links for 2008-10-29

"Parts of south-east England had more than an inch of snow last night while London experienced its first October snowfall in more than 70 years as winter conditions arrived early". Welcome home from living in Greece, Martin.

"I enjoyed reading this post written by Martin Belam from currybet.net about posting delicious links automatically to your blog. The writer gives 10 useful bookmarking tips to create compelling link pages. I don't quite use the same method to automate link posting. Delicious' problem is the lack of choice on the posting frequency: It's daily, period. Now I'm sure you can find a more flexible solution through Delicious' API, but for non-developers, the auto-posting tool sucks".

"I see a situation where experienced journalists that can be trusted have no barrier to communication with their audience. Sub-editing is a twilight world, checking things you don’t really need to check…Senior people will always monitor the content, a core group will create the product". Damn, looks like my two days sub-editor training in 2001 will never be put to use in anger. It certainly never looks like it has been on here, does it?

OMG! $14.99 to basically 'View source' on an iPhone. Genius.

One of those areas where I can't help thinking that investing a little time in learning a bit of Perl / Ruby / Automator yourself would pay dividends - you'd be able to make your own tailored solution to looking for plagiarism, and have learnt a skill for other tasks as well.

Brave first move here - as Matt McAlister says, it is a great service and promotional tool, but hard to sell advertising in this space unless everyone else moves in and there is a measurable market.

"To give you an idea of how irrelevant the ads served by Adsense are, yesterday, the Big Picture RSS feed had 40,305 Ad Impressions, which generated a grand total of how many Clicks? How about 17, or 0.04%. That's about what you would get from people accidentally clicking ads when navigating their email". Awesome rant, even if it made me feel slightly insecure about my RSS figures.

A 5 minute plus excerpt from 'Feedback' about the BBC's blogs during which I was only mildly concerned about Giles referring to "hits" as a web metric, and the fact that only about 20 seconds was given over to blog comments...