Kevin: I'm a member of the Online News Association. It started in the US and still tends to get most of its entries from there, but it's made some strides in showing not only the best international English content but also beginning to highlight some non-English news sites. There is a good mix of blogging, multimedia, breaking news, investigations and technical innovation.

Suw: Wonderful table of fonts featuring "100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces today."

Suw: Really great post about the difference between flow and stock as a metaphor for media.

Suw: Really great post outlining four of the most popular reasons entrepreneurs give for starting their own business, and why it doesn't quite work out like that.

Kevin: Pete Warden does a very interesting analysis of Facebook in the US and looks at who is connected to connect to whom. "Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster." He breaks the country into areas like Dixie, Stayathomia (the Mid-Atlantic, Ohio River Valley and upper Midwest), Greater Texas (Missouri, Arkansas and Texas), the Nomadic West, Pacifica (the Seattle area) and Socalistan (southern California). It's a very interesting analysis.

Kevin: Facebook has overtaken Google News for referrals to news and media web sites. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic writes: "Facebook's page view explosion in the last months of 2009 — plus new evidence that it is becoming the major driver of news — has some analysts wondering whether the site is taking over Google News and personalized Google Reader accounts as America's leading information hub. "

Kevin: Demand Media, which has fine tuned an approach to inexpensive text and video content online, is looking to sell its content to traditional media. They optimise content to what people are searching for online. Demand produces 4500 pieces of original content a day. Some writers are getting very anxious for the fact that Demand pays roughly $15 per 500-word piece.

Kevin: Robert Andrews of paidContent UK gives a great list of proposed amendments to the UK Digital Economy Bill. There are some very interesting things lurking in these amendments. Conservative Lord Ralph Lucas has tabled this amendment: “Protection of the right to link to publicly available information on the internet”, which states: “The creation, aggregation, copying and publication of any link to publicly available information contained on websites on the internet shall not constitute an infringement of copyright.”

Kevin: Dan Lewis James looks deep into Hunch at the social network design principles. This is a fascinating look at how to build social spaces based on the goals and pyschological motivations of users. While working for a content site, you wouldn't re-create Facebook, but if you look at the goals that people have in terms of finding and sharing content, you can easily see how you would build a news site different to add social elements not just around participation but also in terms of helping them find the content that they want. This is a really well done and thoughtful post.

Kevin: Fascinating discussion from the DeSilve-Phillips Dealmakers Summit 2010. “We believe in content but we’re struggling to monetize it,” said Jeff Horing, managing director of Insight Venture Partners. Interesting discussions as well in terms of paid content versus advertising supported content. Investors see opportunities for investing in magazines that serve attractive niches, but they don't see investment opportunities in newspapers. "Newspapers have a fundamental issue where they don’t deliver as much value as their alternatives," said Richard Zannino, managing director of CCMP Capital Advisors.

Kevin: This year's Edelman Trust Barometer. Richard Edelman says: "The events of the last 18 months have scarred people. People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees. It's a more-skeptical time. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that's good, but they need to understand it's not a single-source solution. It's a piece of the solution."

Kevin: "Everybody goes online, everybody has a cell phone, and kids hate blogging and Twitter, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project."

Kevin: How to use Google Fusion Tables (Google Spreadsheets for large files) to update a map from a large spreadsheet.

Kevin: My takeawy from this post is Iris Chyi's comments. She finds "Her research has consistently found that even while online news use continues growing, its preference lags behind that of traditional media." And she adds: "More research, as opposed to guesswork or wishful thinking, on the perception of news products is essential."

Kevin: paidContent panel discussing paywalls with Jacob Weisberg of Slate, Politico co-founder and Editor-in-Chief John Harris, Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau and Bloomberg Chief Content Officer Norm Pearlstine. Paywalls are a practial issue not an ideological one. Bloomberg's Perlstine said: "“It’s supply and demand. If you can suspend those laws, you might as well try. But our own experience is that you can charge a lot of money from an audience that has a special need for your content. The report on where all the best football players are going to college is important to some people. But most general news is not sufficiently distinct. There are some smart people who are betting on it. It seems to me more out of desperation than from an actual business plan.”

Kevin: Mark Glaser writes: "In the view of some traditional media execs, Google is a digital vampire or a parasite or tech tapeworm using someone else's content to profit. As that rhetoric heated up in the past year, Google has responded not with equal amounts of invective but with entreaties to help publishers." It's the text that accompanies and in-depth interview with Google's Krishna Bharat and Josh Coehn about Google News. I agree with Mark's assessment in terms of response to some pretty rough punches thrown their way by newspapers. Google is doing well so can afford to turn the other cheek. It's a good interview and well worth watching.

Kevin: The Washington Post reports: "The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity." How Google and the NSA might cooperate isn't clear. One thing I would say from this piece and others is that Google's threat to quit China has brought attention to cyber-attacks originating from China (whether the Chinese government is involved is difficult to prove but implied by subtle details in Google's announcement).

