links for 2007-07-11

Clay Shirky: “A Luddite argument is one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfit the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys … especially if the discomfort of the newly challenged

Allan Prosser: “Being local used to involve standing outside funerals taking the names of mourners as they left. … Communities had an identifiable structure. … Life in 2007 is infinitely more complicated.”

A new section for all the wacky stuff that will populate the “most read” feature?

Oliver Luft chats with Ben Hammersley about the social media reporting experiment following his return from Turkey.

“UFO sightings have fallen dramatically in the last decade. Why? Because of ubiquitous camera phones.”

“Blogs are a good case where ‘time spent’ is more meaningful than page views. Especially since the blogosphere is particularly prone to the ‘quantity over quality’ problem. It’s easy to pump out 20+ posts a day – and that tactic garners a lot of page view

Al Jazeera English is looking for viewer feedback via YouTube.

“So where does the renewed scare about the MMR vaccine come from? This is where the reporting becomes more difficult to assess.”

“The key question is – from an economic pov, how much long-run value is Facebook really creating?”

Gawker spots one of the unfortunate unintended consequences of moving towards time-based metrics instead of pageviews…