links for 2009-03-04

  • Kevin: Mark Jones, the Global Community Editor at Reuters, writes on his personal blog about the best uses of Twitter by news organisations. He's right to flag up the Austin Statesman page for highlighting their Twittering staff. I think there are lots of excellent individual efforts in relationship to journalists and Twitter including Rory Cellan-Jones and Darren Waters at the BBC and Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss here at the Guardian. But I think Monica Guzman with the Seattle PI does a great job. It's the people using the service for social media journalism who stand out in my mind.
  • Kevin: Friend and colleague Jemima Kiss flags up a McKinsey and World Economic Forum visualisation of innovation and cities around the world. It really tells a story, including the huge output of Silicon Valley, Tokyo and even Chicago in terms of patents. The location of London on the map should have UK policy makers worried. US policy makers should be worried about details in the report of highly skilled immigrants returning home. Positive immigration policies can help deal with these issues. However, this map takes into account US patents, which one would assume would over-represent US cities in the data.
  • Kevin: Wiki vendor SocialText add status updates like Twitter or Facebook, calling them 'Signals' and add an Adobe Air application. TechCrunch says the Signals feature competes against enterprise micro-messaging services like Yammer or WIzeHive.
  • Kevin: Clay at Sunlight Labs talks about the issues he has with content management systems and argues that web frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails are a better option. It's an interesting wrinkle on a common discussion in the industry, and it's worth the read.
  • Kevin: ReadWriteWeb looks at three servicers, XMarks, Evri and Ensembli that add semantic web features and help show related content through natural language relationships and other emerging semantic web technologies. As RWW says, we haven't arrived at the glorious semantic web future, but these are steps on the path.