Suw: Fascinating look at the development of banking fraud. A must-read.

Kevin: Clay Shirky writes: "The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all."

Kevin: Google explains what any geek knows. If news publishers want to prevent the search giant from indexing their content, they can do that tomorrow. Will they? The ball is in the news publishers' court, and quite frankly, seeing as a solution exists alreday for newspapers to 'protect' their content from Google, these publishers might have little chance in court of winning a case against Google. Instead, the newspaper publishers want to change the rules of the internet. It also shows once again how newspaper publishers show an amazing ignorance (and arrogance) when it comes to the basic working of the internet. As I've said before, if newspapers want to wage war against the internet, when they think they are just waging war against Google, I know which side I'm on. Don't break the internet to make up for a broken, but repairable, business model.

Kevin: Alex Linde writes: "So then, people want intelligent witty (and perhaps tabloid) articles that are insightful, relevant and easy to read – just like they always have. But I’m not going to pay for them, and I can change provider in an instant. So good luck to the newspapers, if they can’t reinvent their businesses they’re toast."

Kevin: Dana Oshiro at RWW writes: "At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
"death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels."

Kevin: Robin Wauters at TechCrunch writes: "International publishers demand new intellectual property rights protection to safeguard the future of journalism.

That’s the title of a press release distributed late last week by the European Publishers Councel (EPC), which you can find here. Pretty heavy stuff, right? They don’t ask, they demand. They’re not looking for more effective application of the current IP rights protection, they want an entirely new one. And once they’ve secured that, the future of journalism will be safeguarded (hold the applause)"

Kevin: A good old rant about media moguls at an exclusive gathering in Sun Valley Idaho in the US. "Yes, why haven’t you, the kings of the media universe, invented almost anything?

You just buy, copy and follow.

Not innovate."

Kevin: Mark Glaser interviews freelance technology journalist Cyrus Farivar, EFF's Danny O'Brien, Kenyan-born journalist, writer and humorist Edwin Okong'o, Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg and award-winning producer of over 50 documentaries and television specials Kim Spencer. They discuss free speech online in various countries, from Iran to China to Kenya — and even a mention of the U.S. government's attempts at curtailing speech online over the years.

Kevin: Will Sullivan writes: "Beyond new interfaces, augmented reality allows for a new layer of location information that could help fuel more mobile crowdsourcing, collaboration, gaming and more."

I've written about this for the Guardian, and while I think that these applications are fascinating, like so much bleeding edge technology, one of the key factors limiting or helping mass adoption will be the user experience. The other limiting factor will be that AR applications only work on a small subset of the small subset of high-end smartphones. That will change over time, but we are still in very early days with AR on mobile phones.

Kevin: At exclusive US event, Murdoch says: "News Corp. doesn't look to be in the business of developing an e-reader either. Says Murdoch: “I don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world, like Sony and Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or newspapers or for magazines. I think they’re a year or two away being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones, and we’ll be absolutely neutral."

Kevin: "The iPhone audience is age-diverse: a device this powerful isn’t just for kids. There are roughly as many iPhone users 55 and older as there are 13-24."

Kevin: Afghani presidential candidate Dr Ashraf Ghani launches social media offensive. A leading contender in Afg­hanistan's upcoming presidential election has called in UK social media agency Red Narrative to replicate the digital success of Barack Obama.

Kevin: All US states except Wyoming have some form of 'shield law' that allows journalists to protect confidential sources. Courts in the US are extending the laws to apply to bloggers. "But a judge in New Jersey has just made the questionable decision that blogger Shellee Hale isn't covered by that state's reporter's shield law, which allows journalists to protect their confidential sources.

The judge ruled that Hale shouldn't be considered a journalist because she hadn't shown she was affiliated with a "legitimate" media outlet, according to Law.com."

