Kevin: The New York Times has an excellent and chilling graphic showing the circulation declines by major newspapers across the US and showing their relative size. My only issue with the graphic is that it was obviously taken from the print addition. I would have liked to have been able to zoom into the data.

Kevin: Paul Miller provides a good overview of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society's Media Cloud project. Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman and Berkman Faculty Co-Director Yochai Benkler had a debate on whether the blogosphere "largely echoed traditional media or was instead a source for original news and democratic agenda-setting". Paul notes (which chimes with my own experience) "European snobbishness about the insularity of US news … may not survive exposure to this data". It uses Thomson Reuters Calais and Amazon web services.

Kevin: UK public data hackday shows how much that can be done with publicly available data in the UK in just eight hours. The (r)evolution will be fueled by beer and pizza.

Kevin: The New York Times calls on the US Senate to join the House of Representatives and the presidential candidates in submitting "timely electronic filing of donations". President Barack Obama is on the hunt for cost-savings by improving the efficiency in government. Here's a way to save the US taxpayer some dough. Instead of filing the donation information electronically like other parts of the US government, the Senate's "own computerized information is first printed out onto paper, which is then sent in sheaves to clerks to be re-entered ever so slowly into a different computer system." Democracy and government efficiency FAIL.

Kevin: I was recently asked about what impact Amazon's Kindle would have on newspapers. I think Steve Yelvington is right in this post that newspapers are wary of Amazon becoming a content broker, just as the music industry woke up too late that Apple is now a broker for music. But I was very interested in Steve's comment at the end of his post. "The traditional newspaper — an omnibus collection of often unrelated news, information and advertising, bundled up into a monolithic product — is being torn apart by market forces that no e-reader will change. But news in some form will be there. It is, after all, everywhere else."

Kevin: Alan Mutter and his Newsosaur blog is one of my regular reads. We really need more business-oriented voices in terms of journalism blogs. Motley Fool looks at some of Alan's suggestions for the future of the newspaper industry. He's got three suggestions including printing only when advertising will support it, charge for original content (note not all content) and develop advertising models beyond banner ads. The post is worth a read, and Alan's Newsosaur is worth following on a regular basis.

Kevin: Yahoo has launched a major challenge to Facebook connect with a service became available on 600,000 sites. The Yahoo Updates service is a partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit. It uses the open standard OAuth in its system and ReadWriteWeb says it's quite easy to use. Off to give it a try.

Kevin: The New York Times has an excellent graphic that shows: "Job losses have been most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing and those that already had the highest unemployment rates." My home county in Illinois has a Chrysler plant and 14.9% unemployment. Excellent visualisation.

Kevin: The BBC has announced an expansion of its social media stragegy. They will add a 'social discovery' mechanism in which site users would have an activity page. The article says that this would include links to other social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The proposition isn't really clear from the article. Will this service merely allow BBC site users to aggregate their social media activities on the BBC. They will also create a new 'Head of Social Media'. Alas, most efforts in the BBC are dissipated through bureaucratic dampening.

Kevin: Mark Jones, the Global Community Editor at Reuters, writes on his personal blog about the best uses of Twitter by news organisations. He's right to flag up the Austin Statesman page for highlighting their Twittering staff. I think there are lots of excellent individual efforts in relationship to journalists and Twitter including Rory Cellan-Jones and Darren Waters at the BBC and Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss here at the Guardian. But I think Monica Guzman with the Seattle PI does a great job. It's the people using the service for social media journalism who stand out in my mind.

Kevin: Friend and colleague Jemima Kiss flags up a McKinsey and World Economic Forum visualisation of innovation and cities around the world. It really tells a story, including the huge output of Silicon Valley, Tokyo and even Chicago in terms of patents. The location of London on the map should have UK policy makers worried. US policy makers should be worried about details in the report of highly skilled immigrants returning home. Positive immigration policies can help deal with these issues. However, this map takes into account US patents, which one would assume would over-represent US cities in the data.

Kevin: Wiki vendor SocialText add status updates like Twitter or Facebook, calling them 'Signals' and add an Adobe Air application. TechCrunch says the Signals feature competes against enterprise micro-messaging services like Yammer or WIzeHive.

Kevin: Clay at Sunlight Labs talks about the issues he has with content management systems and argues that web frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails are a better option. It's an interesting wrinkle on a common discussion in the industry, and it's worth the read.

