/usr/bin/links --date='Sunday, November 22'

Some interesting bits from around the Web about technology, social media, marketing, and other snazzy bits.

• Stephen Fry attacks 'malevolent' comments following Twitter spat -- The most interesting bit of this, for me, is the part asking Biz Stone to "justify" Twitter because Tweets are "pointless musing." It's interesting how people focus on the trivialities on the Web, but spend so much time in idle chit-chat in person... why should it be any different online?
• Could Mozillians help reinvent local news? -- The Knight Foundation and Sunlight Labs are "reaching out to developers and designers who are using internet thinking to change how government works. If these people are good at coming up with ways to internet-ize government, why not see if they can do the same for local news? Smart." Taking that one step further, how could the the Mozilla Project or Mozilla community play a role in reshaping local news online?
• Making browsers faster: Resource Packages -- "we suggest a standard approach that all browsers makers can easily implement, and that is backwards compatible with browsers that do not support it. We also want a solution that works for all types of resources, not only image bitmaps, and one that doesn’t require any new tools, file types or protocols." Interesting proposal...
• Why do I See All Those Those Weird Characters? -- Akkana Peck covers the unfortunate situation behind characters like "’" and why you might run into them. In part it has to do with the evil which is "smart quotes."

  In related news, after transferring this blog to a new host, I installed the No Curly Quotes plugin to curb the unfortunate habit WordPress has of using curly quotes instead of normal quotes as $DEITY intended. I strongly recommend the plugin if you're using WordPress.

Enjoy your Sunday!