links for 2008-12-10

"There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed". No news yet on whether it is full of lost odd socks.

"It seems with the closure of this project, a place where a small number of BBC licence fee payers could upload blogs on the BBC website, and the end of World Have Your Say's external comment moderation experiment, that the BBC is retaining very direct control over what appears on its webspace. This is in contrast to organisations like the Telegraph (My Telegraph) and Sky (Sky Community) where website users have been provided with a space to write and upload their own blogs. Rather than closing projects like Island Blogging, should the BBC be expanding them?"

Watch out regionals, now the librarian is after your market: "So, if you're in a public library and your town is potentially dependent on the McPaper or a major national (If the NYT survives), what could you do? Can you use RSS feeds to assemble a local news source from smaller independents? Can you surf the local blogs and aggregate?"

"These great Twitter mashups and tools represent some of the best ways twitter data can be used to create a great twittering experience". No word on how many of them require you to give up your password however.

Great, great overview on all the issues around URL tracking parameters and search engines. Includes this gem: "Bad examples '?IAmSpyingOnYou=a768sdf129&YouAreASucker=re23adfd'". Love their philosophy: "design for people, be smart about robots, and you will achieve long-lasting success."

"Google continues to dominate the online video market in much the same way it dominates search. Google properties set a record in October with more than 100 million video viewers - 99.5 million of whom watched videos on YouTube. Google's [U.S.] video market share represents more than two-thirds of the estimated online video watching audience for the month". Thankfully in the UK we have the competition commission regulating to make sure that this can't happen over here. Oh. Hang on a minute...