Tags: papers

Nature 150 Interactive

A beautiful interactive visualisation of every paper published in Nature.

Keepers of the Secrets | The Village Voice

A deeply fascinating look into the world of archives and archivists:

The reason an archivist should know something, Lannon said, is to help others to know it. But it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else. Indeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important. Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?

News week, day 1 (Phil Gyford’s website)

The sad state of online newspapers (the design this time, not the business).

To paraphrase XKCD, someone not on the internet is wrong.

Exhibit A: Rupert Murdoch wants to stop Google indexing newspaper content, asking Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights? As Danny Sullivan points out, Mr. Murdoch could save himself a crusade by simply writing a robots.txt file.

Exhibit B: Some hack in The Guardian puts paid to the myth that newspapers publish “quality content” by writing a screed entitled Google is just an amoral menace. The problem here seems to be that Google is too powerful for its own good because it does a great of job of aggregating content and making it easy to find. This problem statement is so absurd that even other journalists can see it’s wrong.

Whenever I see stalwarts of a dying business model rail against Google in this way, I can’t help but think that what they’re really angry with is the web itself.

I would argue that they could spend their time more constructively, reading Clay Shirky or listening to Steven Johnson. But then, as Kevin says:

Never argue with anyone who buys ink by the barrel. They tend not to be any good at debate.

Update: It gets better. The editor of the Wall Street Journal calls Google parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet. Read the article and then read this twist on it.

At least all of this nonsense shows that the newspaper industry has moved from “denial” to “anger”. They just need to get through “bargaining” and “depression” before they finally reach “acceptance”.

Web Use Project: Papers

A wonderful source of data on user behaviour and perceived skill levels online.