Tiny Planet

I’m clearing out some inactive or inaccurate links. If I’ve taken yours off by mistake, leave a comment and I’ll re-link.

At least somebody is seeing their company grow in these recessionary times: membership of social networking sites is soaring as people look to make contacts for potential jobs elsewhere.

Traffic on the world’s top professional Web networks has surged since the financial crisis started to make headlines, with the top player, the privately held LinkedIn, notching 25 percent more registrations in September than forecast.

“Nobody has ever seen anything like this before,” said Kevin Eyres, head of LinkedIn’s operations in Europe. “Now we are growing by almost one new user each second.”

Membership on LinkedIn has jumped to more than 31 million from 18 million at the start of the year, growing fastest in the financial services, media, education and technology fields, Eyres said.

Hypermiling might be the word of the year but I prefer topless meeting. Only it’s not what you think.

Fine Gael’s economic ‘plan’ dissected in far better fashion than I can muster.

Greenland goes to the referendum booth to seek greater self-rule powers.

Take that you spammy feckers.

If we could resurrect neanderthals by cloning, should we?

The town where no one is allowed to die.

From a Reuters article on mobile phone usage:

Known for their ‘gift of the gab’ or talent for speaking, the Irish lead the way in the use of mobile phones, spending around 179 minutes per month on average on their mobiles.

The Irish love of the ‘craic’ or general banter has also spread to texting with mobile phone users in Ireland sending an average of 154 text messages a month, nearly double the figure in Britain of 81.

I’m more interested in how the Ofcom survey figured out that Americans spend more than 15 hours a week on the internet. Does this include people who would, say, pull up Firefox and keep tabs open all day? That would, in my eye, taint the survey. Or is it referring to active usage? If so, who keeps a record of their time on the web?

China’s output per head of population is smaller than Albania’s. Except China could probably buy swathes of the planet.

Wooly mammoth DNA decoded. Am I the only one who wants to see this species roam the Earth again?

A gallery of the greatest conspiracy theories.

Prices at Dubai’s Palm developments are down 40% to a paltry $2.7m.

Vive la France (in digital library terms at least).

It seems 21% of Americans can’t find the Pacific Ocean on a map. On the plus side, 94% can find the US.

The fakir who was buried alive for 40 days.

It’s depressing that it’s hard to argue with Jim Kunstler:

Personally, I believe the age of Happy Motoring is over. Many Americans have already bought their last car – they just don’t know it yet.

Can culture change anything? Paulo wants to hear from you.

Apparently we’re related to kangaroos. Now I feel a little guilty about eating this distant cousin of mine in a pie one evening. Tasty, though.

A blast from the Lifehacker archives worth keeping close to hand: manage your online reputation.

Even the Department of the Taoiseach is going without a Christmas party. I guess this is Brian Cowen’s attempt to help save the public finances.

So very tired, but here we go:

A chaffinch map of Scotland: “The work looks deceptively simple, while in fact it is a cleverly multilayered combination of poetry, cartography, ornithology, linguistics, and maybe just a hint of Scottish nationalism”. I love the oddities of the internet.

Strip websites back to basics.

Like ice, penguins, clouds and atmospheric disturbances? Then you’ll love this selection.

I can sympathise with the Transformers. But Pokemon? Super-soakers? C’mon.

And if you haven’t had enough after that, try love, romance and other natural disasters.

Even Times Square is getting climate conscious.

Living in the shadow of past glory is not easy for some Egyptians.

Well that didn’t take long, did it, Blizzard?

Hahahaha.

Vodafone has decorated its website for Christmas, even though we’re not even a week into November. Come on, people!

Because science is awesome we can now clone formerly extinct animals.

Because science is dumb a HIV vaccine actually increased the risk of infection.

I think Dilbert has given us a way out of taking responsibility for the economic crisis.

Jeff Jarvis on a future for news media:

I proposed a problem to solve: What if a city, say Philadelphia, loses its paper tomorrow. What would you build in its place to serve the community? The [working] group went to town. Rather than trying to hack at the old, they build something new.

They calculated the likely revenue Philadelphia could support online and then figured out what they could afford in staffing. Instead of the 200-300-person newsroom that has existed in print, they decided they could afford 35 and they broke that down to include a new job description: “community managers who do outreach, mediation, social media evangelism.” They settled on three of those plus 20 content creators, two programmers, three designers, five producers (I think they were a bit heavy on those two), and — get this — only three editors.

I’m glad I don’t have money saved with Bank of Ireland.

Flickr’s three billionth photo.

No duh headline on a very important story: How HIV changed ex-addict’s life.