Monthly Archives: January 2005

How to make friends and influence people (or just find good links)

Thanks again to Simon Waldman for pointing me in the direction of two great sites for storing and exchanging useful links: del.icio.us and Furl. The former describes itself as a “social bookmarks manager”. Er, yes, of course we know what you mean by that. Thankfully, Waldman’s explanation is a little clearer, highlighting the way that you “can RSS everything: the most popular, a specific tag, or another person’s bookmarks.” In the latter case, you can find other people who are linking to similar things, and so begin creating useful contacts.

The site introduces me to a lovely neologism: ‘folksonomy’, a paper on which is ironically the most popular link. You can also read more about ‘social software’ here.

More about the tsunami disaster

Boing Boing has this posting about amateur video footage of the disaster to add to my previously posted link about blogging coverage. Also very much worth looking at is Simon Waldman’s list of Tsunami coverage links – and the more critical posting on blogsperiment. Frequently cited is Wikipedia’s entry on the disaster (look at the discussion tab), but dig deeper and their page on multimedia is especially impressive, with a good critical overview of multimedia reporting, as well as some collaborative fact checking (such as highlighting fake pictures).

Looks like bloggers are slowly getting credit for their coverage of events, as reported in The Times of India (thanks to journalismonline@yahoogroups.com for that one), whose list of blogs includes Worldchanging.com, sumankumar.com, and command-post.org.

The Indo-Asian News Service reports ‘Web users lend virtual hand to tsunami victims’. It’s also interesting to see that Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are now saying on their site that they’ve received sufficient funds for South Asia and asking that potential donors instead contribute to their general Emergency Relief Fund.