This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

• Neil Gaiman's Journal: Storms and how they start

  "Twitterstorms are no fun when people are making up things about you or insulting you for things you didn't do or think or say. When scores of people from a group that you consider yourself a part of are shouting at you, it's incredibly upsetting, no matter who you are. "

  tags: Hugo twitterstorm twitter Neil+Gaiman

• How BitTorrent Rewrote The Rules Of The Internet | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

  Fascinating, short read about how BitTorrent's use of Micro Transport Protocol has dramatically grown its user base, and made the net a less congested place. "Under uTP, any BitTorrent transfers you have going on in the background will politely wait for your streaming to be finished before they jump in. Then, in the uncrowded hours of the late night, uTP lets your torrenting get going, soaking up all that suddenly spare bandwidth. Now that uTP is used for 80% of BitTorrent transfers, traffic no longer peaks in that 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. time slot. This is also why the monthly userbase has grown from 60 million in 2008 to 170 million today--all while the share of peak traffic continues to go down. "

  tags: bittorrent internet innovation

• The world's largest photo service just made its pictures free to use | The Verge

  "Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection, in exchange for an open-embed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. For a small-scale WordPress blog with no photo budget, this looks an awful lot like free stock imagery. "

  tags: copyright photography photos Getty

• Wrexham.com overturns ban to film council meetings - Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage

  "A hyperlocal news website has been successful in overturning a ban on the filming of council meetings. Wrexham.com has published what it believes to be the first ever video of a Wrexham Council meeting following several rejected requests in recent years."

  tags: council transparency democracy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.