Kevin: Adam Tinworth pushes back at the idea that you can't buy subscriptions for content on the iPad, contrary to a piece in the Wall Street Journal's All Things D saying that Time Inc was struggling because it could not come to an agreement with Apple on how to handle subs. Adam says that there are routes for selling subs, but he also says that Apple could be clearer on what those routes are.

Kevin: A good, critical but not overly negative look at Demand Media, Associated Content and Suite101 by Emma Heald. She concludes: "The majority of content farms' content is not news-related, and those searching for news topics are unlikely to come across it. Everybody in the media industry is aware of the differences between hard news stories and the content farms' how-to pieces, making it doubtful that the latter will devalue the former. A critical eye on such developments is justified and indeed necessary, but how much of the concern is actually rational?" It's a good look at these companie and what they do and don't do. It's one of the more balanced pieces on these companies, often called "content farms", that I've seen.

Kevin: Chris Brogan has a though provoking short post on loading up on RSS feeds. "But for most of us, staying current on several dozen (or several hundred) news feeds isn’t our job. It’s a way to feel current, but it doesn’t always positively impact our decisions and plans." The bottom line: Does consuming all that information help you make better decisions and be more successful in your business?

Kevin: A good look not only at a leaderboard of social games in China but also the businesses that are creating them and their market goals for the near term. Chinese social games developers are finding monetisiation difficult and are looking to enter the Japanese market where average revenue per user is 12 times higher. They are also looking to Korea and Russia as possible markets. However, they will face competition from other companies such as Zynga and Playfish as they try to expand outside of their home market.

Kevin: Matthew Buckland looks at Google's Newspass content payment system and compares it to the system that Rupert Murdoch has instituted at The Times. He compares Newspass to a cable television subscription in which a consumer makes a one off, predictable payment to receive a package of content each month. Of course, this makes much more sense than a lot of payments to different providers or micro-payments for individual pieces of content. The big question as Matthew highlights it is whether a significant number of publishers will choose to join Newspass or create their own payment system (could they considering anti-competition laws). Knowing publishers, I would expect them to lobby for a relaxation of anti-competition laws in their own countries to make such a system possible rather than partner with Google, which they have as Matthew rightly points out, a love-hate relationship with.

Kevin: Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb asks off of the back of a Forrester research report that location based social networks such as Foursquare, Brightkite and Gowalla are dominated by a small group of young men. Only about 4% of US online adults have ever used these services, and only 1% of people use these services more than once a week. The market is fragmented. However, there are still opportunities there, Sarah argues even if Forrester concluded that "the potential doesn't match the hype yet".

Kevin: Forrester researcher Melissa Parrish looks at location-based social networks such as FourSquare and Brightkite (an early network that as of July 2010 still has more users than FourSquare). The market is quite nascent but can connect marketers with "right-time, right-place marketing by connecting people and nearby points of sale with geotargeted media", she writes. The early adopters are very skewed to males in the 18-25 demographic, and it is a highly competitive emerging market with no established player.

Kevin: Adina Levin has an excellent post looking at the narrow appeal of FourSquare and other location-based services based on games. A Forrester research study found that 80% of its users are male and 70% are aged 19-35. (I also wonder if it skews heavily male because of issues of privacy and personal safety. As a male, I'm not fussed about revealing my location. However, I know many female friends who have questioned revealing this, especially if a former partner is involved.) Adina says: "When adding game dynamics to software, it’s important to consider the varying motivations of potential users." She says that location will probably evolve to take into account a wide variety of motivations. For companies looking to explore location, they should take into account these motivations and see if they map well for their customer base, she says.

Kevin: An excellent article at MIT's Technology Review by Erica Naone looks at new location based services and networks. Hameed Khan, the CEO and lead developer of face2face, says, "Location is more a platform than it is a particular service." As the author of the article says: "In other words, simply sharing location information isn't enough–it also needs to be incorporated into a useful application." This is key. Many of the current generation of location games add competition and appeal to narrow demographic as shown by recent Forrester Research. This article looks at an excellent range of new services that have broader appeal and deliver more value to users.

Kevin: A deep look at non-profit journalism start-up Texas Tribune. Like other non-profit news groups, they have a number of different sources of revenue, from foundation and large donor support to events. They have also had a lot of success with publishing data. One thing the article talks about in great length is the risk taking culture at the Tribune. Multimedia editor Elise Hu said: “Instead of being in a place where I feel like I don’t have a lot of control over the hierarchies and bureaucracies that are in place,” she says, “here we can say, ‘Let’s try this. Let’s just go ahead and do it, and if it doesn’t work, let’s fix it.’?”

