links for 2009-03-09

"I was with the rest of the room in admiring Companies Open House which provided restful Companies House look-up for a company’s basic registration information. Unbelievably, the government’s Companies House website doesn’t have a permanent URL for each registered company, and is shut between midnight and 7am!! Companies Open House is an app that parses company data and gives you a nice page with all of the basic details about each company at a permanent URL. Companies Open House is open 24/7 and you can use each company’s permanent URL as a reliable and stable link when making inferences about a company on the Web. It would be interesting to see if the richer ‘subscription’ data might be set free or derived from other sources to make an awesomely powerful service"

"Robert Thomson, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, recently attacked Google but made a really important point in doing so: “Google devalues everything it touches,” Thomson said. “Google is great for Google, but it’s terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content.""

"When asked about possible future features for Twitter, he reportedly said that one of the things being considered is an extension that lets people know what’s happening in their immediate vicinity. That would basically mean that Twitter could actively ping users about local events that are going on in their neighborhood, in real-time, based on the location they’ve indicated. As an example, Williams says users could be alerted to the fact a fire is burning a few streets away from where Twitter knows (or thinks) they are."

"I’ve noticed a few people making Spotify playlists of old Festive 50 lists. So far I’ve found 1978, 1982 and 1988. I thought I’d sift through Spotify myself and see what the online music service could do for Peel’s 1990s lists. A couple of the 90s lists were unusual – Peel didn’t broadcast the 1991 list until 1993 and he broadcast only the top 31 tracks from the 1997 list, even though all 50 were chosen."