links for 2009-02-27

Search engine genius and agent provocateur Michael Gray gets in on the 'shut down newspaper websites for a day to teach Google a lesson' meme: "Let’s move up the food chain, what if the major newspapers across the United States got together and planned a one day information strike against Google. What if the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times and every other big paper had gotten a little sick and tired of living off the table scraps Google was giving them and blocked all thier crawling bots for one day. What do you think the general public would say when they checked out Google news and saw only stories from second and third tier publishers, while Yahoo News and Live News were perfectly fine. What do you think the homepage of Techmeme would look like, and just how much sympathy do you think there would be for Google?"

"The next section really did make my jaw drop. 'In terms of 'official' activity, cyber life is just like real life - if it happens in a CILIP-sanctioned space, it's official; if it happens down the pub or in someone else's space, it isn't.' This is a classic 'ownership' issue - if we say it's real then it's real, and if we say it isn't real, then it's not". Looks like it isn't just the NUJ struggling with some aspects of 21st century communications this week.

"One 'top' UK scientist has according to the article surveyed exactly one teacher and now fears for an entire generation because she 'believes' things might be happening to them physically. She 'believes' bad things are happening. Call me crazy but I thought scientists used data and experiments and academic standards rather than fears, beliefs and conjecture."

A service for helping you to manage your copyright on the web, as used by FUMSI magazine.

One page introduction to the concept of RSS

My overview of how to avoid RSS information overload

Yesterday's training session was my first public interwebz teaching or presentation since the UK Twitter explosion - what a difference it made. Real time encouragement from the delegates. A good mix of people were there including @jennysimpson @abisignorelli @sdrb @davidsegal, and this is @abisignorelli's Twitpic of me and @sdrb during one of our breaks

My recent Kubrick post gets a mention in the New York Times Ideas blog: "It [2001: A Space Odyssey] missed the mark with video phone booths; HAL the computer’s human lip-reading, Pan Am product placement and meetings mercifully free of PowerPoint. What a fantasy."

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