Kevin: From Howard Weaver on Twitter. Great post on SnarkMarket by Tim Carmody about Nate Silver and 538.com: "I say 538 wasn’t great in this election season (just) because Silver’s formula worked; it was great because it so consistently tempered the insanity of polling fluctuations (including at Pollster.com) by identifying erratic data, bad sampling, house effects, and other quantitative noise. In other words, Silver’s formula (and his explanatory rationale for it), instead of just being an aggregate output, actually helped its readers to make sense of the broader universe of polling, from process to results. As a result, the blog wound up being one of the best political reporting sites on the web." Agreed.

Kevin: Digg, Facebook and Twitter are not necessarily the best examples of lean, low-cost startups, and this is a good contrarian view of Web 2.0. There are a lot of stories right now asking digital start-ups to show the money in part because the recession will force the weak and poorly managed to do just that. It will make the dot.com crash look positively like a walk in the park. The days of easy money and easy funding are over.

Kevin: "iTunes is a business model for distributed content, a way of monetising the fragment itself. Until every news article, every photo, every headline costs something (even a fraction of a fraction of a penny) to read or includes a paid-for ad we do not and will not have an iTunes for news."

Kevin: (Newspaper Death Watch) sorted through our 147 entries of 2008 to come up with the stories that surprised us, delighted us or made us shake our heads in disbelief. We’re

Kevin: The world's newspaper editors sound off on integrated newsrooms – Editors Weblog article (09.01.09)

Insightful Analysis and Commentary for U.S. and Global Equity Investors

Kevin: Chris Amico has a list of excellent tools for digital journalists.

Kevin: Absolutely essential for any journalist looking to filter social media on your beat. Bookmark this post now. Keep it handy.

Kevin: What is the future for not only enterprise RSS but standalone RSS readers for enterprise. I agree with otherw reading this article, Google Reader, while good, is no substitute for NetNewsWire. I see RSS as a fundamental enabling technology, and I think that any journalist who isn't using a reader like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon is missing a huge opportunity to much more efficiently process information. However, adoption remains weak. I need to talk to Suw about this because she's the adoption guru in the Charman-Anderson household. How do I jedi mind trick journalists into using RSS?

Kevin: This wraps a lot of the recent discussion, much of which isn't new, about the death of newspapers in print form and what comes next. The discussion still seems to be two camps talking past each other with parallel points of reference. The print folks argue about the necessity of the print without considering print as a delivery mechanism for information that may not be suited for all information or for all audiences, and the newest online folks are coming from an all digital culture that is only a few years old. Right now, the discussion isn't all that productive, but it's good to read this summary, even if I don't agree with all of the conclusions.

Kevin: Tom Scott at the BBC says: "If you run a website you’re going to want to manage your content. You might use an Enterprise CMS, an open source CMS, a blogging platform or a bespoke app, and as you might expect at the BBC the same rules apply. Except some of us have been trying out something a bit different — using the web as a content management system."
There is something simple and yet very, very powerful here.