Kevin: Michele McLellan writing at the Knight Digital Media Center corrects a Time piece she was quoted in and calls out "replaceniks" who try to judge the value of new local media start-ups as replacements for local newspapers. She criticises studies that try to compare the new class of outlets to existing outlets. "I think such studies fail to assess other sources of news and information, and I think these all complement, rather than rival, traditional news media. Also, a traditional newsroom of any size is going to produce consistently better journalism than a lone blogger but I think overlooks the idea that it only takes one determined digger to uncover an important story that a larger outlet might miss." And she says that she never told time that 1 in 10 hyperlocal outlets were producing "good" content.

Kevin: A look at updates to the BBC's CPS content management system. I used to use it when I was the Washington correspondent for BBC News Online. It has definitely progressed in the three and a half years since I left the BBC. The interface is much cleaner. They have now moved away from table-based layout to CSS in part because it will help them add more meta-data to the layout.

Kevin: A look at updates to the BBC's CPS content management system. I used to use it when I was the Washington correspondent for BBC News Online. It has definitely progressed in the three and a half years since I left the BBC. The interface is much cleaner. They have now moved away from table-based layout to CSS in part because it will help them add more meta-data to the layout.

Kevin: Wolfram Alpha now has widgets that allow you to embed math-based apps using their computation engine easily on your site.

Kevin: Jeff Jarvis argues at Business Insider that content companies like Condé Nast know that they need diversify their revenue streams. They cannot rely on advertising to the extent that they used to. The abundance of content and also advertising online means that the margins will never be what they once were. Jeff suggests that content companies need to move into retail (or possibly even affiliate sales such as through Amazon) to help offset the decline in advertising.

Kevin: A visualisation toolkit from Stanford. They have a number of examples of how to use the toolkit. The site explains: "Protovis is free and open-source, provided under the BSD License. It uses JavaScript and SVG for web-native visualizations; no plugin required (though you will need a modern web browser)! Although programming experience is helpful, Protovis is mostly declarative and designed to be learned by example."

Kevin: A good interview with Clay Shirky. I like how he is moving the discussion about the impact of the internet away from the binary banality of internet good/bad that we seem to have. The internet is complex, just like humanity and life in general. There are good and bad aspects. For instance Clay says: "We'll never get to a world where the high-minded civic stuff is the majority of the medium, anymore than books are like that. But we need things like PickUpPal and PatientsLikeMe, services that are saying we could actually harness this medium not just for self-amusement, but to change the world for the better."

Kevin: A good look by Christian Arno at Six Revisions at how to design your site for a global audience from using UTF-8 for text encoding to how symbols and colours might mean different things depending on the country and culture. It's a good reminder that globalisation doesn't mean homogeneity.

Kevin: John Stauffer of Ogilvy looks at the rise of Facebook in Asia. In the past, local social networks have dominated, but that is changing. Apart from Cyworld in South Korea and Mixi in japan (Orkut is the leading social network in India but it is not local and Facebook is expected to surpass it later in 2010), Facebook is the dominate social network in most Asia-Pacific countries. The growth has been stunning in the past year especially in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.

Kevin: Chris Pearson of DIY Themes has crossed swords with Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of the leading blog platform WordPress, over licencing issues. Mullenweg believes that premium theme makers should licence their work under the open-source GPL licence. Chris Pearson disagrees.

Kevin: The BBC Trust gave the greenlight for British public service broadcaster to develop smartphone apps based on research it commissioned that says that the "paid apps goldrush will be extinguished by the mobile web".

Kevin: The Guardian (where I worked from September 2006 to March 2010) has launched a WordPress plug-in allowing people to take full feeds of their content for free as long as they agree to display Guardian advertising. That's an extension of ad networks, and I'm not entirely sure that there is solid evidence that this will add significant revenue, although much of the data we have must be understood in the context of the recession. I do see some interesting possibilities with respect to building a blogging network. Mathew Ingram explores that well in this article.

Kevin: Quite a useful guide to technical terms for journalists looking to navigate have a good cheat sheet of digital publishing terms.

Kevin: An interesting chart based on Forrester Research that looks at online behaviours across age groups in the US. One thing that is very interesting is the relatively small group of "Collectors", those who use RSS and tag content to gather information. Even amongst the very active Gen Y group (22-26), the highest group of collectors is 18%.

Kevin: Wired's iPad app will see a price cut for its second issue, from $4.99 to $3.99. The first issue was seen as a huge success, selling 95,000 copies, despite a lot of criticism about how it looks, works and how large it is (weighing in at 500MB) Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and the author of Free, said that he prefers a freemium model where some parts of the magazine would be free with premium elements that people could buy. However, as Peter Kafka takes pains to highlight, Anderson has no control over pricing.