Kevin: Lois Beckett writes: "There were plenty of proposals for collaboration at the summit of nonprofit news organizations that I wrote about on Monday, but one idea is worthy of Rambo: a “mobile strike force” of investigative journalists, ready to deploy at any moment, anywhere in the country, to dig into scandal, cover natural disasters, or otherwise power up a local news outlet."

Kevin: Roland Legrand has these five suggestions: 1) Create micro-sites 'focused on a specific topic of interest to our communities'. 2) Streams of content such as a stream of blog posts or Twitter updates 3) Use wikis for context 4) Boost audience interactions, possibly even '2.5-D environments such as Metaplace' 5) Give participants more control.

He also makes this very interesting comment about print-online integration, which he says that he supports. "There's one major risk to this: that we might end up seeing the web as just another way to distribute newspaper articles rather than a radically new opportunity." It is more than a theoretical risk.

Kevin: "
Ron Royals / Corbis
@Twitter

24/7 Wall St. has come up with 10 ways in which Twitter will permanently change American business within the next two to three years, based on an examination of Twitter's model, the ways that corporations and small businesses are currently using the service and some of the logical extensions of how companies will use Twitter in the future"

Kevin: You can now toggle the advanced Google Image search options to restrict images to those with a Creative Commons license, ready for certain re-use.

Kevin: A gem from 1994 by Jon Katz, that's right 1994. Katz wrote: "Over the past decade, newspapers have made almost every kind of radical move except transforming themselves. It's as if they've considered every possible option but the most urgent – change." Nope. We never saw the current problems coming. You keep believing that if it makes you feel better.

Kevin: Scott Rosenberg talks about how most journalists don't understand the motivations for why people blog. Journalists write professionally, for money, for fame, for influence.

Scott says: "But nowhere in his world is there room for the actual motivation that drives most bloggers: a desire to express themselves, to think out loud, to exult in the possibilities of writing in public — and learn from the pitfalls, too. Maybe there’s a payoff in enhancing your reputation, but there can also be a payoff in simply enhancing your experience at communicating your thoughts and ideas. Speaking to a big crowd is alluring but speaking even to a small group of friends is rewarding, too. For the great majority of participants, blogging is a social activity, not an aspiration to mass-media stardom."

Spot on.

Kevin: "Hoping to compete with emerging foreign markets and prevent another major industry collapse, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Tuesday the city’s launch of eight initiatives aimed and drawing and keeping new media technologies in the Big Apple.'

Kevin: " Last week saw a wave of developments in the opening of government data, coinciding with the Personal Democracy Forum in New York. The new CIO of the country, Vivek Kundra, announced a site called the IT Dashboard that shows government spending on IT contracts for many federal agencies, and includes detail on the progress and performance of those contracts, as described here. This follows the launch of data.gov in May, the first step in a new direction for federal government transparency."

Kevin: "BUT Politico also realized it couldn't be a Web-only outfit. Two things make Politico what it is, thanks to "old line" media. The continued investment of the Allbritton Family, which owns several TV stations and is struggling with debt like McClatchy, Gannett, etc. And the print version of Politico has allowed the organization "to thrive and more than double the company’s revenues," writes Wolff. He attributes the success of the print tab to the Web site. Maybe so. But print is paying the bills. And there's nothing new in that."

Kevin: Martin Langeveld writes: "A from-scratch news organization today would, of course, be an online-first enterprise. That doesn’t rule out print as a niche byproduct, but print would not be among the 'initial efforts.'"

Kevin: "Picture if you will, a collaborative site that runs on two servers, is managed by four people, and has attracted a third of its target demographic within six months of launch. A site that has had 800,000 posts submitted by its users in its short lifetime and has 16 million pageviews/month – and growing.

This is the story of Stack Overflow, a free question and answer site built by developers for developers that has fostered a strong and committed online community in under one year. How? Easy, according to founder Joel Spolsky; all it takes is an understanding of anthropology and a lot of determination."

Kevin: Wolfram|Alpha: What is it good for?

