Kevin: Alan Mutter and his Newsosaur blog is one of my regular reads. We really need more business-oriented voices in terms of journalism blogs. Motley Fool looks at some of Alan's suggestions for the future of the newspaper industry. He's got three suggestions including printing only when advertising will support it, charge for original content (note not all content) and develop advertising models beyond banner ads. The post is worth a read, and Alan's Newsosaur is worth following on a regular basis.

Kevin: Yahoo has launched a major challenge to Facebook connect with a service became available on 600,000 sites. The Yahoo Updates service is a partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit. It uses the open standard OAuth in its system and ReadWriteWeb says it's quite easy to use. Off to give it a try.

Kevin: The New York Times has an excellent graphic that shows: "Job losses have been most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing and those that already had the highest unemployment rates." My home county in Illinois has a Chrysler plant and 14.9% unemployment. Excellent visualisation.

Kevin: The BBC has announced an expansion of its social media stragegy. They will add a 'social discovery' mechanism in which site users would have an activity page. The article says that this would include links to other social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The proposition isn't really clear from the article. Will this service merely allow BBC site users to aggregate their social media activities on the BBC. They will also create a new 'Head of Social Media'. Alas, most efforts in the BBC are dissipated through bureaucratic dampening.