Kevin: A great head-to-head comparison of Data.gov and the recently launched Data.gov.uk (a launch that I covered for the Guardian). The verdict: "While Data.gov.uk was just recently launched publicly, it has many advantages over Data.gov. It's easier to use and geared towards developers, who, let's face it, are the only ones who are going to do more with the data than open it up in Excel. Data.gov has some catching up to do. Both still have a long way to go. Both are good steps in the right direction."

Kevin: US streaming video site Hulu marks a milestone, having served 1bn stream. Now, it will be exploring paid models with offering of a $4.99 to get rid of the ads or $14.99 for seasons of shows and a back catalogue.

Kevin: "Outspoken billionaire cum provocateur Mark Cuban charged Google and other content aggregators Tuesday of being freeloaders — or worse. "The word that comes to mind is vampires," he said. "When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood."

Kevin: Miguel Helft from the NYTimes writes: "YouTube said last month that it would dip its toes into the digital movie rental business with five independent films tied to the Sundance Film Festival. The company said the five films, which were available for 10 days, received a combined 2,684 views.

At $3.99 per rental, YouTube netted $10,709.16. "

Kevin: Peter Kirwan (who I shared a stage with last week at the Frontline Club in London) writes: :"If the new rules of media end up writ large on tablet devices, a series of battles will need to be fought and won. The biggest conflict of all pits hardware and software companies, mobile operators and content producers against one another. Each wants the lion's share of the value chain." Interesting piece.

Kevin: My colleague Steve Busfield at the Guardian writes: "After a little prompting Rupert Murdoch gave it straight when asked what he thought of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's vision of a future without paywalls: "I think that sounds like BS to me." Murdoch says in announcing News Corp's $254m profits for the last three months of 2009: "Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things digital. We're on the cusp of a digital revolution from which our shareholders will profit handsomely." Shareholders will profit handsomely. Murdoch will profit handsomely. Make no mistake fellow journalists, you will not. Polish up your CVs. Launch your own projects. Murdoch's digital future won't mean job security or living wages for you.

Kevin: I think Peter Preston raises some important issues in this piece from the Media Guardian. I will agree with him that the paywall and paid content discussion has been largely ideological and not strategic. I think that even the use of the term paywall creates a binary position when really we've got a spectrum of options. I do think that newspapers will be bundled with other services such as pay TV. However, I think Preston makes some imperfect comparisons when he looks at the Optimum Cable-Newsday bundle and speculative bundles that Rupert Murdoch might create with Sky TV and News International.

Kevin: Robert Wright, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, believes that technology has made special interests more powerful in the US to the point of almost making the US ungovernable. "This generation of political technology — Special Interest 2.0 — has made Obama’s job a lot harder." Has technology turned the US into a direct democracy, or a much larger version of the failing state of California? It's an interesting argument that I'm not sure I agree with.

Kevin: Jake Dobkin, the publisher and co-founder of Gothamist, has some very harsh words for The New York Times. "I don't think a paper that loses millions of dollars a year and funds itself by taking extortionary loans from plutocratic Mexican billionaires can be said to be competing in anything, Metro or otherwise. My feeling is you only get to congratulate yourself if you produce a great product and make money doing it— you don't get any points for doing just the first half. And that doesn't just go for you guys— I don't think any magazine or newspaper that supports itself by sucking on the teat of some old rich guy (or his heirs!) should be giving anyone else advice." He says that goes doubly in terms of local. (What about City Room?)

Kevin: Robert Andrews at paidContent.org.uk highlights a brilliant bit of research on the turning point in the rise of the freesheets. Nearly half of the freesheets that have launched have shut. As Robert says, it's some fantastic research by Piet Bakker at Hogeschool Utrecht.

Kevin: Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has a great example of Mark Cuban being a bit hypocritical about calling Google and aggregators vampires when Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, which Cuban has invested in, does many of the same things that Cuban accuses the bloodsuckers of doing. There is a lot of this kind of talk by media incumbents who really play both sides of the game. Danny isn't the only person to call Cuban out on this. It's important to do seeing as many in the legacy media are using their bully pulpits to call for changes in competition law to support their businesses. Emerging media companies don't have the platforms to counter this kind of lobbying.

Kevin: Staci D. Kramer at paidContent.org publishes a memo sent to the affiliates with Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz's Journalism Online LLC paid content company. The memo adds a little more detail. "Most are using some version of the metered model, though all are deploying their own variations. For example, one is combining the metered approach with the segmenting option; another is combining the out-of-market targeting with the meter; and a non-profit affiliate will combine the meter with a support campaign."

Kevin: Telegraph "New strategy will focus on content, commerce and clubs – not user figures, says Telegraph Media Group digital editor" Ed Roussel says that the strategy of linking increasing traffice to increasing ad revenues "broke around March 2008". Roussel heads up The Telegraph's Project Euston, "We have done it so that any one of our over 500 journalists who has a brilliant idea can apply for funding and other resource, and try to make it a reality." Smart programme, but as a friend says, it comes after hundreds of journalists have lost their jobs. Sad that it had to come to this.

Kevin: Jason Fry suggests that generalist advice for writing on the web should come with a caveat" "Take stuff like this with a boulder of salt. Such well-meaning advice oversimplifies our craft, and makes the mistake of assuming Web readers are all alike."

