links for 2009-07-29

  • Suw: I'm going through citation hell at the moment, trying to tidy up all the half-written citations in my report. Looks like Zotero might well help me sort out the mess!
  • Kevin: Umair Haque writes an open letter to 'newspaper magnates'. It's well worth a read. Just a taster: "20th century news isn't fit for 21st century society. Yesterday's approaches to news are failing to educate, enlighten, or inform. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair. It is the news industry itself that commoditized news by racing repeatedly to the bottom. It's time for a better kind of news.
    A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry's nose. Nichepapers, as the name implies, own the microniche."
  • Kevin: My Guardian colleague and journalistic hacker Simon Willison lists a number of tools that non-developers can use to create mash-ups, visualisations and other data-driven web projects. It's a good starting place if you're looking to create a data project but don't know where to start. We'll be using these at the Guardian at our second internal Hack Day.