Links for August 24th 2009:

• The Message of Twitter: "Here It Is" and "Here I Am" [Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives] – Henry Jenkins has a thoughtful post on why Twitter matters. The most positive being that "None of us can spot everything in our field and collectively pooling our knowledge is of enormous value. For me, that's been my primary use of Twitter both as a consumer and as a contributor." The most negative being the misquoting that from the contextlessness of 140 characters (something especially problematic for academics).
• Identity of 'skank' blogger revealed [The Age] – "An anonymous blogger whose identity was unmasked by court order after she called a Vogue Australia covergirl a "psychotic, whoring, lying … skank" plans to sue Google for $US15 million for breaching her privacy. The model, Liskula Cohen, confronted and forgave the blogger after a judge ordered Google to tell Cohen who had allegedly defamed her on a blog called "Skanks in NYC". … it has now been revealed that the blogger is Rosemary Port, a 29-year-old New York fashion student. … In an interview with the New York Daily News, Port said Cohen, 37, had defamed herself by launching such a public lawsuit. She claimed she had the right to an opinion and that she had been "put on a silver platter for the press to attack". "Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my website: one from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it," Port said. "That was before it became a spectacle. I feel my right to privacy has been violated."" (The privacy 'there and back again' …)
• Fairfax records $380m loss [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – "Fairfax Media has posted a net loss of $380 million for the 2009 financial year. The media company says its underlying earnings were $605m, down 27 per cent on the previous year. Fairfax has blamed the speed of the economic slowdown, cuts to advertising revenues, and the move towards online services for the result."
• Location, Location, Location [Twitter Blog] – Twitter are adding (optional) geo-location metadata: "We're gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information." Jeff Jarvis has a good run down of why this will actually be very useful.
• Retractions up tenfold [Times Higher Education] – "The rate at which scientific journal articles are being retracted has increased roughly tenfold over the past two decades, an exclusive analysis for Times Higher Education reveals. Growth in research fraud as a result of greater pressure on researchers to publish, improved detection and demands on editors to take action have been raised as possible factors in the change. The study, by the academic-data provider Thomson Reuters, follows the retraction last month of a paper on the creation of sperm from human embryonic stem cells. The paper, written by researchers at Newcastle University, was withdrawn by the Stem Cells and Development journal following its discovery that the paper's introduction was largely plagiarised."
• Teenager is first to be jailed for Facebook bullying [Telegraph] – "Teenager Keeley Houghton, who used Facebook to make death threats against Emily Moore, has become the first person in Britain to be jailed for bullying via a social networking site. Houghton, 18, boasted on the site that she wanted to kill Miss Moore, also 18, who she had bullied since they were at school together. Houghton, who admitted harassment, was sentenced to three months in a young offenders’ institute and given a five-month restraining order. District Judge Bruce Morgan told her: “Since Emily Moore was 14 you have waged compelling threats and violent abuse towards her. “Bullies are by their nature cowards, in school and society. The evil, odious effects of being bullied stay with you for life. “On this day you did an act of gratuitous nastiness to satisfy your own twisted nature.” On July 12, the court heard, Houghton wrote on her Facebook site: “Keeley is going to murder the —–."