Kevin: There isn't a lot new in this report regarding Google's threat to quit China if it's nto allowed to operate an uncensored search engine. However, it does add some perspectives from inside of China. That's always useful.

If you want to be a great public speaker, your preparation has to be more than just blasting gangsta rap and shadow boxing in front of the mirror. …

Kevin: This is an interesting hire. Robin Sloan, formerly with Current TV, is heading to Twitter to work with media partners. For those not familiar with Sloan, he and Matt Thompson (who just took an interesting job with NPR) created the EPIC animations (aka Googlezon) looking at the future of media while they were at the Poynter Institute.

Kevin: The irrational exuberance and backlash with respect to Apple's iPad would make a lovely psychological study especially in terms of different technology tribes. Steve Jobs has always been about the interface, whether that is the GUI or the human-computer interface. Deep geeks (and I travel with that tribe) want to get underneath the interface. At any rate, this is a really simple breakdown based on tweets of the iPad backlash. Enjoyable.

Kevin: Bravo TV has announced a new partnership with location-based social network FourSquare. As Nick Bilton at the New York Times writes, it may seem counter-intuitive that a social network that works to get people out from in front of their TVs would want to partner with a TV network. However, look a little deeper and this is about building new relationships with their audiences beyond TV. Smart move.

Kevin: Dr. Serena Carpenter, an assistant professor in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, looked at the skills that traditional news media and online news media were looking. What leapt out at me was that traditional news rooms were looking for both nontechnical and technical "routine expertise" while online news rooms were looking for "adaptive expertise" in additional to traditional journalism skills. This might be my interpretation, but it's an interesting look at what newsrooms are looking for in employees.

Kevin: A very interesting open source document collaboration and annotation project from the Centre for Educational Research and Development. It's based on WordPress and has its roots in the WriteToReply and digress.it projects. Digress.it is a plugin that allowed paragraph level commenting. The project also reveals semantic relationships between documents in the repository. Very clever stuff licenced under GPL 2 or Modified BSD licences.

Kevin: Leading Russian search engine Yandex sees first US dollar revenue slide in its history. It's 2009 revenues were up 14%, but due to ruble devaluation, their US dollar revenue decreased. Yandex being the Google of Russia saw its revenue increase while the overall Russian advertising market decline by 30% in 2009.

Kevin: Adrian Drury, principal analyst for consulting and research firm Ovum, says that media need a miracle in 2010, and Steve Jobs of Apple via the iPad "amounted to a strong story for publishers. But it comes with some major caveats". The caveats? Companies looking to deliver content on the iPad should do so with the knowledge that the music industry ceded a lot of the control over the industry to Apple's iTunes and the iPod. The revenue potential whether via paid content or advertising depends on the device volume. Good read outside of the tech press.

Kevin: A detailed look at failures at the Las Vegas Sun. The economic melt down in Las Vegas had a role in dooming the project, but also, this article is a good look at some of the cultural issues that played a part in driving a wedge between the digital and print sides of the operation. It's a story of divergent strategies and divisive personalities. It's well worth reading for journalism managers struggling to execute integration strategies. I think it also makes the case that hyperlocal strategies need to be flexible and adapted for different communities. There is no silver bullet, one size fits all strategy.

Kevin: More interesting stats from Google chief economist, Hal Varian: "Typically, 53% of newspaper spending goes to traditional printing for distribution — costs eliminated through digital distribution — compared with 35% on what the Google exec called the "core" functions of news gathering, editorial and administration."

Kevin: An interesting annotation system for the US State of the Union address. The system was developed by Chris Amico for US television public broadcaster, PBS. It uses Django and some other libraries to achieve the effect, and Chris describes the process on his blog. The video is very slow to load for me, but that might be down to being outside of the US and PBS not having a global CDN.

Kevin: Chris Amico writes about an annotation system that he built for US television public broadcaster PBS and its NewsHour programme. It's a technical overview with some ideas on how to improve it. The system is written in Django with some other elements which he explains. It's a good, detailed, how to post. Well done Chris.

Kevin: Publishing hopes for the iPad. "It's become clear over the life of the iPhone that people love consuming information like this on their phone — the people who buy Kindles buy more books than before they had a Kindle" Sarah Chubb, president of Condé Nast Digital said. "Machines like this make you want to consume more media, which is good for us."

Kevin: Michael Skoler writes at the Reynolds Journalism Institute blog about the iPad. "To be a game changer for news, the iPad would have to do one of two things. It would have to convince people who don’t now consume news to start consuming it. Or it would have to convince advertisers that their ads on the large, bright iPad screen are more valuable, so they would be willing to pay higher rates or shift more advertising to news sites. Doubly doubtful." Well worth a read.

Kevin: Tricia Wang writes about the standoff between Google and China and also competition between Google and Chinese search king Baidu. Wang studies tech "usage in low-income communities" and currently "conductin ethnographic work with urban migrants in China". This post is a fascinating, in depth look at why Google hasn't been more successful in China outside of elite internet users who easily navigate around The Great Firewall.