links for 2009-12-08

"THEY are the 'twitterati' – the privileged 96 Manchester council workers allowed to use social networking websites on town hall computers. The council has banned its 18,000 staff using popular sites like Facebook and Twitter at work to stop them wasting time. But the M.E.N. has learned that 96 staff - mainly workers based in advertising and communications – have been allowed to continue logging in."

"On the one hand, Google Cache has allowed me to do a bit of forensic Twitter searching to piece together deleted conversations. There will be times when it will be an important tool for holding public figures accountable for what they say in public. On the other hand, everyone makes mistakes. Shouldn't we be able to delete and forget them?"

"Boom’s tips include setting up news alerts and stories by email functionality and making registration as simple as possible, also flagging up the extra benefits for readers who register". Don't we think the fact that 'making registration as simple as possible' is *still* news to some news organisations in 2009 is a problem, regardless of whether they are being indexed in Google or not...?

Blimey - new I-Spy books. Who knew?

"However, the spread of 20mph residential zones threatens to create a fresh battleground as motorists rage at the ever more intrusive range of traffic-calming measures. Councillor Bob Belam, cabinet member for environment at Waltham Forest council, said: 'Having this [new] technology will be more beneficial than a series of road humps that slow down the response times of the ambulances and fire engines'". My dad making the pages of the national broadsheets.

"On Friday afternoon, Google made the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines, and the world largely yawned. Maybe Google timed its announcement that it was personalizing everyone’s search results just right, so few would notice. Maybe no one really understood how significant the change was. Whatever the reason, it was a huge development and deserves much more attention than it has received so far. To put how little attention the change got in perspective, less than 50 news articles and blog posts were written about it, according to Google News. In contrast, nearly 1,000 articles were written about a relatively minor change to Google’s First Click Free program."

"MANCHESTER is to stage a festival to celebrate 100 years since the birth of genius codebreaker Alan Turing. The festival, will be held in June 2012, and will centre on a performance of Breaking the Code, the play written about how he unlocked secret Nazi transmissions during the Second World War."

"Many of the first data mashups involved plotting data on a map, and it's never been easier to map data with a new generation of tools"