links for 2009-01-13

Very sad to see someone I remember from sports broadcasting when I was kid die. However, if I'd been putting the running order of the BBC One 6 o'clock news together last night, I'm not sure that I would have had this as the item immediately *before* the news that William Stone, the last remaining British serviceman to have seen active duty in both world wars, had died at the age of 108. I think most people would think that what he'd contributed to the country was a bit more significant than presenting Ski Sunday.

"As Tim notes, less than a week after publishing claims that Alan Sugar was among a number of 'top Jews' due to be targeted by 'hate-filled extremists', the Sun's front page article of the 7th of January has mysteriously vanished from the web. As it seems unlikely that the paper will have willing accepted that it was a tissue of lies from start to finish, concocted by its journalists with the help of a supposed former spy called Glen Jenvey, either lawyers have already made contact with the paper or the Press Complaints Commission is presumably investigating and has requested it be taken down for the time being."

"Simply charging people to read individual stories on newspaper Web sites is not a service. Newspapers can charge for legitimate, bona fide Web services. But what legitimate services have they ever thought of?". There was that thing where you could get yesterday's news sent to you in a massive PDF file and then fiddle about with your printer settings to try and reduce it from broadsheet size to A4 and still be able to read the type, and then they charged you for it...oh, hang on, I see what you mean...

My local MP endorses Ada Lovelace Day.

Useful sourced numbers on Google, Digg, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube et al.

"Everything you do online should be done to increase the trust that others have in you. 'Others', in this case, includes both human visitors and search engine spiders. When you have the trust of those two audiences, you're perfectly positioned for long-term success."

"Of course, the whole story is pointless anyway. If I need the answer to a query and I don't have access to Google, the Internet or a computer for that matter I'm going to have to drive to my local library, which is going to cost over 1,000 Google searches in terms of energy consumption, or ring someone up and ask them. So in actual fact, using a search engine is going to decrease the problem, not increase it. Oh - and I wonder how much energy gets used to create a single copy of the Sunday Times, just out of interest."

One of those interesting list type blog posts - this one uses one of my photographs of Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic.