Kevin: Ushahidi launches a free cloud-based service of its crowd-sourced crisis reporting platform. The new service, CrowdMap cuts the time to create a deployment. Instead of having to install it on a server, all you need to do is fill out a form with your password, a valid subdomain, name and tagline, according to a description on the Ushahidi blog.

Kevin: James Ledbetter at Slate looks at some strange traffic numbers from Demand Media ahead of its IPO. Publicly available figures from Quantcast report a 75% drop in traffic, but the service also reports that traffic at Demand's eHow.com dropped to zero in July. Ledbetter posits some possible explanations.

Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick says that Facebook's location service, Places, will launch soon. According to reports in CNet, it will not be a standalone service to compete with existing location services but rather an API for other location services to use. "I expect that several of these motivations will apply to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users as well, not just the single-digit millions of early adopters using services like Foursquare and Gowalla today."

Kevin: Visualisations of investment money (right now, mostly in the US) and the connections between investors.