Kevin: Jim Hopkins I'm a former USA Today newspaper editor and reporter explained why he was shutting down the blog to track his former employer Gannett. He's concerned about his health. He also says that he's suffered from the vitriol of some of the commenters.

Kevin: From the Media Futures Conference in London: "Panellists were agreed on the future for local newspapers. Patrick Barwise, professor of management and marketing at London Business School said: 'Local newspapers won’t come back, the classified advertising model that held them together has changed.'"

Kevin: If you want to know why newspapers in the US are suffering, look no further than the decline in advertising from large department stores. Macy's has halved its advertising spending since 2005. Look in a newspaper from the most of the 20th Century, and you'll see almost full page ads from department stores. No more, and it has left a gaping hole in their budgets.

Kevin: Charlie Beckett writes: "60 000 people sent in material to the BBC during this year’s heavy snowfall in the south of England – yet during the recent heatwave the BBC’s user generated hub only got 60 – why?

Some of the answer is obvious. Snow is more fun to film."

Kevin: A brief overview of a panel discussion at the recent Personal Democracy Forum in the US. "Roz Lemieux (of Fission Strategy) stated that for many organizations, social networks are still an uphill battle. And for those invested, they would be wise to see the social web as a gift economy. Give more than you take and you will see great results."

Kevin: Cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch made the excellent video the "Web is Us/Using Us". He delivered this at the recent Personal Democracy Forum in the US.

Kevin: "ChicagoNow, and a similar initiative also unveiled last month by The Miami Herald, reflects newspapers'continuing quest to redefine themselves as essential information providers, regardless of the medium.
But the sites are also engineered to go beyond traditional commenting and blogging that many newspapers already offer. To that end, they're being constructed as virtual community centers, with tools that permit easy access to popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter."

Kevin: ProPublica's new editor of distributed reporting, Amanda Michel lays out their strategy: "First, we'll coordinate collaborative reporting projects. Second, we're going to make available data and documents hidden from public view and hold them up to public review. Third, we'll create resources that people can use to critically assess what's happening in their towns and cities."

Kevin: Institute’s Ideas Festival in Colorado featured Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, ABC News’s David Westin, Bloomberg L.P.’s Norman Pearlstine, Time's Josh Tyrangiel and Journalism Online’s Steven Brill. They call agreed that specialisation was going to play a crucial role in the future of journalism. ABC News David Westin said the key to success falls in answering the question, “What can we provide that others can’t?”

Kevin: Dr Michelle Ferrier was part of the development team and the managing editor for MyTopiaCafe.com, a hyper-local site for the Daytona (Florida) Beach News-Journal. She talks about the lessons that she learned as the site is being shut after less than two years. There are lessons that are common with other hyperlocal projects, and she highlights some new lessons. Some of her points: "Integrate the effort throughout the larger organization or they'll constantly be monkey wrenches to dig out of the works." This was a key point that jumped out at me: "For legacy media, there's too much overhead weighing down the profit margins to turn red into black in the short term." Read the post if you're doing hyperlocal projects. It's well worth it.

Kevin: David Carr writes about the Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth's attempts to explain what looked like a money for access play by the paper, allowing lobbyists to pay up to a quarter of a million dollars for dinner with lawmakers and Post journalists. Car says, "The absence of a credible explanation, compounded a grievous wound to an important newspaper. The whole episode suggests a misreading of history that has been well covered by the paper but also, and perhaps worse, a tin ear to newsroom dynamics."

Kevin: Joshua Green at The Atlantic says that the invitations sent by Washington Post to lobbyists and to lawmakers for a dinner and discussion at Post publisher Katharine Weymouth differ greatly. The invitation to US lawmakers make no mention that lobbyists were paying invited to pay from $25,000 to $250,000 for the privilege to meet lawmakers and Post journalists. The Washington Post newsroom rebelled against the project, and the Post hastily canceled the 'salon'. Some lawmakers feel blindsided.

