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Kevin: To fight despair, you have to seize or create your own opportunity during this economic crisis. I agree with Jim Long that there are tremendous opportunities in social media. The difference between 1999 and 2009 is that you don't have to wait for your employer to create the future for you. You can create it on your own often with next to no outlay of funds.

Kevin: A link for Suw to get her into the writing habit for 2009. We've both got a book or two to write. Let's make it the year for our first one.

Kevin: Jay Rosen is writing an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education in the US about Twitter and its usefulness. I have used Twitter both socially and professionally. During the US elections, I traveled across the country, and it was invaluable as a reporting and community tool. It's incredibly light-weight. With the end of mobile service in the UK, I think it's easy to forget how effective a bridge it is between the web and mobile users.

Kevin: Jeff Jarvis writes on the Media Guardian why Google 'defines the economy'. "In a sense, Google itself is built on a derivative: its data on data. Like the derivatives that got us into this mess, Google's are based on creating abundance. But unlike those corrupted financial products, Google's metaknowledge creates new and real value."

Kevin: A tip of the hat to Aaron Spiegel who mentioned Debate Graph on Twitter about interesting uses of social media in the context of the Israel-Gaza conflict of late 2008, early 2009. "@israelconsulate using twitter to answer questions about israel and @debategraph plotting answers www.debategraph.net" With the ever increasing amount of data on the web, visualisations will be important in helping people make sense of large amounts of information. I could see other ways to visualise this information rather than the tree model that they have, but it's a very interesting idea that merits development.

Kevin: SkyGrid is offering a free version of its news aggregation tool. They also offer a $500 a seat premium service, which they believed would rival pricey Bloomberg terminals, but in this down market, they found few takers. The service not only allows users to create custom filters from both blogs and traditional news sites, but it also has an algorithm to determine 'sentiment' of articles.