Kevin: Dan Lyons at Newsweek looks at the upcoming launch Apple's iPad. The analysis is largely bullish and looks at how Steve Jobs of Apple has turned conventional wisdom that 'walled gardens' on the internet don't work. "The closed system also lets Apple make more money, because it collects 30 percent of whatever customers spend on apps or content. Same goes for movies, music, and books. Instead of making a one-time sale, each iPad sold becomes a recurring revenue stream for Apple."

In the end, I think it's not a black and white issue of closed versus open systems. The biggest issue with many of the closed gardens in the past is that they often worked well for the people that ran them but they didnt' work so well for consumers. Also, while Apple is often criticised for its control over the iPhone apps market, it stil offers a huge range of choice.

Kevin: Felix Salmon at Reuters looks at revenue per page on professional blog networks like Nick Denton's Gawker and Henry Blodget's Business Insider. It came out of a Twitter conversation Blodget. The post is interesting, especially the last paragraph. I spotted this in the third comment: "The reason why very few can make money on content alone is because the people selling the product have some warped idea that the product is less valuable than the format that was once very profitable in a print format." Currently there are a few reasons why print advertising is more profitable than digital, but we'll see a shift over the next decade if not the next few years. The problem currently is down to metrics. Not all web traffic is created equal. Sales teams need to sit with their web metrics team. There is a good digital story to tell. Ad teams often aren't telling it.

Kevin: Ian Delaney looks closely at miniblogging services such as Tumblr, soup.io and Posterous. He points out, "None of these platforms currently have any form of advertising, premium features or any other way to make their business sustainable." To survive as sustainable businesses, he says that platforms will have to differentiate, and he offers a few suggestions on what those might be.

Kevin: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures looks at web traffic outside of the US to popular sites and services such as Facebook and Twitter. He concludes: "The conventional wisdom is that international usage cannot be monetized as well as US traffic and that is certainly true. But with >80% of your potential users outside of the US, I think the web sector needs to start working harder on international monetization."

Kevin: Via Richard Sambrook, he points out Charlie Brooker's most recent column in The Guardian (my employer for three more days): "…its newspapers. "In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often "cut" the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out."

Kevin: Grim reading. "From its peak in 2005, newspaper ad revenue dropped 44.2 percent, from more than $49.4 billion to less than $27.6 billion last year. The last time advertisers spent less on newspapers was in 1986."

Kevin: When I covered Obama's campaign in 2008, I did a lot of coverage of how he used social media and a very savvy mobile strategy to fuel his historic campaign. The big question was how he would use this grassroots campaign support once he was elected. The answer would be not much, until the push to pass health care. Ironically, loud (beyond their numbers) Tea Party protestors were beat by behind the scenes advocacy. Organising for America (was Obama for America) made 500,000 calls to Congress. They sent 324,000 letter to Congress. They held 1,200 events.

Kevin: C.W. Anderson writes about what he says: "it’s clear with a little hindsight that late March and early April 2009 marked a turning point in the conversation about the economics of online journalism." Read this post. He goes on to say about arguments from major news organisations and their legal counsels: "Both arguments can be unified in terms of their basic hostility to the current citational structures that undergird the web." I wrote about it last year in what I saw as a growing hostility amongst newpapers to things that are foundational to the way most internet users expect the web to work.

Kevin: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer celebrated a year as an online-only operation. It's an interesting article. They mention the work of Monica Guzman. I 'bumped into' Monica on Twitter when I was covering the 2008 US elections. She's got the right formula for high-engagement journalism. "But some of the new generation is relishing the conversation, which may be epitomized by Guzman, 27, and the followers of her popular Big Blog. She celebrates funky, techy, alternative Seattle in her posts and weekly coffee house meetings with readers."

Kevin: Google has a service that allows you to place ads on TV in the US. Seth Stevenson at Slate V(ideo) tries it out and found that they could buy a 30-second spot in the early hours of the morning on Fox News. For about $1300, their video was viewed by 1.3m people and they got about a thousand people to visit a special website that they had setup. Very interesting.

Kevin: Media think tank Polis at the London School of Economics held a panel about social media and journalism in conjunction with the Press Complaints Commission (a self-regulatory industry body here in the UK that has come in for criticism for its deal objectively with complaints). The panel was Chaired by Charlie Beckett, Director of Polis, the discussion began with case studies from Stephen Abell, Director of the PCC and included statements from Janine Gibson (editor, Guardian Online), Anna Doble (litigation specialist, Wiggin LLP), Torin Douglas (Media Correspondent, BBC), Jeremy Olivier (Head of Multimedia, Ofcom), and Professor Ian Walden (Professor of Communications Law, Queen Mary, University of London and PCC public Commissioner). It's worth a look and looks at the complex relationship between social media and journalists.

