Links for 2007-11-22

Posted November 22, 2007 12:37 AM.

• Absolutely extraordinary World of Warcraft adverts, featuring William Shatner and ... insanely ... Mr T! Approaching the funniest thing I've seen in forever. Like the man says on the web page, almost enough to get me to play WOW again, but that way dark dark unproductive madness lies...
• Ronan Bennett responds in the Guardian to Martin Amis' comments about Islam and Muslim people... Spotted via CityofSound "Ask yourself what you are reading. An important question from a leading literary figure? A brave revenge fantasy? No. A major cultural and literary figure endorsing prejudice against Muslims."
• The UK Government has lost records pertaining to 25 million British people as a consequence of sending a few bits of physical media through the post... A reminder--if ever there was needed one--that government is neither consistent enough in the long-term nor competent enough in the short to be entrusted with ever more information about its citizenry.
• My old department at the BBC has launched a blog concerned with its R&D activity and exploration of new technology... It looks like Tristan and Chris have really managed to take the team that Webb and I used to run to new heights. Really want to know more about what they're up to at the moment.
• Revenue from print advertising is in radical decline with online advertising taking up much of the slack.. If I was a betting man, I'd say that you could expect broadcast television advertising to be the next to be dramatically hit, in favour of targetted advertising packaged around on-demand download video.
• It's worth reading through Engadget's full list of posts on the Kindle from Amazon That the future of content is digital distribution over the standard web is not a shock to me. Television is the obvious next step here too. I don't think it's here yet, but the mainstream ebook reader is definitely now on the horizon.
• Flickr's awesome new 'Places' feature has launched, allowing you to go and see the best pictures of all kinds of places all over the world. Lovely stuff. Develop a body of data (photos) and then hook it up with other data sources to enhance both. Each dataset navigable in terms of the other. The combination makes both more valuable.
• Happy birthday to Danah Boyd on turning 30! For anyone out there who's worried about turning thirty, let me reassure you. It's fine. it's great, actually. Thirty-one, on the other hand. That's a pain. You don't really see it coming.
• Ben Goldacre writes a long, brilliant and--please god--persuasive debunking of Homeopathy for The Guardian The horror for me here is that cultural studies' critiques and examinations of the process of science are partly responsible for the public suspicion of evidence and rationality. Makes me very sad.
• Linzie Hunter's spam one-liners are just extraordinarily good. She takes spam subject lines and turns them into typographic art. They're really lovely. She made some Moo cards with them and they looked awesome and I'm wondering if the Moo crew should try and bring her on as one of their regular designers.