Kevin: "John Hartigan, the Chief Executive of News Ltd, the Australian arm of News Corp has joined in with his colleagues in the United States today in bashing Google and bloggers." He says of bloggers, "Almost anyone can start one of these sites, with very little capital, no training or qualifications. Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for – something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance."

Kevin: The venture will be supported through donations and grants and will operate independently from the Union-Tribune.

Kevin: Mark S. Luckie, which gives 30 simple activities journalism graduates could do to experiment and improve their online skills this summer.

Kevin: Malcolm Coles suggests that with the low user base that UK newspapers should shut off their "hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts".

I disagree, but then I'm using an RSS reader, NetNewsWire to read this post so am in the minority. However, I would say that he misses broader points not just of RSS but of the broader issues of machine readable formats. RSS is an enabling technology that has much borader application than simply the small number of people who use them browsing large amounts of data.

Kevin: Ken Doctor writes: "“Mobile.”

“Video.”

Usually, these are the rather dry one-world descriptions of What’s Next, items on to-do lists for anyone serious about building new digital businesses. Add “Social,” and you’ve got a trifecta."

Kevin: Martin Langeveld thinks about how he would set up a new news organisation and concludes: "In other words, the viable business model they can glimpse — consisting, perhaps, of a weekend-only or twice-weekly printed byproduct of an online-first publishing operation — represents such a downsizing of the enterprise that it can’t possibly carry the company’s legacy debt load, so the only way to make the transition is first file Chapter 11."

Kevin: Charlie Beckett writes: "People turn on news channels for news. Instant news, short news, live news. By all means create different programming but don’t waste your time trying to put it on a 24 hour TV news channel."

Kevin: "With the industry roiled with challenges, the Knight program is changing its focus. Instead of having mid-career fellows choose a subject to follow during the academic year, the new strategy centers on innovation."

Kevin: "The Seattle Courant, an experiment in building an online-only newspaper in Seattle, has shut down. Keith Vance, who founded it, said it failed because he wasn’t able to get the project the funding it needed to survive."

Kevin: Patrick Smith: "The relaunched Evening Standard still offers very little on a local, district level online. In a city made up of inter-connected but often distinct boroughs, it surely makes sense to offer Londoners something relevant to the specific areas they live in. The Standard should become an umbrella for local blogs and news start-ups—a platform for local people to write news about their area."

Kevin: Amazing. "Inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service, a group of individuals from the technology, marketing and public sectors came together to build an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities. " Volunteer opportunities with an API. Think of the applications

Kevin: "Today, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Vivek Kundra, the US national CIO, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov. The dashboards are designed to help Vivek and the CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending."

Kevin: By Jim Finkle – Analysis BOSTON (Reuters) – "Cybercrime is rapidly spreading on Facebook as fraudsters prey on users who think the world's top social networking site is a safe haven on the Internet."

Kevin: Erik Sass at MediaPost says: "The lack of interest among creditors could be a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, it may signal that creditors don't believe there is an immediate threat of McClatchy defaulting on its debt — a rare vote of confidence in the beleaguered newspaper business. On the other hand, they may have quietly arranged insurance for their debts in the form of credit swap defaults, in which case, it would mean the opposite — that they believe a default to be likely and are hoping to collect more money on their default insurance."

Kevin: Anyone who looks at their site stats knows that aggregators – such as Google News, Yahoo News, the Drudge report, Newser, Digg etc – drive the vast majority of traffic to news sites. Rob Weir, the director of digital development at the Columbia Missourian in the US says the vast majority is more than 71%.

Kevin: Jeff Jarvis takes issues with more calls in the US to change copyright law to help save newspapers. I'm in full agreement with Jeff that the lawyers on the wrong side of the First Amendment. The desperate arguments would attempt to return us to not only a pre-internet news cycle but a pre-radio news cycle. Law should not be used in an attempt to turn back the clock. Furthermore, laws that attempt to do this fail.

Kevin: As other news organisations cut staff during a recession, US political blog Talking Points Memo is adding staff, doubling their editorial staff. They are adding four reporters and three other editorial staff members.

Kevin: John Timmer at Ars Technica writes: "Although attempts to formalize online codes of behavior have run into a buzzsaw of criticism, a survey of over 1,000 bloggers shows that most of them hold themselves to some standards of ethics. But they rate ensuring material is properly attributed ahead of any sort of personal accountability."

Kevin: A service to see how many updates are being posted to Twitter. I used it to get a rough idea of how many updates were being posted to Twitter as news of Michael Jackson's death broke.

Kevin: This is the power of an API, and it's one of the reasons that Twitter has seen such growth. Like Last.fm, Flickr, Delicious and other web services, it shows why building an API is key to fostering an eco-system. It is why content companies such as NPR, the New York Times and my employer, The Guardian, have made the effort to build an API.

Kevin: Jon Donley writes about new developments in Web 3.0, aka the Semantic web. Key work is being done to build sites that are architected with machine-readable formats, but much work remains. And it's not clear what will motivate companies to do the work left. Both Yahoo and Google are building services that will accelerate that work whether it is Google's Rich Snippers or Yahoo's Search Monkey.

Kevin: Rich Miller cites a Keynote Systems analysis of the internet traffic as news of Michael Jackson's death broke. "Advertising networks and widgets are being cited as the key factors in the performance problems experienced by major news sites during the crush of Internet traffic Thursday as news broke about the death of pop star Michael Jackson."

Kevin: Google has launched a suite of mobile services in Africa that include SMS-based mobile search, an SMS-based marketplace and an SMS information service that includes topics such as agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports and health. This is something that Google is doing for obvious feel-good PR, but with the number of mobile phones available around the globe with nothing but voice and SMS service, this is a huge new opportunity not only for development in Africa but also for Google's development.

