links for 2009-12-11

"In the empirical part 213 [Spanish] newspaper articles about migration and ethnic minorities are analysed with a quantitative and a qualitative approach. The articles show that free papers paint a rather negative image of the migrant population. This can be explained by the way news is produced; there seems to be a low level of elaboration and a high use of administrative and police sources". I wonder if these were British Costa-del-Clacton-On-Sea immigrants they were talking about?

"While charging ahead to swiftly blend social network feeds into search results may make sense on paper, the search services could be underplaying the risk of  exposing search users to a heightened risk of losing control of their PCs to cyber crooks". I worry about the volume of bot-tweeting spam that is going to get poured into Twitter even more now that the prize of a Google SERPS clickthrough is on offer.

"In a rather pointed criticism of the UK journalists with the large follower numbers (mainly, but not exclusively, at The Guardian), Green contrasted these as examples of people who ‘liked to talk rather than listen’."

"Right now in terms of the constant reduction of cost we are experiencing in journalism the human component is regarded as cheap and exchangable, but in the end it will be the most expensive. I believe that in the future of journalism there will be fewer players, but the ones who invest in the human factor are going to be big ones. The well-educated, more complex human will be very expensive. But only a few of them will be needed". Looks like a thesarus robot wrote that headline though ;-)

I'm now convinced that the people commenting on these blogs, including those refuting Andy's testing methodology by quoting Wikipedia, spend so long arguing about bitrate and encoders on these forums, that they can't actually have any time left to watch tv of *any* definintion