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Another Icelandic volcano has blown its top and, as you might expect, the media has gone batshit. Even otherwise commendable publications like Nature have lost their heads and are calling Grímsvötn “the new Eyjafjallajökull” (hint: it’s completely different). So here’s a quick look at the key information sources you need to understand what’s going on.

Firstly, let’s just talk about pronunciation. Whereas I could understand the reluctance to attempt Eyjafjallajökull, even though it’s not that hard once you’re got your tongue round it, Grímsvötn is much easier. An Icelandic friend says the í is like the ‘ea’ in ‘eating’ and

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Last year, days after I took a buyout from The Guardian, I wrote a fun little rant about publishers and their delusional approach to the iPad. Since then Suw and I have bought an iPad and have tried out a number of apps, and one of those apps was The Daily.

The shortcomings of the interface and the app have been well covered. (The Daily, now with 20% more crash-tastic badness.) However, rather than focus on the poor interface or lousy execution, I’d like to focus on the bland content, something you don’t usually get to say about Murdoch content.

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There was an interesting discussion about linking and journalism amongst a number of journalists in North America. Mathew Ingram of GigaOm and  Alex Byers, a web producer for Politico in Washington, both collected the conversation using Storify. It covers a lot of well worn territory in this debate, and I’m not going to rehash it.

However, one issue in this debate focused on the workflow and content management systems. New York Times editor Patrick LaForge said:

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/palafo/status/70668697051725824"]

Workflow and how that is coded into the CMS is a huge issue for newspapers. For two years when I was at The Guardian, most

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Earlier this year I did some work for OldWeather.org, a citizen science project that is transcribing weather and other data from old ships logs. As part of their website progress assessment, I hand-analysed their web traffic referrers to see where people were coming from and whether we were reaching our core communities. One of the things I found was that whilst Facebook sent over two orders of magnitude more visitors than LinkedIn, LinkedIn was responsible for much higher quality visitors. Visitors from LinkedIn visited an average of 17 pages per visit, staying for 34 minutes with a bounce rate of

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