links for 2008-06-06

"Poland's national football coach apologised yesterday after a tabloid newspaper ran a gruesome depiction of him holding the severed heads of Germany's national coach and captain and demanded he slaughter them at the forthcoming Euro 2008 championships."

"The big question for startups like Wikia Search is: does the average search user really have difficulty retrieving satisfactory search results from Google? I don't think so. I'm no fan of Google as a company but I rarely use any other search engine."

"The double standards Google SEO make it difficult to compete. I’ve mentioned YouTube Cloaking before. The NYT apparently also gets this privilege. Well established sites with a substantial advertising budget? Those will never be banned or penalized."

"He was saying the BBC was provoking violence against Poles, when what they should be doing is drawing attention to immigration from India, Pakistan, Africa and the Carribbean, thereby directing violence at...Surely that is not what he meant. Is it?"

"The BBC has abandoned plans to create a 'licence fee' option for users of its international news website who were outraged by the introduction of advertising last year."

"In the 80s I was never attracted to the music of Flock of Seagulls or Human League. Now I know why. The maths says all that asymmetry adds up to a fashion disaster". There's nothing shallow about judging music on the haircut, kids, its maths at work.

"Match of the Day is the latest programme to find itself under scrutiny after a bookmaker closed betting on a competition on the BBC's flagship football show after noticing some suspicious punting". Thankfully I never had to deal with one of these...

"My Telegraph and Telegraph Blogs will be offline for about 24 hours. Most of this time will be taken up with sending the database across the internet to Oklahoma and then plugging it in at the other end". Hopefully not by Government CD courier ;-)

"I mean seriously, having a blog section on the website is like having a section in the paper for 14 column inch stories."

"Wired Magazine reports on how Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, they say, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master."