Kevin: Data scraping for the rest of us. How to use Google Spreadsheets to scrape data from web pages and tables.

A group of dedicated open-government activists have teamed up to push the federal court records system into the 21st century, much to the annoyance of the government.

Kevin: Friend and colleague Charles Arthur weighs in on the current micropayments discussion that has been revived, at least in my little corner of the web, by news organisations looking for a new revenue stream and looking to make digital content pay in ways other than reliance on advertising.

Kevin: Editors in the US with comments on their sites should invest the 20 minutes watching this video in which David Ardia explains Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. David is with the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, but before joining the Center, he was the assistant counsel at The Washington Post. The bottom line is the for US publishers they can moderate comments without the fear that this exposes them to undue legal liability. It's not a case in which they have to make the binary choice of unmoderated comments or no comments at all.

Kevin: Discussions on three types of mashups: Presentation mashups, data mashups and logic mashups.

Kevin: Matthew Ingram talks about the Policy Wiki experiment at Globe and Mail in Canada. He describes it at "a combination of a traditional wiki — that is, a publicly-editable resource similar to Wikipedia — and a public discussion forum, with comments and voting features as well. In many ways, it’s a kind of social-media mashup aimed at pulling in suggestions from readers and other concerned Canadians about public policy issues."

Kevin: Worth reading and worth watching the video. BusinessWeek asked why the foreclosure problem became so severe in the US. They found after 70 interviews: "One reason foreclosures are so rampant is that banks and their advocates in Washington have delayed, diluted, and obstructed attempts to address the problem."

Kevin: The graphs help explain some complex economic events and why the last 10 years, a so-called "Golden Decade" were a-historical and why some of the financial models that allowed for the boom had too small of a time sample to be taken seriously.

Kevin: Nicholas Carlson of the Silicon Alley Insider looks at the cost of printing the New York Times. It's an interesting cost comparison albeit I'd like a little more clarity on the numbers he's using.

The comments are worth reading especially one by Thomas Lord talking about a competitive print on demand model. It's good to see some creativity creeping back into areas of the newspaper business model.