links for 2011-07-22

"This is a day to hack upon culture. It is open to anyone interested in hacking, data, culture etc, and we're looking to explore ideas for applications, datasets, mashups and the rest. There will be lunch at the venue, and plenty of coffee (our special SPARQL Blend) to fuel coding and collaboration."

Despite the slightly unfortunate name connotations at the moment, the next Hacks/Hackers meet-up is in London next week and features the Guardian's own Laura Oliver talking about what we've learned about user engagement from live blogging the Arab Spring and the "not-that-type-of-hacking" phone hacking scandal

"The term ‘hacker’ warrants re-examining in light of the unravelling News of the World scandal. The circle within which my journalistic persona travels is that of hack/hackers. I am part hacker. I am a data journalism advocate for a developer platform called ScraperWiki. And I am very concerned about how this tumultuous time in journalism history will define the word ‘hack’ and all its related synonyms."

"I believe that what the public want, what this moment demands, is not another round of self-serving hypocrisy or internecine strife from Britain's journalists, but a serious discussion about the difference between good and bad investigative journalism and a complex but necessary debate about where the boundary of acceptable journalistic practice lies and how it should be enforced" - robust defence of investigative journalism from the BBC's D-G

"Fix your communities. Stop allowing and excusing destructive and pointless conversations to be the fuel for your business. Advertisers, hold sites accountable if your advertising appears next to this hateful stuff. Take accountability for this medium so we can save it from the vilification that it still faces in our culture. Because if your website is full of assholes, it's your fault. And if you have the power to fix it and don't do something about it, you're one of them."

After my Times iPhone app review: "@currybet thanks Martin! After reading this, I suspect you've illegally accessed our smartphone dev backlog." - good to see at least one sense of humour has survived intact at News International...

"Unless content originators—that is, teachers, journalists, analysts, managers, academics, and so on—make the content interactive themselves, it won’t be interactive. It’s simply too expensive and too difficult if professional programmers are involved. Only where there’s been sufficient content-monetization potential for a high budget do we see it—examples like BBC News active infographics or our related company Touch Press’s books come to mind. Yet there’s been one exception: Wolfram Demonstrations Project. As I write this, it has 7,138 Demonstrations, or as we call them “knowledge apps”, almost all contributed by content originators who aren’t professional programmers."

Blog post introducing some changes soon to be made to CiF, with discussion from the users below

"Another thing I very much appreciate is that people like Laura Olivier [sic], Hannah Waldram and James Walsh spend time on the various live update article threads to ask people questions, offer links to stuff and generally participate. That is excellent" - nice to see our community coordinators getting such public praise from a user