.)

Games & Other Distractions

Enjoyed the Arcade Fire video? More Chrome experiments, games and toys to play with here.

Miscellaneous

Snoop Dogg and Norton join together to fight cybercrime. (Zock! Pow! Take that, incongruity!)

Sigh.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 21

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).

Why the internet isn't as important as we think it is, according to economist Ha-Joon Chang.

The interactive datamap that investigates and charts the growth of Twitter.

Social Innovation Camp: hacking to make the world a better place.

Guardian Tech is a newspaper supplement, again - online.

Social Media

We are all bloggers now, blogging has taken over the world, according to The Independent.

Diaspora - an open-source, privacy-aware alternative to Facebook - to launch on 15th September.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

JotSpeak: audio networking for writers. (More info at The Compulsive Reader.)

3-Day Novel Contest: for those who think a month is just too long, presumably?

Wylie Agency and Random House reach ebook truce; Wylie now in negotiations with Penguin.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Jolicloud: the free, cloud-based netbook operating system is now in version 1.0 and available to all.

The Polyglot Project: improve your language skills, read foreign literature online with a built-in translation tool. (Has a few flaws, at this early stage, but worth keeping an eye on).

Music

Pitchfork's Top 50 Music Videos of the 1990s - and, over the coming week, a countdown of the Top 200 Tracks.

Games & Other Distractions

YouTube UK now has free full-length movies - er, quite a mixed bag at present, though, I think it's fair to say...

Miscellaneous

TIME Magazine's '50 Best Websites 2010'.

The Future of the Internet, as predicted by Smashing Magazine.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 20

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 (well, when I'm not moving house anyway):

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).

The future for virtual worlds - and their not-so-virtual economies.

The internet: is it changing the way we think? (Oddly, no mention of edge.org asking much the same question not that long ago).

Social Media

Social marketing, or socially-reactive marketing? Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk takes a look at the potential of reputation-tracking tools like Revinate and ScanBuzz.

Facebook adds location awareness feature Places - but so far just in the US.

And why Facebook Places might not be entirely 'a good thing'.

Rounds: a video-chat social network - think Chatroulette with elements of Facebook.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The Bat Segundo Show: excellent literature/culture podcast, hosted by litblogger Ed Champion and named after the radio show at the end of David Mitchell's Ghostwritten. (Link to show archive here.)

'I've decided not publish any more books in the traditional way,' says Seth Godin. 'I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically.'

Looking For Truth With A Pin: a 2005 BBC4 documentary on deadpan melancomic poet/musician/writer Ivor Cutler; which someone's helpfully uploaded to YouTube (link goes to Part 1 of 6).

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Matrix: the flight price-comparison engine behind services like Kayak - but ad-free.

Music

Shuffler: a new streaming radio service powered by music blogs (imagine Pandora fed by Hype Machine, but with stations organised by genre and each new track accompanied by the blog post where it was posted).

Sad Steve: simple, ad-free MP3 search engine.

Games & Other Distractions

Violet: defeat procrastination, or lose your girlfriend; an award-winning interactive fiction rom-com.

Miscellaneous

Is the World Wide Web dead?: Wired asks whether apps and mobile devices are fundamentally changing our internet use; also featuring a three-way e-mail debate between Chris Anderson, Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle.

Unsuck It: cynical and irreverent online translations of common (and hopefullly not-so-common) business jargon.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 19

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).

Crowdsourcing doesn't work, says UK government (or actions to that effect).

Carphone Warehouse launches 'infinite MP3 player' cloud music service.

On being young and lonely in the age of social networking.

The tablets are working, says Murdoch, tablets are our future. (Meaning the iPad, etc. Obviously.)

Social Media

Ian Bogost explains the mechanics of social games (e.g. Farmville) and why he created Cow Clicker: "a Facebook game about Facebook games".

Google buys social games site Slide for $182m, adding yet more fuel to rumours of a future Google answer to Facebook.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The Marketplace of Ideas: "a radio show and podcast about books, culture, commerce and fascinating concepts." (The show archive on iTunes is well worth a look.)

The author who paid actresses to read her book - prominently, in public places around New York.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Marklets.com: "the internet's largest" library of bookmarklets - all of which can be easily accessed from your browser with the site's über-bookmarklet.

Music

Film footage from the Alan Lomax archive of American traditional music is gradually accumulating at the Alan Lomax Archive YouTube channel.

Spotify now has a Google Chrome extension - use it to search for and preview music from within the browser.

Games & Other Distractions

BattleCell: a free massively multiplayer online role-playing game based on Google Maps.

Miscellaneous

Google Wave is dead. Long live Novell Pulse?

Remember Mouse Trap (the Heath-Robinson-esque board game)? Now it's lifesize.

Errotica: the joys (or otherwise) of being wrong.