Links for March 18th 2010:

• Oops Pow Surprise…24 hours of video all up in your eyes! [YouTube Blog] – YouTube has 24 hours worth of video uploaded every minutes!
• AAP puts ‘strict curb’ on tweeting reporters [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “Australian Associated Press is cracking down on its journalists who use social networking sites while on the job. AAP reporter Sandra O’Malley wrote from her Twitter account yesterday morning that “work’s put a strict curb on tweeting”. The agency’s editor-in-chief, Tony Gillies, says this is because reporters have been posting their thoughts online while on assignment. He says he is trying to protect AAP’s brand. “I’m talking about people who work for AAP tweeting and blogging while on assignment for AAP,” he said. “If they are tweeting during those assignments – and let’s leave aside for one moment what they’re doing rather than paying attention to the story that’s unfolding in front of them – whatever they’re tweeting may reflect on AAP.”
• Networks, Crowds, and Markets: A Book by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg – Full book pre-print version; looks like a really useful read: “Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected. […] The book will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.”
• Flickr Short URL Generator – URLkr – Useful tool to create flic.kr links, using Flickr’s own URL shortening service.
• Why short links can take a long time to get you around the web [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – Some URL shorteners are slowing down the web: “URL shorteners have become a fact of life, given the proliferation of short messaging services (and also the demands of print, which finds URL shorteners mean you can link to long URLs in a few characters). But they’re sometimes a roadblock – at least, the one from Facebook is.”
• 25 years of .com domain names [SF Gate] – Happy Birthday dot com: “On March 15, 1985, a Massachusetts computer systems firm registered the first .com Internet domain name. Although Symbolics.com didn’t spark an instant gold rush, the event planted the first seed of a transformation that has changed the world into a Web-fueled digital river of news, commerce and social interaction. Today, exactly 25 years later, life B.C – Before .Com – is already a distant memory, especially in the tech-centric Bay Area. […] In 1985, only six entities registered a .com, one of six top-level domain names created a year earlier in a reorganization of the early Internet’s naming bureaucracy. At the time, .cor (short for corporate) almost beat .com as the designation for commercial Internet addresses.”
• Facebook passes Google as most-viewed site in US in past week [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – “Is that Google in Facebook’s rear-view mirror? Why, yes, it is, at least in the US, according to the latest figures from Hitwise. The statistics will be worrying for Google, principally because that won’t be traffic heading downstream from Google to Facebook; it will be people logging directly into the social networking site. And pause to consider: if the problem of search – what Google aims to do – is solved not by building the most fantastic search engine, but by building the biggest social network, what does that tell us? That we’re not actually looking for that much? Heather Hopkins notes that Facebook was the most visited site in the US last Christmas eve, Christmas day and New Year’s day – but also on the weekend of March 6th and 7th. That starts to look like a trend. Compared to the same week in 2009, Google’s visits were up 9% – but Facebook’s were up 185%. So now Facebook was 7.07% of visits, while Google was put in the shade – just – at 7.03%.”