links for 2010-01-29

"Their main worry seems to be less that Spain is turning into a cultural wasteland anyway, and more that they won't have any material to flog off in Latin America. Did Rob Wells really think through a complaint that his company's flooding of one country's market was reducing the flow of material he wants to use to flood other countries with? If Spain was turning into a cultural desert, isn't that good news for Latin America's homegrown artists?"

IMHO the single most important snippet of info about the iPad yet..."Just started watching the promotional video about new Apple iPad and at 01:15, there's a piano interpretation (by Ben Folds) of Inbetween Days in the background".

"The Guardian has long been interested in the availability of public data, both as a raw material for reuse, to empower more active and informed citizenry, to improve transparency of government and as a public right. There's a lot of key information within data.gov.uk which is of interest to our journalists and readers, so to begin to understand how to unlock it we decided to build a simple app based on Government data and data collated within our own Guardian Data Store which allows you to inspect lots of different quality metrics about schools and education in your local area"

"Guardian.co.uk achieved its second record-breaking month in a row with nearly 37 million unique users for December, a record for a UK newspaper website."