links for 2009-06-08

"For some reason, over the past few months someone has decided that an existing (if dubious) ban on flash photography for health and safety reasons has to be expanded to a complete ban on all photography in the tunnel. I’ve always been curious about the ban on flash photography as this is just a foot tunnel and hardly likely to cause anything more serious than a bit of annoyance to fellow walkers - and a lot less annoyance than screaming kids - but a total ban on all photography?".

Cites 'Phone Phreaking' in the 1950s as the start of electronic social media in a great post reminding us that frankly, given any type of technology, people do the things that people do.

"In these tough economic times it can be hard getting a client to sign up with SEO when they already have established brand awareness and respectable online exposure. Lure them in with small one or two page additions to pique their interest and you can prove the value of SEO by letting your results speak for themselves. Even though they might be doing well, they can always improve their rankings."

"After years of targeting wavering Tory voters to try and fight for the few thousand swing votes needed to take a general election, taking for granted the millions who traditionally voted Labour because they believed it was the right thing to do, New Labour have seen it all come home to them."

Is Malcolm being paranoid or are Microsoft out to get him due to his negative take on Bing? I tell you, if his copy of Windows starts regularly blue-screening, he'll know they are a-fiddling...

"It’s all pretty sucky, and those who know search spam predicted this would happen when Twitter added trends to its home page. I’d point to my own tweet about this back then, and Google web spam chief Matt Cutts joking back with me about it, but Twitter Search is so broken that I can’t find anything written from my own account."

"The following screen shot has to be seen to be believed - 7 Wikipedia articles listed as news sources in Google News"

"After 4 years of steady growth, the community collapsed within 6 months. The reason was we stopped recruiting volunteers. We felt we had enough. We stopped recruiting, training and even trying to properly motivate the volunteers we had. Volunteers don’t work for free, they work for fun. Which means they will volunteer their time until they find something more fun to do with their time."

Seriously more icons than I could ever possibly need, but I will probably download them all *just in case*