Kevin: David Olive writes: "Groupthink rules. No editor or producer wants her media outlet to be the only one that ignores the Michael Jackson story for even a day. If a reporter's story in next edition differs significantly from everyone else's, he feels stupid and worries about his job security."

Kevin: Dean Wright – Reuters Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards – writes about how the news organisation navigated the story of the disputed Iranian elections after authorities shut them down. "(I)t fell to citizen journalists — many of whom were among the protesters — to provide the images that the world would see, using such social media as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube." Here is the summary:

" The combination of citizen journalism, and the standards of news organizations of companies such as Reuters, has the ability to produce a richer flow of information around the world.

Provided we clearly flag the origin of material and put the relevant context around it, our subscribers, our viewers and our readers –- who are already immersed in social networking as consumers and contributors themselves –- are smart enough to evaluate this content, without challenging our core journalistic values."

Kevin: It looks like a flip-chart diagram from an internal meeting. It looks at issues that prevent the BBC from sharing content with audiences, other companies, developers, start-ups and 'the UK media ecoystem'. As one of the person commenting on the picture, one missing element is rights. It's a huge issue, and it's impossible to discuss more open content without touching on a rights issue.

Kevin: Newspapers serving southern suburbs of Dallas Texas shuts. Jeff Jarvis says that it's a good opportunity for local bloggers.

Kevin: Lyn Headley writes: "Relations between journalism and the web have always been tense, but things are getting nasty. A coalition of publishers, journalists and scholars is taking shape in opposition to "parasitic aggregators" in order to "protect" "original" content. Moral and political agitation is afoot which will challenge deeply held convictions about the nature of journalism and the web. These forces align well with a number of ventures aiming to lower the barriers preventing orderly payment in exchange for access to news. At the other end of the spectrum, a new crop of startups and ventures, recently profiled by Steve Outing, is working an angle some are calling micropatronage. Will either of these approaches encourage a sustainable, high quality journalism?"

Kevin: * The 2009 categories are:
o The Knight Award for Public Service
o General Excellence in Online Journalism
o General Excellence in Online Journalism, Non-English
o The Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism
o Breaking News
o Specialty Site Journalism
o Investigative Journalism
o Multimedia Feature Presentation
o Online Topical Reporting/Blogging
o Online Commentary/Blogging
o Community Collaboration Award
o Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies
o Online Video Journalism
o Student Journalism

Kevin: An overview of new attempts by newspapers in the US to build local blog networks around newspapers. Simon Owens looks at a blog aggregator in Chicago, ChicagoNow, which is linked to the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers will get a share of the revenue from the site. At the LA Times, their blog editor, Tony Pierce, wants to focus on 'posts, not blogs', linking to individual posts. Owens writes, "Pierce said he thinks blog networks are only the first step toward true engagement. Despite the hype over Web 2.0, not all content deserves to be highlighted for a newspaper's readership. To be truly innovative, he said, editors are going to have to roll up their sleeves and wade through drivel to find the gems."

Kevin: "Google has eliminated an experimental feature that allowed people quoted in articles in Google News to post comments on those articles."

Kevin: Will Bunch gives his thoughts on why newspapers didn't invent Google News. "The problem, Michael Nielsen argues, is not a story of failure but of success — newspapers had developed an elaborate architeciture to do the things they did well, and making changes to adjust to Internet start-ups would have done more harm than good. …To compete, a newspaper could lay off that award-winning photo talent — but at what cost to morale, to the paper's brand name, and to its internal way of doing business?" I think the other problem is that newspapers still are rarely part of the link economy. Linking to other sources is still an anathema to many journalists.

Kevin: Twitter demographics are difficult and contradictory. Some of this is down to measuring traffic solely through the web interface, and a recent article showed that the vast majority of Twitter usage, 80%, comes through their API. Nick Burcher looks at statistics from Quantcast, Hitwise and and compete. The result is inconclusive at best.