links for 2011-03-10

"Since the warning from the Information Commissioner this week that websites in the UK need to ‘wake up’ to new EU legislation on accessing information on user’s computers, many questions have been raised, but when they will be answered remains unclear."

Ignore the "for SEO" bit in the title, this is a great guide to some of the most useful text and number manipulating formulas in Excel. If you have an aspiration to get better at Excel for journalistic purposes, it is a good start.

"This might be the single biggest pitfall for reporters, all of whom have poured care and effort into crafting a terrific piece of journalism, only to scroll to the bottom and see themselves described as a lazy bias idiot who can’t even spell correctly. Every adrenal impulse developed in the long history of human evolution tells us to either disengage or come out swinging in these moments. But both staying out of the comments and jumping into the fray might mean inviting a pile-on". This is a really great thorough overview of a problematic area for news sites.

"Those are the two identities we are trying to manage—not our work selves and our home selves, not our party selves and our serious selves, but our inner, real selves and our outer, show selves. When our inner and outer selves get into conflict and confusion, we look inauthentic and hypocritical. In all our spoken fears about privacy and publicness, I think this is the great unspoken fear: that we’re not who people think we are, and we’ll be found out."

"In this post we hope to alert all website managers and owners to the rapidly approaching 25th May 2011 deadline to incorporate “cookie opt-in law” into their sites. This deadline is set by EU members in Brussels as part of the “Citizens Rights Directive” 2009/136 (“CRD”) which includes amendments to the E-Commerce Directive (2002/58/EC)."

"What this entire debate misses, of course, is that SEO itself is an inefficiency, a transaction cost rather than a value-creator — it is a technique designed entirely to compensate for the failure of the search engine to correctly analyze site content, searcher desire, or both. Over time, economics teaches us, inefficiencies tend to be wrung out, and transaction costs reduced."

"A number of people asked about the technical aspects of the great Delicious exodus of 2010, and I've finally had some time to write it up."

'What is Twitter?', 'When will 2012 university league tables be available?' and 'Who is the highest paid footballer in the world 2011?' are just some of the questions guardian.co.uk users have asked us in the past month when using our site search.