Links for 2006-09-08

Posted September 8, 2006 1:17 AM.

• Yahoo's having a public Hack Day which you should all attend Should be really good fun. Unfortunately I'm unlikely to be in the US otherwise I'd be totally there.
• A pretty good Infographics pool on Flickr Some nice stuff, to lead you deeper.
• Ryan Carson on the Four-Day-Week challenge I'm jealous, but I don't have time to get the stuff I want to get done in a five-day week. I'm often sprawling over weekends, as I will be this weekend in fact, and did last. Bloody knackering.
• Tom Watson MP puts his letter of resignation on his weblog I've met Tom and I believe that he's doing this for honourable reasons and that he honestly feels that Blair needs to go. I'm not sure I share those feelings, although I'm pretty clear that the authoritarian streak of the Labour party is creeping me out.
• The Sun has its own take on what's going on with Blair and Brown I honestly don't believe a word that The Sun says. It all seems like campaigning with their florid rhetoric. Still interesting to see where their loyalties lie.
• Marvel reverses labeling policy for gay characters This actually happened a week or so ago, so I apologise for clumsily referencing the labelling policy a couple of days ago without checking. Good news anyway.
• Russell Davies (note not Russell T Davies) and friends take on "In Our Time" with "In Our Own Time", this week about Buffy the Vampire Slayer I've only listened to the first ten minutes of the programme so far, but for an amateur effort it seems relatively entertaining. Love the idea though. The BBC should encourage this kind of thing...
• The Web Credibility Project Another interesting project from Stanford researching how and why people evaluate what to read or believe online.
• Danah Boyd is trying to collate current research on Social Network Sites I might steal this idea. I'm looking to find some interesting stuff around collective intelligence and social motives.
• "Online video vault YouTube is place to see and be seen" Medium-dull article features some less dull insights into why people do this kind of stuff in the first place from Clay Shirky, who - frankly - gets around a bit online...
• Alex Russell writes a really nice (and personally flattering) summary of FOO Camp Really glad to have got some people's attention with the Dirty Semantics stuff. I'll probably be putting in for a talk at ETech around the subject, if I can really get a grasp on it before then...
• Magma have some of the best dedicated design stores in the centre of London And it looks like they have a pretty good mail-order outfit too for design books, t-shirts, posters and assorted sundries.
• Cabspotting I didn't link to this at the time, and I'm mystified as to why I didn't - beautiful and fascinating visualisations of cab paths around San Francisco
• My Society put up some beautiful travel heatmaps a while back that I wanted to talk about but haven't had time One thing I'd suggest is to overlay maps where the starting location is different (either each major city or tube stop, or at the end of each square half mile). That should give you a sense of which areas in London are best and worst connected...
• Trustmojo On ongoing project investigating trust on the new web. Interesting ideas, beautiful site.
• PICNIC '06 looks pretty interesting Difficult to believe that I've only just noticed that it existed. Thanks to George Oates for pointing it out...
• Meet The LocoRoco Kid on Kotaku See how she sings! Beautiful singing! I miss Loco Roco. I may have to go and play more.
• Motivating participation by displaying the value of contribution Looks like an interesting article, which I will attempt now to buy and read.
• Suw Charman on how to speak at and organise conferences This is a good solid piece that I don't think would necessarily please a lot of the people who think about these things. The gender thing is a particular community flashpoint.
• Dion Hinchcliffe reports on 'Five Great Ways to Harness Collective Intelligence' I agree that the harnessing of collective intelligence is one of the core big ideas of the new bubble, but I'm not convinced by some of these examples.
• Nat Torkington on 'Rewarding Users for Contributing Data' I couldn't agree more with a lot of this - points-based reputation / prestige systems and financial incentives are generally bad ways to reward contributions in social environments.
• Cameron Marlow talks about privacy, transparency and the Facebook controversy I've been thinking about this a lot recently and have come to the conclusion that it's never so much about how private something is, it's about how much it deviates from what people expected the privacy level to be in that particular service...
• The question, 'Daddy or Chips' has long confounded man. But Google trends has the answer... It turns out that until the middle of 2004, it was very definitely all about chips. Now however, it's all about Daddy. Who knew!