Loose Bits, Sept 12 2006

A new Loose Wire blog feature, collecting some links that aren’t necessarily new, but worth pointing out in case you missed them:

• Google’s News Archive Search – lets you search back through news articles several years, decades, even nearly a century back. Stories are listed by interest (whatever that means) but with three very handy extra features: a categorisation by period on the left, below it by publication, and the option to view the stories in a timeline (actually a vertical listing by year.) Useful stuff.
• The Lonelygirl15 mystery gets solved, gets boring quickly. An insight on how little we can distinguish, or care about distinguishing, between fact and fiction. More here and here.
• Talking of which, I couldn’t access Wikipedia or the BBC websites while I was in China. Made me realise how much I rely on both.
• My friend and fellow columnist Charles Wright is feeling the pain of declining ad income on his Bleeding Edge blog. It’s a tough business, and it’s easy to forget that if you like a blog you should try to support it. Unfortunately RSS readers make it easy to skip the ads.
• A new version of Democracy, the oddly named TV viewing software and downloader, is available. New features include playlists, folders, Flash capabilities, non-English suppot for Windows, Mac and Linux and overall tarting up of the interface.
• My other friend Cameron Reilly of The Podcast Network has gone Moleskine.
• Interesting talk abroad about the GyroQ, a tool that allows for quick entering of data into a Mindjet mind map. I was tickled to see the address of the company is The Old Dairy, Eggpie Lane, Weald, Kent.