"Google's book search algorithm incorporates more than 100 "signals," and those signals change constantly. The goal is that all these signals add up to a single, simple result: "That the best way to get a book ranked high on Google Books is to write a really good book," Gray said"

"1794 tells the story of one amazing year through the lives of eight men and one woman who all experienced it in life-changing ways. It’s my personal, partial and permanently unfinished version of history. It’s also an experiment in stripping the book down to its barest essentials, then adding some of the flexibility and remixability of the web."

"But the experience of Gawker, Deadspin and other sites shows that — once the dust has settled — advertisers flock to buzz and growth. It is only in the last few months that Deadspin, for all its earlier critical acclaim, has been specifically requested by alcohol and other advertisers."

Promises a lot, that title, and it delivers it. Lots of interesting stuff in here.

One to investigate – a 1932 Bela Lugosi film set on a sugar plantation operated by zombies. My kind of metaphor.

Beautiful effort to document Gothic architecture and map it alongside a history of early modern France.

This is a presentation which I gave recently asking what development policy can learn from evolution.

The main conclusion is that as would-be change-makers, we should not try to design a better world: we should concentrate on building better feedback loops.

"There are all sorts of fascinating facts to be picked up from the research. Examples: Al Jazeera provided the most balanced coverage on Afghanistan; US television networks broadcast more violence than other countries; and BBC World is widest ranging international news source."

"Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World. A realtime link. And it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, and only recently made possible by, our technological connectedness."

"Law 3: No one has thought about selling the advertising
Weirdly, because advertising actually makes the business press go round, no one in the ad department will have thought about how to organise the selling of online ads. There will be no scheduling tool to ensure no one books the same space at the same time; no one will have been given responsibility for coordinating the online ads, and no one will have consulted with web development about what formats work or not. As an added bonus, the tracking codes provided by the client for their banner ads may clash with the tracking codes used by the publisher. Trail fail."

"Amazon.com customers have bought more Kindle e-books than both hardback and paperback books combined for the top 10, 25, 100 and 1,000 bestselling books on Amazon.com over the last 30 days."