Kevin: A sponsored post on ReadWriteWeb with some tips on how businesses can best use the location-based network Foursquare. One good tip is to use a tool called Foursquare Perspectives to find out information about how users are interacting with your business.

Kevin: My former colleague Jack Schofield interrogates the numbers behind Wired's proclamation that "the web is dead". Like a lot of pieces, Wired's headline bleeds out the nuance in the piece itself. Jack also points out problems of comparing video to text content in terms of the size of the files. It's a good piece from someone with a lot of knowledge both in terms of technology and journalism.

Kevin: Rebecca Denison of Edelman Digital in Chicago gives a great list of social search tools that help to follow conversations on Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz. Great resources for journalists looking to find conversations about stories that they are working on.

Kevin: A look at SMS-driven question-and-answer services ChaCha and KGB. KGB uses people to answer its questions for the price of 99 cents a text. Danny Sullivan, who follows search engines, thinks that human-powered search has a place but is unlikely to ever threaten Google. However, the services have found a place with teens and early-20-somethings.

Kevin: A look at howbigreally.com and the thinking behind it from BERG and the BBC. "We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. the Apollo 11 Moon walk explored an area smaller than Trafalgar Square; the distance between your WW1 trench and the enemy could only be as much s from your front door to the street corner." The website is currently (as of August 2010) a public prototype. It was crashing a few hours after its launch, but it's worth a look.

Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb writes: "Wisconsin developer Marc Harter has released a new Web service, command line tool and open source software called Ogre, which transforms geographic data from 16 different formats into GeoJSON, the preferred new format for geolocation Web app developers."

Kevin: My friend and former colleague, Jemima Kiss at The Guardian, writes about the imminent launch of location features in Facebook. She says, "the only thing that matters about adding location data to Facebook profiles is how secure and uncomplicated the privacy settings are." I think privacy is one issue, an issue that is much more important with location than with other services. I also think that Facebook has to deliver value to its users, not just to advertisers. If it can do that, it will definitely have added another important element to ensure its continued growth.

Kevin: Steve Yelvington has an excellent post on the forces who are declaring that the Web is dead. "Those with power always seek to retain and increase it, so it should come as no surprise that corporations like Verizon and Comcast and individuals like Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch want to create a future where they can decide what's available, to whom, and how it works. Their digital future would be built on approved applications sold in controlled, closed-system markets, delivered over private networks prioritized by economic power, throttling independent voices and open competition."

Kevin: Interesting tool. "SurveyMapper is a free real-time geographic survey and polling tool from the nice people at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London."