Four short links: 10 March 2011

MTurk Spam, Javascript Secrets, Better Comments, and Full RSS

  1. Everybody is Spamming Everybody Else on MTurk — one researcher found >40% of HITs are spammy, but this author posted a Mechanical Turk HIT to supply recommendations for visitors to a non-existent French city and got responses from people expecting that every response would be paid regardless of quality.
  2. Javascript Garden a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language. It gives advice to avoid common mistakes, subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavours into the depths of the language.
  3. A 5 Minute Framework for Fostering Better Conversations in Comments Sections (Poytner) — Whether online or offline, people act out the most when they don’t see anyone in charge. Next time you see dreck being slung in the bowels of a news story comment thread, see if you can detect whether anyone from the news organization is jumping in and setting the tone. As West put it, news organizations typically create a disconnect between the people who provide content and the people who discuss that content. This inhibits quality conversation.
  4. Full Text RSS Feed — builds full-text feeds for sites that only offer extracts in their RSS feeds. (via Jason Ryan)
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