Kevin: Very interesting developments in terms of new news models. John Temple (formerly editor of the now the Rocky Mountain News which shut after almost 150 years of publishing) is the editor of the new Peer News site which is being funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Temple said that there was no silver bullet. He cast the site as an attempt to create a "new civic square". Even more interesting, he's talking about creating a site based on living articles.

Kevin: From O'Reilly Radar: "According to Eric A. Meyer, an author and HTML/CSS expert, the answer is a definitive yes. In the following Q&A, Meyer explains why HTML5, CSS and JavaScript are the "classic three" for developers and designers. He also pushes past the HTML5 vs. Flash bombast to offer a rational and much-needed comparison of the toolsets."

Kevin: I'm not sure I agree with the dissenting opinion of the Judge Frances Rothschild who said the appellate court ruling “alters the legal landscape to the severe detriment of First Amendment rights.” The exemption of 'fighting words' from First Amendment protection was established in the 1942 Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire case. This case may very well be another that refines the 'fighting words' doctrine. However, one of the students threatened to kill the plaintiff with an ice pick and then tried to pass that off as 'jocular' online hyperbole.

Kevin: A chart of 2009 media industry ad revenue in the US by Kantar Media. "The only major growth area: Online ad spending. Internet ads — display only — increased 7% in 2009, according to the report. … Magazines dropped 17%, newspapers and radio each dropped 20%, and outdoor fell 13%."

Kevin: Viv Mag shows off an example of a new video heavy, motion magazine cover for the iPad. It's an interesting look into some of the design thinking behind new content concepts for the media slates like the iPad.

Kevin: Stephen Brook (my colleague at the Guardian) highlights a memo from News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks to staff about an upcoming paywall for subscribers to the Times and Sunday Times. She writes: "Of course, we expect to see the numbers of unique users of our sites come down dramatically. But the people who register to our new digital products will be customers who have made a positive decision to pay a fair price for journalism that they value, and they will be those who are more committed to and engaged with our titles." It will be interesting to see how this works.

Kevin: Journalism.co.uk has an excerpt from the inaugural lecture by City University (London) head of journalism George Brock. I'm sorry to have missed it. He takes issue with a 2008 speech by Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. Brock calls some Dacre's arguments "grotesque and self-deluding arrogance". I couldn't agree more. Brock goes on to say, "There are those in society entitled to defend moral standards, but encouraging journalists to see themselves as moral referees has not helped to create or sustain trust in the profession." Absolutely. I look forward to hearing the full speech.

Kevin: With the Economist special on the Data Deluge and this post on TechCrunch about 'Big Data', we're seeing innovative ideas in terms of not only how to handle large data sets but also how businesses are being developed around making sense of these datasets. It's not necessarily new. eBay, Amazon and Google have been dealing with huge amounts of data, but there are new tools to deal with data and new ways to deal with different shaped problems with data.

Kevin: A comparison between sales data for Motorola's Droid, Apple's iPhone and Google's Nexus One. There is some very good, nuanced analysis of the numbers, and this comment from the Android Guys: "Looking at the super phone that is the Nexus One over its first 90 days, one would get the sense that it's a monumental failure."

Kevin: The post covers a panel on crowdsourced or collaborative journalism from the online-only Seattle P-I and the New York Times, Journerdism.com and Gizmodo. The Wikipedia quotes come for a separate interview by Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, said in terms of verifying content via Twitter and YouTube out of Iran last year, it wasn't possible. "The idea is that it's a conversation on the web about this event."

Kevin: Interesting numbers from the iPad pre-orders. For the first day, Apple was processing 25,000 orders an hour. The dropped to 1,000 per hour over the weekend. More details, 70% of the orders were the WiFi model.

Kevin: Great summary from Liz Gannes at GigaOm about comments from Clay Shirky about 'public sharing'.

* “How much value can we get out of civic sharing?”

That last point was Shirky’s main thrust — how can people use sharing information to effect change? Civic sharing, as Shirky described it, is “taking what the whole group knows tacitly and turning it into a public document.”

Kevin: Adam Astrow at Mashable writes about changes coming up at Digg. He says: "The site is shifting towards a personalization model, where the homepage will be based on characters like a user’s interests, location, who they follow not only on Digg but services like Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook (Facebook), and other “signals” from around the web like retweets, Facebook shares, and more."

Kevin: Ernst Poulsen writes about a Danish experiment with Google Wave, Bølgen. He says, "Despite the fact that "Bølgen" is just an experiment with a small target group, it may provide inspiration for niche-publications, where readers are often just as knowledgeable and may be just as willing to participate and showcase their own knowledge."

Kevin: A great post on the MediaShift blog about how to 'live-stream' your newsroom. It's a very good, practical list of suggestions on how to incorporate social media into a newsroom workflow. One of the most important lessons from this post is about trying to capture intelligence and information at every stage of the newgathering workflow. Journalists are constantly reading background stories that inform their work. It's important not only from the point of transparency but also in capturing value for readers to use these methods