The PhilosoFiles Blog

Twitter used to provide a link on users' profiles to RSS feeds of their tweets, but have hidden this feature in their new look. Who knows, perhaps they're trying to force people to use their site more? Anyway, there is still a way to find these feeds: click on your name at the top right and choose to switch to the old Twitter, then visit the profile of the tweeter in question and look for the link to the RSS feed of the user's tweets. I've also heard that logging out of Twitter and visiting the profile can reveal this link, but haven't been able to get this to work myself.

I appreciate many features of the new Google Analytics, but it can be hard to find a few useful old features, particularly the options on the Content Detail screen for a specific page on your site. This was the screen that appeared when you clicked on the address of a particular bit of content, say in your top content report, and gave you the options for Navigation Analysis (Navigation Summary and Entrance Paths) and Landing Page Optimization (Entrance Sources and Entrance Keywords). I thought I would answer a few questions on Analytics people may have since the new look.

This video is both amusing and telling.

This chart is informative, in light of the panic surrounding Fukushima, undoubted disaster that it is:

This is Lance Orton, the New York City T-shirt vendor who spotted smoke coming from an SUV abandoned near Times Square and alerted the police; the police then discovered an (amateurish) carbomb inside it, and were able to carry out a controlled detonation. It's hard not to find his attitude to the fawning media badgering him for quotes refreshing:

Many people are frustrated by their lack of substance, or worried by the (additional) importance they bestow on personality, but I've always enjoyed set-piece debates between political parties. Primarily as a form of entertainment, to be sure, but also for the light they shed on the candidates participating. They may not be the best place to learn about party policy, but forcing politicians to respond to the same questions and to one another's talking points can be revealing in other ways.

...according to this Labour attack ad:

So much for the right having a monopoly on anti-crime populism. As for the actual merits of the attack - where to start? Well...

1) 'Even the Daily Mail' concedes that "just one in 350, or 0.3 per cent, of the 1.3 million crimes solved by police" can be credited to the DNA database.

I'm editing the openDemocracy front page this week, and alongside the regular articles I've featured a video from contributor Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School who was until recently also a professor here at Oxford. It's a presentation on 'The Historical Record in the Digital Age' in which he discusses the effect of the web on the preservation of information for future generations, and the politics thereof:

I've just discovered this screenshot of what Twitter used to look like (Creative Commons, from prolific flickr screenshot-uploader factoryjoe):

Recently - which in the context of this avowedly 'occasional' blog means last month - I posted on Merseyside police's ill-fated use of an aerial drone to track down a teenage car thief. They ran into legal troubles, for the relatively trivial reason that the Civil Aviation Authority, which is concerned about the threat these devices pose to other air traffic, had not granted the appropriate license.