Selected Saturday links

For quite a while I used del.icio.us to post summaries of interesting links here on an almost daily basis. After a while I got a little tired of the aesthetics of that: the clunky titles, the way it inserted tags, the fact that sometimes there was just one link and sometimes many. And I realised that for the quick/transient linking twitter works better.

So for now I’m going to try and post a digest every week or so, selecting the highlights. If you really want regular updates on what I’m keeping from what I’m reading, you can always follow me on delicious.

• Bringing Citizen Participation to the Heart of the Administration

  Mitch discusses the appointment of a White House Director of Citizen Participation and what that means for the continuation and extension of the approach adopted by Obama’s campaign.

• Old whitehouse.gov down the memory hole

  Jason Kottke makes the very good point that there needs to be a strategy for archiving old versions of whitehouse.gov if new administrations are going to totally replace them

• Alfie Dennen on Stopped Clocks at the Long Now Foundation meetup

  Alfie’s presentation about his Stopped Clocks project at last week’s London Long Now get together

• How ClickToFlash works

  An explanation of how the clicktoflash plugin, a webkit (Safari/Omniweb/etc.) plugin that delays loading flash elements in a page until you request them. With this and flashblock (Firefox equivalent) in place my laptop seems to be saving a lot of RAM. (via Daring Fireball)

• tomtaylor.co.uk : projects : microprinter

  Tom’s write up of his lovely ‘microprinter’, a reclaimed till printer that prints out short messages, reminders, etc. from a web-based queue.

• Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries

  A really handy list of libraries Matt Biddulph has found useful to ease his path from web scripting to iphone development. Handy to have around should the time and inspiration coincide to let me get into building iphone apps.

• From Heath Row To Heathrow…Mapped

  Tracking changes to the space around my twitter bot’s favourite part of London.

• eMusic sales data supports ’long tail’ theory

  Another entry into the debate over whether sales data really backs up the Long Tail theory. I find this more interesting as an exploration of emusic than a debate about the theory itself, which is often overstated and is probably better described as a ’trend’ or ‘shift’ than a theory.

• Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores

  last.fm’s RJ rounds up the options for those looking to break out of the RDBMS world.

• @heathrowtower - Twitter Search

  Responses to my recently launched bot