The Sunlight Foundation in the US announces winners of its digital design competition. "Submissions ranged from an impressive redesign of the IRS to a brilliant infographic showing how a bill becomes a law, to scrollable guide to the Senate, to an inspired UI redesign of the Social Security Administration."

Kevin: Mark Sweeney of The Guardian writes: "The tie-up with Facebook and Twitter, which will allow iPlayer users to recommend programming to their friends as long as they log into the BBC website first, forms part of a strategy to make the service more social.
However, users will have to sign up to the BBC's own website ID service, already used for posting comments on the site, so that the corporation can maintain a "complete social eco-system" with iPlayer users. The corporation has more than one million users already signed up to BBC ID."

Kevin: A Dubai-based public relations agency, Spot On PR, says that there are more Facebook users in the Arab world than newspaper readers. There are 15m Facebook users and newspapers have a circulation of 14m.

Kevin: The amazing data viz people at Gapminder release an Adobe Air app to explore the data and visualisations at Gapminder.

Kevin: A good overview of a report by business and technology analysts Ovum by Laura Oliver at Journalism.co.uk. "News and magazine publishers should instead be developing products and a workflow that caters for the iPad as just one of a range of digital and non-digital readers, says the Reformatting News & Magazine Media report." The iPad is part of a multi-platform strategy, not a single solution for all that ails traditional publishers.

Kevin: A very clear post on how to use Processing both to gather data and to create simple visualisations. This is an excellent tutorial walking you through the data collection and also the visualisation of the data. Highly recommended. I've tried Processing before, but this will help me understand it much more.

Kevin: Mark Potts writes about the porous paywall at the Wall Street Journal. He also wonders why it would have been cheaper for him to subscribe both to the website and to the print edition. (My guess is that print ads are still far more lucrative to the Journal than online advertising.) This is an interesting post that covers a lot of issues about paywalls, pricing and also the relaxed attitude that newspaper sales teams have towards subscribers. Well worth a read.

Kevin: Excellent piece from Patrick Smith comparing the nascent market for media apps with RSS feeds and either online or application-based readers. He doesn't have a lot to say positively about smartphone and iPad apps. RSS is an invisible technology for mot news consumers. They aren't even aware of it but use it in a number of applications. I think Patrick's point at the end is intelligent and nuanced: "Of course, the everyday Man On The Clapham Omnibus doesn’t care or want to know about RSS, much less mobile apps that create a mobile version of their OPML file. But Journalism.co.uk readers are media professionals – and I’d wager that most of you are capable of using free or cheap software to create a mobile news experience that no branded premium app can match."

Kevin: What I call the 'war for the living room' is definitely getting more interesting. With so much video shifting to IP-based delivery, it's suddenly addressable, findable and sharable in a way that TV hasn't been before. Definitely worth watching these videos to see what kind of features these startups are pursuing. They are definitely the 'Davids' in this battle with the likes of Sony, Intel, Logitech and Google teaming up for GoogleTV and Yahoo already having a presence on other connected sets, but features tend to be poached from these startups. Look to the edges for the innovation.