Kevin: ReadWriteWeb looks at three servicers, XMarks, Evri and Ensembli that add semantic web features and help show related content through natural language relationships and other emerging semantic web technologies. As RWW says, we haven't arrived at the glorious semantic web future, but these are steps on the path.

Kevin: Lawrence Lessig and Joe Trippi's new project pushing for a mix of small-dollar donations and public financing for US Congressional races.

Kevin: Ten ideas to make the Twitter web interface better. Some of these are small interface tweaks, but many are already built into stand alone Twitter apps.

Kevin: Steve Yelvington takes a post by my colleague Charles Arthur who observed that news is fungible and moves it on. He looks at newspapers from a consumers point of view, and asks why people buy newspapers. "The problem of fungible commodities is that open markets relentlessly drive prices down toward the cost of production. You want profit margins? Look for scarcity."

Kevin: My esteemed colleague Charles Arthur writes on his personal blog about why the fungibility of news means for the future of newspapers. In a word, he thinks that newspapers are screwed. The post paints a sobering portrait of the newspaper business. I think that a fair few clear headed people know where we're at, but I think the next step is to figure out where we go from here. News is no longer scarce. We're often chasing the same stories and produce a lot of the same content. We really need to ask what it is that we're producing of unique value for our audiences. The market is currently punishing journalists for not asking that question clearly enough.

Kevin: I heard from an attendee at Webstock that Bruce Sterling just seemed to be 'trolling'. I think it's interesting to hear alternative points of view and keep a healthy distance with complex trends like Web 2.0. Not sure that this was a cogent critique

Kevin: A discussion at BeebCamp on how the BBC should use Twitter. It's an interesting discussion that I am sure is happening in a number of media and news organisations these days on how (or if) they should use Twitter.

Kevin: We need more clear-headed analysis like this about what is working and what isn't with newspapers in terms of the business. Lauren Rich Fine says: "Bottom line, it becomes increasingly clear that newspapers are in dire straits. They won’t all survive, nor by the way, should they all. Newspapers’ unwillingness to grasp what is before their very eyes has been at the core of their current woes—but even if they had gotten it, the challenge would still be enormous."

Kevin: Pramit Singh looks at 14 different business models for news, some real and a few simply proposed and asks which is the best one.

Kevin: Charlie Beckett highlights a post by Nikki Usher in the Online Journalism Review in the US that shows why changing mindsets is just as important in building out skillsets at journalism organisations. One of the most important quotes from Nikki is: "Silos, departmental rivalries, and departments that don’t communicate with each other cannot exist if multimedia initiatives are to succeed."

Kevin: Juliet Eysenck, a 23-year-old trainee journalist with Trinity Mirror's Paddington, Marylebone and Pimlico Mercury, successfully challenges a gag order in a manslaughter case using her knowledge of media law. Well done.

Kevin: Steve Coast from the the OpenStreetMap Foundation talks about the groups work to create an open, Creative Commons licenced geo-data set. The Foundation loans out GPS devices to map areas. They currently have about 5GB of data.

Kevin: The LA Times asks Angelenos about where they think their neighbourhoods begin and end. "For several weeks, we plan to listen as we finalize what will become The Times' standard for L.A. neighborhoods and the basis for more interactive projects to come." Excellent way to involve readers.

Kevin: Visualising where US taxes go. Amazing way to show a lot of information. With the economic crisis, it's nice to see that this shows up on Martha Stewart if for no other reason, it means that Americans are re-engaging with politics.

Kevin: With the passage of the stimulus bill in the US, the Obama administration has added details to its recovery.gov site. It's a very different way of government to operate. The stimulus bill ran into strong criticism from conservatives online. Follow #tcot on Twitter to see some of the strongly-worded comments. After a lack of transparency with the bank bailout/rescue (depending on one's view of the effort) has been very poor in terms of transparency and accountability. Will this site maintain public support of the effort by being more public, open and accountable? We'll see.

Kevin: Fred Wilson explains why Hulu, the digital video download service in the US, should embrace Boxee, free media centre software that runs easily on Linux, Macs and Apple TV. Wilson's Union Square Ventures is an investor in Boxee. It's interesting that Hulu, Boxee and Fred are having this discussion in the open. I tend to agree with Fred when he says, "Hulu users don't understand the distinction between watching Hulu through Firefox or Safari and wathicng Hulu through Boxee."