I'm flying off to visit my family in the UK today, but I have a backlog of interesting URLs I wanted to blog about, so I'm temporarily stealing Nat Torkington's Four Short Links format. However, since I go up to 11, my version has five.
Thoughts from the Man Who Would Sell the World, Nicely – I've long been a fan of 80leg's service, they're democratizing crawling. How will the crawled companies react to this now that literally anyone can download millions of profiles from services like LinkedIn and MySpace, with no licensing or terms-of-service restrictions?
Fetch Technologies – On the same topic, I don't know that much about Fetch but they seem to be a sophisticated and well-funded company based on crawling the public web to gather information for commercial purposes.
The World Bank Bares All – I was very excited to discover that the World Bank offers over 1,000 different measures for countries for free. Not only that, but you can download a CSV file of all the data, instead of being restricted to an API. I'm now using this for an upcoming project, I hope more providers consider data dumps in addition to APIs, they open up so many more uses.
IndieMapper.com – A well-produced service for visualizing geographic data on the web. It's great to see more GIS tools migrating online, it's opens up the results to a much larger audience.
Never hire job hoppers. Never. They make terrible employees – Mark's since walked this article back a bit. It reminded me of the evidence that we all have a bias to hire people exactly like ourselves, and Bob Sutton's take on it: "Interviews are strange in that people have excessive confidence in them, especially in their own abilities to pick winners and losers — when in fact the real explanation is that most of us have poor and extremely self-serving memories."
Pete Warden's blog 