Links for 01-04-2010

• Because I Can: Gmail pisses me off - "It's not your place to decide how people use their email, and it's certainly not your place to presume a decent search feature eliminates the need for a basic sort functionality." Agreed. Sort by name is a good way to go through a big lump of inbox and eliminate, say, daily status reports from XYZ. This can help eliminate a fair amount of mail in advance of more detailed handling.
• Perspectives - MapReduce in CACM - "I like MapReduce for a variety of reasons the most significant of which is that it allows non-systems programmers to write very high-scale, parallel programs with comparative ease." This seems a key point that efficiency arguments sometimes miss.
• Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: The Mathematics of Modern War
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips » Lightroom and the New Year - "2. Delete more photos - One way to help wrangle your Lightroom experience is to simply have less photos in your catalog. I've got over 10,000 images in my catalog from 2009. You know how many made it to my portfolio or were sent off to the people I was photographing? Less than 1000. That's 9000 photos that really don't serve much of a purpose. A smaller photo library makes it easier on everything - you, your storage devices, and your computer." I agree. As with Gmail, there are a lot of hidden costs in saving absolutely everything. You don't need to treat storage space as precious but you should be aware that more digital stuff clogs up the works in many ways.
• Freelancers’ ethics | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters - More on the ongoing contretemps about freelance bloggers and ethics guidelines.
• Dynamist Blog: The Collapse of Professional Journalism, Cont'd - Good piece from Virginia Postrel that lays out the case pretty well for why it's not practical for newspapers to hold freelancers to all the same standards as in-house staff. (Which is not to argue that there need be no standards.)