Kevin: This is an interesting hire. Robin Sloan, formerly with Current TV, is heading to Twitter to work with media partners. For those not familiar with Sloan, he and Matt Thompson (who just took an interesting job with NPR) created the EPIC animations (aka Googlezon) looking at the future of media while they were at the Poynter Institute.

Kevin: The irrational exuberance and backlash with respect to Apple's iPad would make a lovely psychological study especially in terms of different technology tribes. Steve Jobs has always been about the interface, whether that is the GUI or the human-computer interface. Deep geeks (and I travel with that tribe) want to get underneath the interface. At any rate, this is a really simple breakdown based on tweets of the iPad backlash. Enjoyable.

Kevin: Bravo TV has announced a new partnership with location-based social network FourSquare. As Nick Bilton at the New York Times writes, it may seem counter-intuitive that a social network that works to get people out from in front of their TVs would want to partner with a TV network. However, look a little deeper and this is about building new relationships with their audiences beyond TV. Smart move.

Kevin: Dr. Serena Carpenter, an assistant professor in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, looked at the skills that traditional news media and online news media were looking. What leapt out at me was that traditional news rooms were looking for both nontechnical and technical "routine expertise" while online news rooms were looking for "adaptive expertise" in additional to traditional journalism skills. This might be my interpretation, but it's an interesting look at what newsrooms are looking for in employees.

Kevin: A very interesting open source document collaboration and annotation project from the Centre for Educational Research and Development. It's based on WordPress and has its roots in the WriteToReply and digress.it projects. Digress.it is a plugin that allowed paragraph level commenting. The project also reveals semantic relationships between documents in the repository. Very clever stuff licenced under GPL 2 or Modified BSD licences.

Kevin: Leading Russian search engine Yandex sees first US dollar revenue slide in its history. It's 2009 revenues were up 14%, but due to ruble devaluation, their US dollar revenue decreased. Yandex being the Google of Russia saw its revenue increase while the overall Russian advertising market decline by 30% in 2009.

Kevin: Adrian Drury, principal analyst for consulting and research firm Ovum, says that media need a miracle in 2010, and Steve Jobs of Apple via the iPad "amounted to a strong story for publishers. But it comes with some major caveats". The caveats? Companies looking to deliver content on the iPad should do so with the knowledge that the music industry ceded a lot of the control over the industry to Apple's iTunes and the iPod. The revenue potential whether via paid content or advertising depends on the device volume. Good read outside of the tech press.