Kevin: Conrad Quilty-Harper looks at coverage of the HTC Magic, the new Google Android phone, and shows how mainstream media outlets are poorly represented in Google searches for information about the new phone. He says: "It’s really hard to understate how important this is. These are multimillion dollar businesses on their own right, and half of their traffic comes from pages like this. Newspapers will probably never figure this out, so in the meantime, their authority is going to be continually taken from underneath them by awesome sites like Engadget and its rivals."

Kevin: The co-founders of The Pirate Bay BitTorrent site are trying to crowd-source coverage of their trial using the hashtag spectrial for Tweets and blogposts. Bloggy.se will index all of the coverage.

Kevin: Sarah Hartley observes five barriers to journalists using Twitter. Some journalists don't see the point. They don't think that anyone that they deal with uses it. Succinct and worth a read and a think.

Kevin: Iain Hepburn, and internet journalist and editor, says: "But of all (Twitter)'s current problems – and it has many – the biggest one is the Twitter obsessives preaching at every opportunity about just how fantastic the service really is."

Kevin: If HTML has always been a bit baffling, here is a quick visual guide ot the sections of an HTML page done right with clear explanations of each section.

Kevin: Jeff Jarvis outlines several scenarios that he sees as the future of news. Local news organisations won't be about news organisations but about their communities he says. Local news organisations will be smaller. He talked about how the smaller newsrooms will rely on networks. Investigative journalism will continue. It's a good and comprehensive list of some of the new ways that news providers will organise themselves.

Suw: I don't agree with Roy that subeditors aren't needed, but I do agree with the commenters who say that perhaps subbing needs to develop to suit the digital medium.

Kevin: Data scraping for the rest of us. How to use Google Spreadsheets to scrape data from web pages and tables.

A group of dedicated open-government activists have teamed up to push the federal court records system into the 21st century, much to the annoyance of the government.

Kevin: Friend and colleague Charles Arthur weighs in on the current micropayments discussion that has been revived, at least in my little corner of the web, by news organisations looking for a new revenue stream and looking to make digital content pay in ways other than reliance on advertising.

Kevin: Editors in the US with comments on their sites should invest the 20 minutes watching this video in which David Ardia explains Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. David is with the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, but before joining the Center, he was the assistant counsel at The Washington Post. The bottom line is the for US publishers they can moderate comments without the fear that this exposes them to undue legal liability. It's not a case in which they have to make the binary choice of unmoderated comments or no comments at all.

Kevin: Discussions on three types of mashups: Presentation mashups, data mashups and logic mashups.

Kevin: Matthew Ingram talks about the Policy Wiki experiment at Globe and Mail in Canada. He describes it at "a combination of a traditional wiki — that is, a publicly-editable resource similar to Wikipedia — and a public discussion forum, with comments and voting features as well. In many ways, it’s a kind of social-media mashup aimed at pulling in suggestions from readers and other concerned Canadians about public policy issues."

Kevin: Worth reading and worth watching the video. BusinessWeek asked why the foreclosure problem became so severe in the US. They found after 70 interviews: "One reason foreclosures are so rampant is that banks and their advocates in Washington have delayed, diluted, and obstructed attempts to address the problem."

Kevin: The graphs help explain some complex economic events and why the last 10 years, a so-called "Golden Decade" were a-historical and why some of the financial models that allowed for the boom had too small of a time sample to be taken seriously.

Kevin: Nicholas Carlson of the Silicon Alley Insider looks at the cost of printing the New York Times. It's an interesting cost comparison albeit I'd like a little more clarity on the numbers he's using.

The comments are worth reading especially one by Thomas Lord talking about a competitive print on demand model. It's good to see some creativity creeping back into areas of the newspaper business model.

Kevin: Steve Outing pierces some of the recent (and largely recycled) talk about micropayments and news content. As Online Journalism Blogger Paul Bradshaw says, newspaper content isn't like iTunes. You listen to songs several times, you don't read newspaper content several times. But Steve looks at a new model, Kachingle. Briefly, Kachingle takes the US National Public Radio voluntary supporter model with a model that allows users to reward content providers they like and not just traditional media but also bloggers. Steve goes through the details. It's a new idea. Will it work? Dunno. But it might be worth trying.

Kevin: Lisa Williams of Placeblogger writes about how journalists, just as technology workers before them, can survive and thrive as big companies fail. She writes: "You'll discover what thousands upon thousands of tech workers discovered: you can do great work outside of an institutional, big-company context, and you can make a living doing so. High tech companies didn't own innovation; the innovators did. News organizations don't own journalism: journalists do."

Kevin: Dan Lyons behind the Fake Steve Jobs talks about his time of obsessive blogging, and Robert X. Cringely writes: "We're at the end of one era on the blogosphere and the beginning of another. What the new one will be like nobody can say. Will the amateurs fade away and leave the game to people who actually know how to write and report? Or will the marketers complete their coup, leaving the rest of us old journos to scramble for jobs at Wal-Mart?"

Kevin: Chris O'Brien talks about location-based services and Google's new Latitute. He writes: "my concern is that it will take any of these location-based services years to attain the critical mass that would make them truly useful." It's a good piece that looks at the services, recognises the privacy issues but talks about the hurdles for their widespread adoption.

