The New, Improved, Fresh Beulah Links!

I know, I know- all two of you were thinking, "Hey, where did Jeremy put all the daily links on his blog?  I need my daily links!"  But the truth, always hard to swallow, is that most people don't want daily links because, really, we are bombarded with links everyday.  So last week or so I decided to group my worthy shareable links for distribution on Thursday- now, instead of eagerly awaiting every day for a few more clicks of internet-inspired bliss, you can just fire up the browser on Thursday and see whats available.  


Also, I changed the banner of the blog in an attempt to bring a little color and design aesthetic to your viewing experience, so if you like it or not let me know in the comments below. 


Time now for......Fresh Beulah Links on 18 November 2010.

From Torrent Freak: A little ditty on the practices of the law firm Davenport Lyons in actively targeting innocent people and accusing them of illegal downloading.  Of course, the firm offered these victims the ability to avoid litigation so long as they paid a fine to the firm directly- which 20%-30% did, even though they were innocent of any charge.  Scummy to the max, this firm is now facing a review from the UK's Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. 


From D-Lib Magazine:  A small intro to a larger project concerning the use of crowd-sourcing in libraries today.  An excerpt:

  When libraries first started delivering digital resources all these social interactions were taken away from users and they simply got an information transaction by downloading content. It has taken libraries a while to realise that users still want more than a simple information transaction and they want the same and more social interactions than they had in the 'pre-digital' days. In our digital library world they want to: review books, share information, add value to our data by adding their own content, add comments and annotations and 'digital post-its' to e-books, correct our data errors, and converse with other users. And now they are telling us they can do even more, they can organise themselves to work together to achieve big goals for libraries and make our information even more accessible, accurate and interesting. Why are we not snapping up this great offer immediately? How and why should we do it?

From CNN Editorial Page: A new action-hero has taken to the streets- Unemployed Man! 

After his confrontation with Superlotto, Unemployed Man goes on to meet many down-but-not-out heroes in Cape Town, USA, a tent city made of stitched-together capes. Together, this band of heroes for hard times goes on to confront larger and larger economic villains, including The Invisible Hand itself.

From Ars Technica: A nice piece on how we lose scientific data in the digital age.  In my lifetime, (not that long to be sure) i've seen large floppy disks, smaller hard floppy disks, zip drives, usb drives, cd's, DVD's, etc...  To make matters worse, the entire brew ha ha over IP rights and internet security often keeps many scientists from releasing their data at all.  I am all for sharing data among researchers- in History it would help tremendously if one could share documents they have analyzed with a larger audience in a manner more efficient than the footnote.  Tremendous challenge but also opportunity for real innovation in solving this problem.    


And last but not least, from Pro Publica: A story they worked on with Washington Post on the 'Man Behind the Mumbai Attacks'.  Pro Publica is a wonderful news resource and they cover, in-depth, many interesting stories and events that really shape our lives today.  If you don't already have it bookmarked, do so now because it will only help you in the quest to stay informed.


Now that's some links.  Get 'em while they're hot!