Kevin: "Asterisq just released Mentionmap, an exciting web app for exploring your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they're talking about. It's also a great way to find relevant people to follow." It's a very good tool to see your network, not only in terms of people you're most connected to but also the topics that they are talking about.

Kevin: Ian Betteridge summarises a discussion that he had on Twitter with a number of digital journalists including Matthew Ingram and John Robinson. Ian puts forward an interesting argument that people too focused on what readers need and forgetting what people want engage in a "puritan reductionism" and "paternalism".
"But if you treat journalism as some kind of “enabler of effective citizenship” you will never produce stories which are compelling, interesting, provoke real emotion – and yes, which entertain too."

Kevin: Zoe Kleinman writes: "Children who blog, text or use social networking websites have better writing skills than those who do not, according to the National Literacy Trust." A survey of 3,001 children aged nine to 16. "Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as "good" or "very good", while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same."

Kevin: Google CEO Eric Schmidt writing in the Wall Street Journal says: "Video didn't kill the radio star, and the Internet won't destroy news organizations. It will foster a new, digital business model." It's especially delicious to see Schmidt use Murdoch's words against him in one of his own publications. "…as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry."

Kevin: A fascinating visualisation looking at the wide variations in income across New York's various neighbourhoods. This is what visualisation is about: Allowing people to easily see patterns in large amounts of information. This shows you the median income of the people living in various neighbourhoods and income distribution of the household in that neighbourhood or borough. Bravo.

Kevin: Matt Brittin, Google UK MD, told a Parliamentary committee hearing: "Google delivers 'something like' four billion clicks to news organisations and publishers per month, he said. "Once those clicks go through to sites those are people reading stories and engaging in advertising."

"It's wrong to paint us as stealing content (…) The amount of traffic that comes from us is equivalent to 100,000 clicks a minute to newspaper sites."

Google's 'snippets' of text were in-line with worldwide copyright law, he claimed."

Kevin: "The Twitter "back channel" can be a powerful tool to quickly knit a gathering of strangers into an online community, a place where attendees at meetings broadcast bits of sessions, share extra information such as links, and arrange social events. But the same technology can also enable a "virtual lynching.""