Kevin: I know that this isn't journalism related, but I'm going to start collecting stories about the financial crisis. This talks about the amount of 'goodwill' or intangible assets on bank balance sheets. In the bust, these 'assets' (sneer quotes intended) may be worth nothing and therefore require even greater capatilisation to support the banks than is currently estimated. It's ugly in the US, and it's even uglier in Europe. CDO and US subprime exposures are not the only issue for European banks. They have even higher levels of goodwill assets on their books.

Kevin: After the much reported comments about Twitter's possible money making idea of charging 'brands' for their use of the micro-blogging platform, Kara Swisher reads between the lines of a Biz Stone blog post on possible avenues Twitter might take. She seems (and probably rightfully so) snarkily suspicious about any plans that Twitter has to actually make money. Is Twitter's only really strategy to become too big to fail and then get bailed out/acquired by a bigger company? If GOOG buys 'em, will Twitter become yet another service that the search giant buys and then neglects?

Kevin: Matt Davis, director of news agency DataNews, said that the BBC could be 'the Freedom of Information Act's first major scalp' as its spending is made public'. Davis says that it will lead to inevitable trimming of the corporation's budget.

Kevin: Just in time for Valentine's Day, suggestions to save the newspaper industry. Page One Girls plus edible pages. My personal favourite is the ch'i sucking micropayment system.

Suw: Some really fabulous data visualisation work. I particularly love the Britain From Above suff. Not just fascinating, but beautiful too.

Kevin: Michael Kinsley founding editor of Slate on the folly of micro-payments and news. He not only spikes the idea of micro-payments, but he also talks about the supply and demand issues in terms of content and news.

Kevin: Looking at some of the Silicon Valley startups and companies that are doing well in the recession. The companies include virtual malls, social networks, spam and spyware filter companies. It's interesting to look for patterns in the companies that are weathering this downturn.

Kevin: My colleague Keith Stuart writes a nice eight step guide to how to develop iPhone apps. It reminds me of watching Olympic skiing. He makes it look and sound so easy.

Kevin: Martin Stabe asks on Twitter: "how have I missed this brilliant site?" From the About page of the blog: Information Aesthetics is designed and maintained by Andrew Vande Moere, a Senior Lecturer at the Design Lab at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning of the University of Sydney, Australia. His research interests include data visualization and visual design, from traditional screen-based interfaces, over "media architecture", to more explorative, artistic and wearable applications. His teaching comprises interaction design, physical/wearable computing and 3D real-time multimedia.

Kevin: Clayton Christensen and the disruptive-innovation crew from Harvard — who developed the NewspaperNext program with the American Press Institute — struggle to get us to understand how and why simple, low-end, inadequate, "junk" products and services so often topple the big guys.

Kevin: This is a very interesting piece that raises a lot of questions about columnists and abuse. I'd really like there to be a clearer differentiation between columnists and journalists. I think this piece slightly blurs the lines between the two. As far as I can tell, this piece is about columnists and a former Gawker blogger. But maybe I'm holding too closely to the US separation of columns and reporting. The comments are very much worth reading. The one thing I would say is that columnists are often shocked by the tone of the 'debate'. However, if you read the columns, they don't set the stage for a debate but rather seem written solely to provoke a reaction. Again, read the comments if you're running a comment site. They make some reasonable and very valid points.

Kevin: A good analysis by the folks at Bivings of the top 10 best US newspaper sites (from the top 100 newspapers in the States by circulation.) There are some good mentions in the comments from sites that don't fit those criteria. Check out the WikiJax feature at Jacksonville. It's an interesting innovation. I wonder if we wouldn't increase newspaper usage if we explained our features better. Of course, the best features and web sites explain themselves.

Kevin: Let the British media iPhone app rush begin. The one thing to note in this release is how ITN will enable offline video access.

Kevin: BitTorrent site Pirate Bay has just released a Google Maps mashup showing their worldwide user base. Janko Roettgers has some good analysis of the numbers. It's just a snapshot in time. It's also interesting to see where BitTorrent, or at least Pirate Bay, isn't used widely such as Africa and the Middle East.

Kevin: Some great sources of where to follow the Australian Bushfires via social media. I've been using a search based filter on Tweetdeck to follow the fires.

Kevin: I usually find mobile trend watchers in denial about the industry. They focus on handset manufacturers and ignore the speed bump/impregnable road block that the carriers are. But this trend list for '09 seems reasonable. I think we're finally seeing some movement in terms of Location Based Services. Apps are finally breaking the on-deck strangehold carriers used to have in terms of mobile data. Definitely worth a look.

Kevin: An interesting project by (mostly) conservative groups (Heritage Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, Club for Growth, RedState, tcot Twitter group) in the US about the economic stimulus. Whatever the political alignment or political motivation, they are releasing not only the bill and amendments but also releasing the data in Excel and Google docs format.

One of the chief reasons online news vets like myself get frustrated by wacky suggestions from people like Peter "Google is the enemy" Osnos and Walter "Hey! Let's collect money from readers!" Isaacson is because, well, it's not like these…

I first started blogging back in 2007. But did you ever know that I ran and still do so solely using my phone ? My first blog was Aviation Sri Lanka (

The easiest way to create an interactive timeline gadget for Google Spreadsheets or iGoogle