Kevin: National Public Radio in the US is launching an ambitious local news effort known as Project Argo. They have $3m in foundation support from the Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This hire definitely caught my eye. "Knight Foundation’s Matt Thompson, co-producer of viral hit Epic 2004, joins as editorial product manager Feb. 1." NPR head of digital Kinsey Wilson says the project is aimed at replacing what newspapers have traditionally done as newspapers continue to struggle. The project partners with a dozen stations across the country, although most are big city stations and most are in coastal states. Each station will have a blogger-journalist to contribute to the project.

Kevin: Apple is reportedly in talks with US TV networks for subscription TV services. Apple TV hasn't seemed to get a lot of love from Steve Jobs, but it sounds like iTunes TV subscriptions will be part of a broader hardware strategy from Apple which includes the mythical Apple tablet. Publishers like Conde Nast are already preparing to deliver content to Apple's tablet and other media slates.

Kevin: A good quick three-page guide on how to get up to speed with Django, a web framework developed by developer journalists. For journalists in the US, Django is the web framework that Matt Waite used to build Politifact, which won a Pulitzer. As Matt said, to get stuff done, it's about 'demos not memos'.

Kevin: Simple Wordle-type, tag clouds from Tagul.com – “basically a Wordle-cloud to the web”. The Journalism.co.uk story links to an example from Sweden, from the web editor for Ystads Allehanda, Carl Johan Engvall.

Kevin: Fred Wilson looks at how WordPress and Tumblr are allowing posting and reading via the Twitter API. Fred quotes Dave Winer who says: "If Facebook were to implement the Twitter API that would be it. We'd have another FTP or HTTP or RSS." Very interesting propositions.

Kevin: The US newspaper industry faced what they thought was another existential threat in 1845. It was the telegraph. However, the technology was disruptive, but not in the way the newspapers feared. Some of the comments mirror what's being said now. It's fascinating to see the historical parallels between commentary about the telegraph in the 19th Century and radio, TV and now the internet in the 20th and 21st.

Kevin: David Sasaki looks back five years ago to the 2004 Internet & Society conference at the Berkman Center which gave rise to the excellent bridge blogging project, Global Voices.

Kevin: A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.

Kevin: Nathan at Flowing Data writes: "It's exciting times for data, indeed.Data has been declared sexy, and the rise of the data scientist is here." He hands out gongs for the five best visualisation projects of the year.

Kevin: Roy Greenslade writes in the Guardian: "According to the latest ABC figures, for the month of November, the Indy sold 186,557 copies a day. A closer look shows, however, that just 93,231 were sold at the full cover price." How much longer before the Indy is sold? Not long I would expect.

Kevin: Robert Andrews writes: "TV isn’t dying, it’s just going real-time. As our post revealing the popularity of X Factor on Twitter showed, viewers expressing their opinions about shows using the computer on their lap and the mobile in their hand are bringing a new social dimension to television."

Kevin: "More than 20 percent of flat-screen TVs shipped in Europe next will have internet connectivity, Futuresource estimates in a new report – that’s 15 million sets, nearly a tenth of the installed flat-screen base."

Kevin: With a community of 9 million sites that use OpenID, the technology that allows people to maintain portable identities says that it will end 2009 with 1 billion accounts.

Kevin: Economist reports: "WHILE the economic downturn has hit advertising, the internet has been busy building market shares."

Kevin: US cable television provider Comcast has rolled out an on-demand television and movie service that gives customers access to more than 2,000 hours of television and movies. The service used to be called TV Everywhere, but has now been renamed (I hate the industry term re-branded) Fancast XFINITY TV. This is available to Comcast customers who subscribe to both cable and internet. It's a bundling play, which makes sense. It's yet another piece of the on demand efforts. I'm sure that we'll see a lot of models before the market settles down.

Suw: The Digital Economy Bill – set to ruin the very thing it purports to support

Suw: Look at the pretty drawings! Nice round up of visualisation techniques.

Suw: WiredUK takes a look at the paywall rhetoric and finds it lacking.

Suw: Answer – No, not really. This blog post simplifies things to the point of inapplicability.

Suw: Kevin Marks' list of words everyone needs to know to understand what's going on in the real-time web.

Suw: Bill Gurley with a fascinating analysis of Google's map strategy and the ramifications not just for Tele Atlas and NavTeq, but GPS device mfrs like Garmin and TomTom, and GPS-enabled mobile phone mfrs.

Kevin: This is very, very interesting. Ushahidi is a crowd-sourced reporting app that grew out of the election unrest in Kenya in early 2008. The project has brought on board Jon Gosier. He is the "founder of Appfrica Labs in Uganda, a Senior TED Fellow and a name well-known amongst the African technology and blogging crowd". He will be working on the Swift River project, which looks to use algorithmic and crowdsourcing methods to help verify crisis information.

Kevin: IPTV and video experiences online came of age in 2009. The success of the iPlayer in the UK drove the development of other catch-up services, and Hulu in the US started to show promise. Samuel Axon looks at companies in the US that are re-making television. It's an interesting round-up, although the models that are developing are different in the UK and other markets.

Kevin: "The Huffington Post has started offering marketers the ability to inject their own paid comments among reader comments and place paid Tweets among the live Twitter feeds the site assembles around news subjects and events." Marketers are intrigued but not yet biting.