links for 2009-06-16

What makes good television?

How about a bunch of people sitting around a conference table talking business strategy?

Sounds like your exciting 10:30 meeting, huh.

Well, Microsoft thinks it's a good idea, and with creative editing "It's Everybody's Business with Jack & Suzy Welch" – a new online reality show on MSN.com – could build a following.

Classroom use of presentation software, whereby information is simultaneously delivered verbally and visually, risks overloading students' working memory and impairing learning. We compared traditional and lexically-sparse slide presentations, using multiple-choice and short essay answers to assess learning; participants exposed to traditional slides performed significantly worse on their essay answers.

Mash-ups are cool – ever since Ordnance Survey, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft launched there various mapping APIs we’ve seen quite a few of them.

Social media is everywhere and for a lot of businesses they approach it likes it’s the magic wand that’s going to be the savior to their business. When you begin to talk to them, usually the conversation starts like this. “Can you help us with that Twitter thing and that Facebook thing, not to mention it’s vital if you can produce for us one of those viral videos. Second, this has to help our business look hip and cool and last but not least, we don’t have the time to really be involved in any conversations.”

Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York. Real time apps that use efficient methods of communicating information between the browser and the server are all the rage these days. Now Flash developers will have an easy way to get in the game.