links for 2009-02-24

"The interesting question is what consequences does this have for communications, and responding to erroneous stories. If the pressure is on sites to be first, rather than being right, then we are going to see a lot more of these stories - and sooner or later, a company will get into serious financial problems because of one."

You want evidence that The Telegraph has cornered the market in trans-Atlantic social bookmarking traffic, and consequently US attention? Here is the normally ultra-accurate SearchEngineLand crediting the Google Ocean discovers Atlantis story to The Telegraph's 'me too' coverage, not The Sun's front page splash.

Times Labs Blog published quite a few good things yesterday, but I liked this one best, not least because unusually the infographic doesn't massage the statistics to remove the American pr0n industry from the picture.

The Heresiarch spent too long worrying about this obvious nonsense that fits The Sun's recent discovery that UFOs, ghosts and underwater cities shift papers when 13 year old kids and cancer stricken reality stars are not available. I'm more interested in whether anyone has the original text of The Sun's web article before it was 'stealth edited' to include Google's PR on the 'discovery' - the originally published version was removed from the Google Cache.

"Many of the people I follow on Twitter, for example, are fellow online journalists who I know either in person or through various other platforms. We use it to share information relevant to the group ('check out this link to a Google News blog post of SEO tips'), discuss complex ideas relevant to the group ('Micropayments will never work in online news publishing. Discuss.'), or seek out hidden but likely practical expertise in the group ('My database is borked. Can anybody help?')". Martin Stabe appears to be goaded by the twignorance of the Sunday Times.

"So do us a favour – if you see people spreading the rumour, refer them to this blog post and mention you heard from a friend that 'Techcrunch are full of shit.'"

"The internet speeds up your failures. You can fail once a week for 15 weeks straight. Then you might befriend a huge influencer that convinces thousands to join. It's happened to me. This sort of community, pre-internet, would never have existed. You would have run out of time years ago. You can't ever guarantee a community. All you can do is increase the odds, reduce the boundaries."

"Digital culture has brought us a wider conversational democracy (good), which suffers from short attention span and is too self-referential (less good). There is no answer to this."