links for 2009-07-13

• Comments Dead, Twitter Holds Smoking Gun
  At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the "death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels.
  (tags: twitter comments)
• Alaska’s tab for ethics complaints about Palin: $1.9 million | csmonitor.com
  If public-records requests are expensive, the Palin administration’s practices help make them so, says Gregg Erickson, a Juneau economist and former state revenue official who publishes a specialized newsletter on Alaska budget issues.

  “They have taken the position that a lawyer has to look at every single record before its release. If a lawyer has to look at it and review it, and maybe write a legal opinion on it, well, that’s going to be expensive,” says Mr. Erickson. Court fights also add to the costs, he says.

  Citizens and journalists who sought public records have been socked with huge bills. At one point, the Palin administration presented the Associated Press with a bill of $45 million for copies of official state e-mails sent to Palin’s husband, to the McCain campaign, and to federal agencies.

  
  
  (tags: alaska palin,sarah foia ethics the-high-price-of-transparency)
  
  
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  What is the fastest way to draw an image from discrete pixel values in Python? - Stack Overflow
  
  
  I wish to draw an image based on computed pixel values, as a means to visualize some data. Essentially, I wish to take a 2-dimensional matrix of color triplets and render it.

  Do note that this is not image processing, since I'm not transforming an existing image nor doing any sort of whole-image transformations, and it's also not vector graphics as there is no pre-determined structure to the image I'm rendering- I'm probably going to be producing amorphous blobs of color one pixel at a time.

  
  
  (tags: python graph image heatmap numbers via:mahatm)
  
  
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  On gathering feedback, in person and online - AnnArbor.com
  
  
  I like UserVoice, I really do; but it couldn't stand up to a dedicated person spamming it with foul language over and over again, and until there's enough spam control to deal with that operational issue in real time it's just going to have to be de-emphasized for now. (suk)
  
  
  (tags: uservoice annarborcom comments newspaper feedback be-careful-what-you-wish-for)
  
  
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  ÜberTwitter Download
  
  
  Welcome! You are moments away from experiencing a truly advanced Twitter client developed especially for BlackBerry devices. We are in our third Beta test phase now, but encourage you to download and try this version as we continue to refine and develop the product.
  
  
  (tags: twitter mobile blackberry beta)
  
  
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  MediaShift Idea Lab . Saving Journalism, One Idea at a Time | PBS
  
  
  We've become accustomed to a media world dominated by monopolies and oligopolies. So we -- and especially the paid journalists who remain in the craft -- tend to imagine that just a few big institutions will rise from the sad rubble of the journalism business.

  That's not where it's going, at least not anytime soon. We're heading into an incredibly messy but also wonderful period of innovation and experimentation that combines technology and people and pushes great and outlandish ideas into the real world. The result will a huge number of failures but also a large number of successes.

  
  
  (tags: advertising business journalism future newspapers gillmor media)
  
  
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  Apartment Therapy DC | Hot or Not? Stencil Graffiti in Savannah GA
  
  
  Stencil Graffiti in Savannah GA: Hot or Not?
  Hot: That little zebra is street art; walking by him would make me smile!
  Not: That little zebra is defacing the beauty of that building; walking by him would make me scowl!
  
  
  (tags: graffiti hot-or-not zebra apartment-therapy via:jyew)
  
  
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  Facts dog Cleveland newspaper defender - The Future of Journalism - Open Salon
  
  
  This blog is going to ask for your indulgence. It is frankly obsessed with the 15-minute video at Cleveland.com that both Katharine and I wrote about yesterday. We're thinking of changing the name of this blog to the How Crazy Was That Cleveland Plain Dealer Video? Blog.

  It's just such a stunning example of newspaper-industry hubris and cluelessness. True confession: I'm writing about it for the second time, and I still haven't made it past the 10-minute mark, where Cleveland Plain Dealer "reader representative" Ted Diadiun refers to bloggers as "a bunch of pipsqueaks."

  
  
  (tags: cleveland cleveland-plain-dealer blogging journalism diadiun,ted we-need-a-better-press-corps a-bunch-of-pipsqueaks)