links for 2010-10-13

Orbiting-to-scale model of the solar system rendered in CSS3 and HTML5. [Older browsers need not apply]

According to Read Write Web, the answer is The Guardian: "Is experimentation with social media by a media organization itself a factor in how much its content gets shared? The Guardian has what's arguably the media world's best iPhone app. Or is it most important to simply produce great content?"

"These tower graphics and videos are going against the massive complexity of other modern data-vis too. They are rejecting the pull of making expert interfaces for experts and awards panels, leaving the average user blank. I like that there are some new simple forms - like these old, archetypal USA Today graphics. (but will I ever love them? probably not - but I 'quite like' baked beans - I don't need to love them)"

"But that’s only part of what makes this so interesting. By publishing the data and having built the healthy community that exists around the data blog, McCandless and The Guardian benefit from some very useful comments (aside from the odd political one) on how to improve both the data and the visualisation."

Fortunately, we've never seen a major reputable news organisation ever commit plagiarism, get a fact wrong, make a bad hire, or spike a story because of commercial pressure, and for that reason we can declare 'Patch' broken and the old ways wholesome and profitable again.

An article about The Times paywall that is well worth reading. I don't doubt that journalism has value, and that to sustain journalism you need to pay for it, but the quote (possibly a little out of context) from Gurtej Sandhu that on the iPad "you deliver a certain package that has a hierarchy" and "people consume how you want them to consume" is quite astonishing. If 'people consumed how you *wanted* them to consume', then no product would ever fail to delight.

I guess we all dodged the effects of that dreadful recession thing then, no?

"At the start of a new term at Cardiff University I wander into newsagents looking for something with which to dazzle our fresh cohort. As we are in one of the messiest economic messes ever messed I didn't have high hopes but without trying at all hard I came out with quite a haul of new titles, in print, on paper."