I love my RSS feed. Every article I read on my almost too-brief commute from work (a mere 13 minutes by train) was brilliant. Culture Digitally and The Institute of Network Cultures both wrote about the leaked Operation Manual for Live Content Moderators on Facebook, that is, the exactly guidelines for moderators confirming, unconfirming or escalating reports of abuse on Facebook. The level of detail is disturbing, but honestly I am happy that Facebook has clear guidelines on most of this stuff. There are a few political things under “international compliance” that are worrying – censor any map of Kurdistan or burning of the Turkish flag? The analyses are interesting reads, though.

The next post I read was by Anne Helmond, who used a downloadable tool by Christopher Warnow to visualize the Amazon recommendation network around Software Studies. Here’s her map – and you can see closeups on her blog.

You can download the tool and run it yourself on Mac, Linux and Windows, and the source is provided too. It’s not just pretty – it serves as a “what to read next” guide, as Anne notes, but Christopher  Warnow also points out that he found interesting differences between the German and US versions of Amazon. For instance, the Germans tend to read Deleuze in a postmodernist context, whereas the Americans are more likely to read him alongside French situationists.