These are my links for July 14th from 09:22 to 21:04:

• The Register’s scathing article on the Treasury’s crowdsource site – The Treasury's Spending Challenge site was supposed to be a way for the great British public to create a wonder-Wiki of savings ideas for the coalition government. There's no denying it is popular – it is still struggling under the load and visitors might see a Service Unavailable (503) message.
• Google puts $1m into academic research projects for digitised books – A Google-backed research project is to map out the relationship between location and literature, visualising works related to a specific era or place using Google Earth
• Social Media and the Art of the Soft Sell (great advice from the Sysomos Blog) – One of the key lessons that many companies are learning, however, is that social media is not a place for the hard sell. Unlike other mediums, companies that try to blatantly pitch their goods and services are penalized rather than rewarded.
• The Hybrid Theory Manifesto: The Future of Marketing, Advertising, and Communications Part Two –
• Over half of opened emails deleted within two seconds – You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. And when it comes to email, you only have a couple of seconds to make a good impression.
• Social Media is the Servant of Strategy Not the Master – Guest post by Mike Cassidy, a non-profit Senior Executive Director specializing in membership development, engagement and retention. His ramblings can be found at www.membershipjedi.com
• BBC changes News FAQ after it accidentally threatens to kill thousands of old links around the web – In the past the site was marketed as bbc.co.uk/news but actually redirected to news.bbc.co.uk. From today, news.bbc.co.uk is no more and all URLs are in the format www.bbc.co.uk/news
• China’s “Twitters” reduce service – Chinese social networking websites that provide Twitter-like services have suddenly reverted to testing mode and access has been spotty amid reports of a government clampdown.
• BBC News – Search engine Bing gains market share – Microsoft's search engine Bing has shown impressive growth in its first year say industry experts.
• Britain’s Foreign Policy in a Networked World – The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, gave the following speech outlining the Government's vision for UK foreign policy on 1 July 2010.
• Facebook’s OpenGraph is Coming to the Mobile Web – Facebook's new head of mobile products, Eric Tseng, spoke today at MobileBeat 2010, introducing a new approach to the company's OpenGraph.
• Reports of blogging’s death have been greatly exaggerated (great article from Guardian) – Blogging is not on the way out – it's just that other social media have taken over many of its functions
• Chatroulette security breached by researchers – Techworld.com – Anonymous chatting may not be as private as you thought
• More than half of travellers share vacation info on social media sites – Online travel company Travelocity’s most recent poll shows more than half of all travellers share vacation information through social media sites.
• Coventry to trial ‘socially conscious Twitter’ – Voice Your View will let people provide feedback about their neighbourhood, including how safe they feel.
• Ben & Jerry’s drops email in favour of social media – Ben & Jerry’s will become one of the first big brands to abandon regular email marketing. It will instead focus on social media.
• Old Spice targets Twitter generation – The Cannes Film Grand Prix-winning Old Spice campaign has evolved into targeting Twitter users, including Starbucks and GQ, with 117 publicly available video messages.
• BBC launches redesigned news website – The BBC launched its revamped news website today. The redesign is the first since March 2008 and "the biggest rethink of the design of the site since 2003," according to editor Steve Herrmann.