Kevin: Good piece looking at location and social networking. I've started using FourSquare recently, and as a Nokia smartphone owner, I suffer from lack of a native app. I know that I'm just starting to scratch the surface of it, but for me, FourSquare is too narrowly pitched. I find the game element artificial. FourSquare has a lot of mindshare at the moment, but for me Twitter has more utility. (Having said that I didn't quite see the utility of Twitter when I first started using it.) I do agree that the promoted tweets based on your location has great potential as a revenue stream for Twitter.

Kevin: In a move that echoes the FutuRoom in Prague and its network of news cafés across the Czech Republic, "Freehold InJersey, a community news blog run by the Asbury Park Press and Gannett, has launched a coffeeshop newsroom in conjunction with Zebu Forno Cafe in Freehold, New Jersey". "We hope that having a 'newsroom' in the center of town will encourage folks to drop by, talk to me and the other writers, and participate in a community conversation," said Colleen Curry, the editor of the website and creator of the partnership. It's smart, but the thing that sets the FutuRoom's cafés apart is that they also derive revenue from the cafés so that what was previously a cost centre, a newsroom, becomes a revenue stream.

Kevin: Stunning move by Hulu. $10 a month buys you access (in the US) to every espisode of every show that its affiliated networks provide. That's on your computer, your iPhone, your iPad, some internet-connected TVs and soon the XBox and PS3. Woah. It will still have ads, but who cares? This is possibly the most clueful move by big content yet. Quincy Smith, a former chief executive of CBS Interactive and a founding partner of Code Advisors, said: " And it certainly concedes that the future of TV is video, not just on-air or on-demand, but also online and on mobile.”

Kevin: Dominic Ponsford with Press Gazette reports on a novel new scheme by the Economist that sends a text message to readers in the UK to see summaries of the stories in the next issue and order a copy directly from their mobile phone. The copy is delivered overnight. The Economist boosted their sales 1.2% in the UK, even thought they consider the market "mature".

Kevin: An interesting article on Advertising Age about click through rates. One thing that's important beyond the narrow focus on this article is that sometimes the easiest to measure statistics aren't necessarily the most important statistics. Indeed, it might say something just about that ease of measurement rather than its relevance. The take-away from this research: "While click-through rates showed a strong positive correlation with interaction rates and brand favorability, only a minor positive correlation could be demonstrated between CTR and purchase intent. "

Kevin: J.D. Lasica looks at an event at Google to look for ways to pay for journalism. It's a good post without a real conclusion other than "What's clear is that there's no single solution to the how-do-we-pay-for-journalism problem".

Kevin: A good list of the 2010 Knight News Challenge winners. "Among the winning ideas are two easy-to-use tool sets for journalists and bloggers to illustrate raw data visually; tools to create “real time ads” that display a business’ latest Twitter or Facebook update; a place for the public to pitch and pay for stories on public radio; a mobile application that enables residents to geo-tag ideas for improving their neighborhood."

Kevin: John Naughton has an excellent meditation about the internet and the pervasive search for easy answers. We're living through a revolution. Get used to it. As he writes, disruption is a feature not a bug. "By implementing these twin protocols, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created what was essentially a global machine for springing surprises." It's an excellent piece that looks at a number of the disruptive trends online such as how to deal with information abundance, which upends traditional economics that attempts to deal with the allocation of scrace resources.

Kevin: Laurie Penny writes in the New Statesmen about the continued prejudice shown by mainstream commentators towards political bloggers in the UK: "Cosy members of the established commentariat eye bloggers suspiciously, as if beneath our funny clothes and unruly hair we might actually be strapped with information bombs ready to explode their cultural paradigms and destroy their livelihoods.

This sort of prejudice is deeply anodyne.

Bloggers aren't out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we're more ambitious than that. We're out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done."

Kevin: Martin Moore has a great post on journalism.co.uk about new developments in journalism in the US. He looks at the new round of Knight News Challenge winners and broader developments. "Much of the new development is emerging from US universities, such as MIT. At the MIT Media Lab’s Center for the Future of Civic Media, for example. It defines civic media as “any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting”.

Kevin: Fourwhere promises to help journalists see what is happening at a specific location. From a business standpoint, Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp all have built their business on checking in with mostly commercial locations. It makes sense from the standpoint of building a business for these services, but it doesn't necessarily build up a full view of what is happening on a location. If the location-based services started to provide other types of check-ins, it could provide a broader service. Conversely, journalism organisations could start providing more comprehensively geo-tagged content that could be sold to these services. Will they build the infrastructure to do it? Or will they miss another opportunity to develop a revenue stream and financially support journalism?