Digitalia Alasdair’s workblog and linkdump

Mag+

My goodness – a work related post that’s not a linkdump.
The clever bastards at BERG are thinking about the future of magazines. Worth watching.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Trackback Backtrack

My cousin has been writing on the topic of trackbacks versus comments on his blog, and I thought I’d pitch in with tuppen’orth.
I think there are a number of reasons that trackbacks haven’t taken off. Spam is one of them, sure – if you’re popular enough to generate discussion among other bloggers, then you’re [...]

RIP: Chris Lightfoot

This’ll turn up later in my linkpost, but I think it deserves it’s own post as well:
Chris Lightfoot died unexpectedly last month (his blog has just been updated with the news, presumably by family).
Odds are, you’ve never heard of him.
His work powers WriteToThem, HearFromYourMP and PledgeBank, among other sites. There’re reasonable grounds to claim [...]

The Danger of Nofollow

All links to external sites on wikipedia are now to be automatically marked “nofollow”. The “nofollow” attribute is an attribute introduced by Google that instructs their crawlers not to follow the link, or give any Pagerank weight to it (which is apparently OK, because Google Are Nice, despite the fact that y’know, if it’d [...]

Spimes, Blogjects, And Other Buzzwords: A Primer

Spime is a pretty stupid sounding word (like most neologisms), but it describes an increasingly important concept – they are objects that can be digitally tracked through their entire life-cycle. There’s a little more to them than that, because the man that coined the term, Bruce Sterling, is a big techno-hippy, and felt the [...]