Links last week – 080525

The following is a selection of links collected from 19th to 25th May 2008, shared via Google Reader, added to FriendFeed or highlighted on Twitter. They have been organised by Library category: Systems and the elements – People, Information and Technology

This week, it’s all about people and how are our habits are being affected and changed by Internet technologies

Systems

• Gilberto Gill’s talk at Google Zeitgeist (how Bazil looks at digital tech) – http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2008/05/19/gilberto-gils-t.html
• Mapping the current and future Internet (what will a Harvard for 6 billion people look like?) – http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/05/yochai-benkler-others-at-harva.html
• The Hyperconnected vs. 84% of Everyone Else on Earth – http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/05/the-hyperconnec.html
• Beyond Blogs (Business Week revisits their cover story from 3 years ago) – http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_22/b4086044617865.htm?chan=magazine+channel_special+report
• Why Zappos pays new employees to quit, and you should too (great example of testing good hires) – http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/taylor/2008/05/wy_zappos_pays_new_employees_t.html
• Microsoft rewriting applications for hosted offerings (first article I’ve seen blatantly stating what Redmond is up to) – http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/22/Microsoft-rewriting-applications-for-hosted-offerings_1.html
• Nicholas Carr’s take on Microsof’t hosting effort (syncs previous link) – http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/05/cloud_may_squee.php
• Why small really is beautiful (bootstrapping start-ups) – http://gigaom.com/2008/05/20/small-is-beautiful-is-big-a-liability-when-targeting-small-businesses/
• Interview with Jonathan Ive (Apple design god, who rarely does interviews) – http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/comment/claire-beale/claire-beale-on-advertising-830554.html
• Top 50 tech visionaries (and some good history along the way) – http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,145290/printable.html#

People

• Networks based on social roles (visualising the different styles of contribution) – http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/05/22/networks-bases-on-social-roles.aspx
• Web users ‘getting more selfish’ (watch out those dependent on online ads, trends they are a changin’) – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7417496.stm
• A group is its own worst enemy (written in 2003 but as relevant today, great tips for understanding social software) – http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
• Managing your image on the Internet, becoming required? – http://www.benparr.com/2008/05/six-ways-to-protect-and-enhance-your-image-on-the-internet/
• Be careful what you wish for – one bloggers story from anonymity to fame and the repercussions – http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25internet-t.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
• How I got hired by Amazon.com (great story about the efforts one person went to and proves you don’t need ‘credentials’ to land your dream job) – http://www.brunozzi.com/en/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-amazoncom/
• Sleep-deprived brains alternate between normal activity and ‘power failure’ (as opposed to just slowing down) – http://www.thinkgene.com/sleep-deprived-brains-alternate-between-normal-activity-and-power-failure/
• Easy way to reset your sleep cycle: stop eating (good tip when on long-haul flights) – http://parentingsquad.com/easy-way-to-reset-your-sleep-cycle-stop-eating
• Perfection does not exist – http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/05/19/perfection-does-not-exist/

Information

• The odds are stacked against us (good article by Cory Doctorow reminding us of how easily our brains are tricked by statistics into making the wrong decisions) – http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/20/rare.events
• 5 data visualisation dissertations worth a look – http://flowingdata.com/2008/05/23/5-data-visualization-dissertations-worth-a-look/
• Ubigraph – free tool for visualising dynamic graphs – http://www.ubietylab.net/ubigraph/index.html
• Semantics and tagging are great as long as computers are doing it [not people] – video of Sergey Brin – http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7582902000166025817
• Twitter as the canary in the news coalmine – http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/05/19/twitter-as-the-canary-in-the-news-coalmine/

Technology

• SmallWorlds – a free browser-based 3D virtual world that integrates YouTube, Flickr and other Web 2.0 services – http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/21/smallworld-a-virtual-environment-that-takes-web-20-3d/
• Cloud Computing (great example of how a start-up needed to scale fast and temporarily, and how Amazone Web Services saved their bacon… and then invested in them, hey ho) – http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/technology/25proto.html
• Full text of Ray Ozzie Live Mesh memo (one of those public ‘internal’ ones) – http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/full_text_of_ray_ozzie_mesh_memo.php
• Web design principles and things to avoid – http://www.10e20.com/blog/2008/01/11/essential-web-design-principles-to-earn-trust/

Search

• Are machine-learned models prone to catastrophic errors – http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/05/are-human-experts-less-prone-to-catastrophic-errors-than-machine-learned-models.html
• Introduction to Google Search Quality – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html
• The importance of a competitive search market (and see also the link to Tim O’Reilly’s response at the end of the article) – http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/25/the-importance-of-a-competitive-search-market

SharePoint

• How can I make my web site faster with caching (an oldie but still useful) – http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2006/11/08/how-to-make-your-moss-2007-web-site-faster-with-caching.aspx
• Creating MOSS 2007 features, a reference – http://aidangarnish.net/blog/post/2008/05/Creating-MOSS-2007-features—a-reference.aspx
• New technical article on Excel Services and Open XML formats – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc540662.aspx
• Announcing SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) – http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/05/19/announcing-sharepoint-deployment-planning-services-sdps.aspx

Image of the week – don’t fool yourself into thinking blogging and twittering is all that important: (Courtesy of http://xkcd.com)

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