12. February, 2002 - get your news before the links die

The deadline for the dollarshort.org coloring contest is February 18th. [opine bovine]
The Who Announces U.S. Tour. No visit to Minneapolis. [fark!]
Three magic little words to stop telemarketers cold. [fark!]
Cal Ripken buys into minor league. The link about an American sport comes from the BBC because: 1 - they have decently short URLs, 2 - they don't have JavaScript errors in their pages, 3 - they don't have so many ads on the page that it takes ten minutes to load.
Doc says What they [Knight-Ridder] did to [Dave] Barry, and to Dan [Gillmor], was blast tens of thousands of links into a fine mist of 404s. I think about this myself when I do things like lose my long-standing URL at best.com or reorganize parts of Dave's Picks. And while I do log all the 404s on my site into a file, there are some robots out there that are too stupid to keep from trying to crawl the missing pages every single day, over and over again, and the log-file rapidly fills with crap. One of these days I'll modify the scripts that serve up every page on Dave's Picks to redirect these things better, but there are still some things that are just going to go away, and I wish the 'bots would start accepting that, at least in some cases, a 404 is forever. [scripting]
More commentary on linkrot and other issues facing newspapers on the web in What happens when a news site is forced to share a common interface with a city portal?. [opine bovine]
The 2002 Anti-Bloggies Winners [Davezilla]