Kevin: Chris O'Brien talks about location-based services and Google's new Latitute. He writes: "my concern is that it will take any of these location-based services years to attain the critical mass that would make them truly useful." It's a good piece that looks at the services, recognises the privacy issues but talks about the hurdles for their widespread adoption.

Kevin: I know that this isn't journalism related, but I'm going to start collecting stories about the financial crisis. This talks about the amount of 'goodwill' or intangible assets on bank balance sheets. In the bust, these 'assets' (sneer quotes intended) may be worth nothing and therefore require even greater capatilisation to support the banks than is currently estimated. It's ugly in the US, and it's even uglier in Europe. CDO and US subprime exposures are not the only issue for European banks. They have even higher levels of goodwill assets on their books.

Kevin: After the much reported comments about Twitter's possible money making idea of charging 'brands' for their use of the micro-blogging platform, Kara Swisher reads between the lines of a Biz Stone blog post on possible avenues Twitter might take. She seems (and probably rightfully so) snarkily suspicious about any plans that Twitter has to actually make money. Is Twitter's only really strategy to become too big to fail and then get bailed out/acquired by a bigger company? If GOOG buys 'em, will Twitter become yet another service that the search giant buys and then neglects?

Kevin: Matt Davis, director of news agency DataNews, said that the BBC could be 'the Freedom of Information Act's first major scalp' as its spending is made public'. Davis says that it will lead to inevitable trimming of the corporation's budget.