Kevin: Intel shows off a prototype gadget to let you know when information that you might find on the internet is "contradicted by other information". Sign me up.

Kevin: CNET News' Tom Krazit and Declan McCullagh debate whether the tendency of Web sites to stagger under high demand can be avoided, or is even that big of a problem. Read this blog post by Declan McCullagh on Digital Media.

Fascinating look at why people stay famous. In short, it's because we all talk about them in an attempt to connect with each other on a subject we can be fairly sure the other person has heard of.

Kevin: Nieman Lab reports: "MinnPost, the non-profit news startup in Minneapolis, has rolled out a new form of advertising that looks a little bit like print classifieds, a lot like Twitter, and nothing like traditional marketing on the Internet. They’re calling the service Real-Time Ads, and it’s live in the left column of the front page right now.
The service aggregates tweets, blog posts, and other feeds from local business with timely messages to convey — an ice cream shop announcing the flavor of the day, for instance, or a clothing store offering a one-day coupon."

Kevin: Martin Belam writes: "I think the Telegraph's bunkered attitude to their scoop, and their insistence that they alone determined what was 'in the public interest' from the documents is a marked contrast to the approach taken by The Guardian. The Telegraph are physically publishing a selection of their data on Saturday, but there is, as yet, no sign of it being made online in machine readable format." Disclosure: I work for the Guardian, and Martin Belam is information architect at the Guardian.

Kevin: John Naughton, who writes for the Observer, looks at a report on trust in the media in the UK. John said this about the report and a debate hosted at the Guardian (my day job): "For me there were eerie echoes of the arguments about the Birt-Jay “mission to explain” in the 1980s, which in turn went back to Walter Lippmann and his view about the role of the press in early 20th-century America. Like Lippmann, Birt believed that the function of journalism was not to “pick at the scabs of society” but to convey to citizens the complexities of the decisions that have to be made by a sophisticated, industrialised society."

Kevin: David Schlesinger, Editor-in-Chief Reuters News, tells the International Olympics Committee Press Commission: "Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more."

Kevin: Topix looks at the kind of revenue necessary to sustain newspaper staffs, and finds that newspapers are still finding it difficult to make money online .

Kevin: Benji Lanyado, travel journalist and one of the journalistic innovators here at the Guardian, answers some of the questions that I posed in a post on the Guardian's digital content blog about augmented reality – applications that layer information over the physical environment that you're in. IBM is getting a lot of attention for its Wimbledon AR application, the Wimbledon Seer, which layers over match and venue information over the camera view from a Google Android phone. Very clever. Benji and I have talked about the possible applications for AR in travel. He expands on his ideas on his new blog. Worth a read.

Kevin: "German publishers have united behind demands that the government pass legislation
shielding their intellectual property from "ongoing theft" over the Internet."

Kevin: Every newspaper wants to be The Economist. Even during the recession, the magazine's revenues and circulation are growing. Jeff Jarvis compares The Economist to Apple. Both companies break all of the 40 rules Jarvis laid out in his book What Would Google Do?. They succeed because they are uniquely good. "The problem for the rest of the industry is that they can’t all break the rules as The Economist does because they’re just not that good. You have to be great to the The Economist or Apple and if you fall short, you fall all the way. And staying great is constant work."

Kevin: The Washington Post decided to publish a 7,000 word, two-part series only on their website. "The Post cited the financial pressures facing the company as the reason for publishing the feature exclusively online. Is this something that you would consider? Why or why not?"

Kevin: Todd Ziegler at The Bivings Group, a digital consultancy in Washington DC, finds "Traffic from Twitter and Facebook is increasing by 20-30% per month on the sites I manage that (1) produce content on a consistent basis and (2) are working to promote themselves on these platforms." But they don't drive much traffic on sites that 'aren't actively engaged on those platforms".

Kevin: A new blog about Facebook has launched. To get some buzz, they revealed a hack that could expose crucial profile data. Facebook quickly plugged the hole. Memo to self: Don't rely on privacy settings to keep data private.

Kevin: Google has greatly improved their maps of Iran through their Mapmaker programme, which allows users to add details to Google maps. O'Reilly looks at the improvement in mapping in just a couple of Iranian cities.

Kevin: Steve Outing is sceptical of news organisations demanding that users pay for content, but he says that news organisations need to investigate ways that effortlessly allow people to pay for content. He was one of first to write about Kachingle, which has an intriguing model that allows people to support the sites they love, and other companies are starting to provide similar services.

Kevin: How not to use Twitter. Habitat, an up-scale furniture company in the UK, is accused of using spamming popular hashtags with offers, including using hashtags related to the Iranian election protests.

Kevin: From a Dow Jones report: "Axel Springer AG (SPR.XE) expects consumers will pay for high quality online content in time, although the publisher of Bild, Europe's largest daily newspaper, already has a successful online business model, according to chief executive Mathias Doepfner."

Kevin: Reuters Global Community Editor Mark Jones looks at how different news organisations including the Huffington Post have handled running web coverage of the post election protests in Iran. Mark wondered why the HuffPo might have a large number of private emails, more than the Guardian, the BBC and the NYTimes. I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the HuffPo's southern California roots, home to a large Iranian ex-pat community. But that's just a guess.

Mark also made this observation: "CNN via its iReport, and the BBC via its Have Your Say service, all had rich seams of user-submitted pictures and videos. But they didn’t appear to be able to weave such material into their running commentary on the Web — perhaps a case of being overwhelmed with material and being forced to keep it in silos."

Kevin: The French government is to give all 18 to 24-year-olds a free newspaper once a week for a year as part of 600 million euro aid package for the press.