Kevin: An interesting development for anyone interested in 'transmedia' and stories. With the rise of social media, there has been a focus on interactivity, which I really enjoy. However, I think we pressed pause on story innovation during this time. The rise of social media and the dot.com crash before it, led to some stagnation in thinking about how we tell stories. Fortunately, I think with data visualisations and the mass appeal of the digital content, we're seeing a revival of exploration. This is a project to watch in that vein

Kevin: Carrington Malon of Spot On PR writes: "Facebook has become a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East and North Africa and the platform can now claim 15 million users as of May 2010. Whilst Facebook saw strong early growth in 2008/2009 from English and French speaking users across the region, Facebook’s decision to add an Arabic interface in March 2009 has opened up access to a whole new demographic of Internet users and added 3.5 million Arabic users over the past year."

Kevin: An interesting post by Alastair Leithead about coverage of the protests in Thailand. Alastair says that the international media were pilloried by not only Thais but ex-pats for their coverage of the protests in Bangkok. He said that some of the criticism was particularly harsh on Twitter. He expressed frustration at having to explain a complex story not only on television but also in 140-characters on Twitter. He asked some of his critics on Twitter how to succinctly explain the crisis and actually got some useful insights. An example example of how engagement can help diffuse criticism.

Kevin: An interesting post by We Media author Dan Gillmor on Salon talking about his upcoming book Mediactive. The goal of the book is to persuade people to become much more active users of media instead of simply being passive consumers. As he says, part of this is about improved media literacy. However, as digital technology allows more people to become creators of media, he also asks questions about who is a journalist in this new age and whether or how such protections afforded in the past only to professional journalists.

Kevin: An interesting view that the first-person decentralised expert (in this case venture capitalist Fred Wilson) has replaced the third-person centralised expert quoted by traditional media. It's worth a read. The one issue with decentralisation is that it requires more effort from the person seeking information. Decentralisation does not work passive audiences. The post is specifically talking about Fred Wilson in the context of Inc magazine. It might make more sense that niche content, especially business content, has a more active audience than for general news.

Kevin: A way to automatically generate calls to US National Public Radio's API. It makes API calls easy.