Kevin: InsideFacebook.com looks at Facebook's international growth. (Data from April 2010) Monthly growth in Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, Argentina, and Malaysia of around 10%.

Kevin: Some fascinating statistics showing Twitter's international growth. Kit Eaton writes at FastCompany: "Specific events around the world sparked peaks in international growth, Sanford notes–with the February 2010 Chilean earthquake prompting a 1,200% spike in member sign-ups. A 300% spike was seen after Colombian politicians began to use the system, and speedier growth was seen in India after local politicos and Bollywood stars began to Tweet."

Kevin: Lots of lessons here about the new content economy. They run a very, very lean operation. They are visually led, which I think suits the content, and they have surprised advertisers in how well the advertising has performed. There is also a gem of a line in the piece about content designed for the iPad. Adam L. Penenberg, a journalism professor at New York University, said: "You’ll know a new narrative form has emerged when you have to consume a particular story on an iPad to truly understand its content, and reading it on any other platform simply wouldn’t work." (Hat tip to Mark J Davis for the recommendation on Twitter.)

Kevin: A group of privacy advocates, computer scientists, lawyers and other interested groups met for the 20th Annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference. They produced a bill of rights for social network users. Jon Pincus, chief technology officer of Qworky, a Seattle company that makes meeting software for small businesses, and co-chairman of the 20th CFP conference, which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery said it best when he said: "The underlying idea is that Facebook likes to describe itself as equivalent to the third-largest country in the world. What rights do the citizens of that country have?"

Kevin: Richard McManus has a good look at how to improve information consumption in the flood of real-time news. He suggests topic tracking services such as Google Alerts, PubSub, LazyFeed and Topikality. He also suggests news aggregators or creating a single feed of several sources. This is increasingly easy to do with RSS or Twitter lists. One last good piece of advice: Turn off the firehouse when you need to work.

Kevin: Loud3r provides semantic filtering technology for news and information, and it already has some big clients including a hyperlocal project by the Chicago Tribune, ChicagoNow. The Loud3r teams asks two questions about filtering solutions: 1 Does the solution deliver a comprehensive view of the topic to the reader? A comprehensive view includes Tweets, Blog posts, News articles, Photos and Videos.
2 Does the solution effectively improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the reading experience?
One of the key observations that the Loud3r team makes is this: "There’s not very much unique content produced every day. I know that seems like heresy, but 90+% of the content is simply sharing, reposting and duplication."

Kevin: Finanical analysts at firms such as Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Barclays Capital are trying to use the 'hot news' doctrine in the US to limit aggregators from pulling together their "most closely held, time-sensitive and valuable information product: The daily stock recommendations generated by their financial analysts." The hot news doctrine stems from a 1918 case in the US where a rival to the Associated Press tried to repackage news from the wire service for west coast markets. The US Supreme Court concluded that the rival had engaeged in unfair competition.

Kevin: "The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014." Also according to the Newspaper Association of America, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6% in 2009.

Kevin: Tim Armstrong at AOL had wanted to buy Associated Content in the spring of 2009. Time Warner, which was in the process of spinning off AOL, said no. After the deal fell apart, the chair of Associated, Mike Perlis of Softbank, used his network to make overtures to Yahoo. It's a master class on how business networking works, and a great example of 'it's not what you know but who you know'. It also shows the deep networks in Silicon Valley. Yahoo was looking to expand its content offerings (again), and after an audit of Associated's content, they were sold. What is very interesting is this line in the story: Yahoo Media boss Jimmy Pitaro is "itching to use Associated Content freelancers to create niche verticals with endemic advertising".

Kevin: Gary Andrews looks at how The Sun in the UK played an own goal in its attempts to engage bloggers to flesh out its coverage. After contacting bloggers and asking whether they would like to participate in their coverage, The Sun went ahead whether the bloggers gave permission or not. Chris Taylor from "It'll Be Off wrote to Gary: "I want to make it abundantly clear to everyone: I have nothing to do with this. I want nothing to do with this. And I am furious that the good(ish) name of my little blog, that ceased to be a concern some six months ago, is being used by the worst of all tabloids as some fucking publicity machine for their horrendous sweepstake generating iPhone app, and their even more horrendous newspaper.” Rights seem only to apply to media companies not to content creators.

Kevin: Mel Taylor Media doesn't mince words in criticising Gannett Broadcasting, the local television win on US publishing giant Gannett, in its decision to outsource local web sales efforts to DataSphere, or in the words of the post, is "putting some of their local web sales efforts on auto pilot". The post describers DataSphere as the "master of call-center web sales and quickie blogs". The post quotes a Borrell Associates report published in 2003 looking at the Disruption of Local Media. "The key take-away from this 7 year old, Borrell report? As long as a traditional media manager is calling the shots at the local media website, it will most certainly fail."

Kevin: James Robinson at The Guardian has a good summary of an OECD report looking at newspaper circulation trends around the world. The US and the UK top the table in terms of circulation declines, with 30% and 25% declines respectively since 2007. A few things that stand out in the survey is that US newspapers had an extremely high exposure to the advertising market. On average 87% of their revenue came from advertising. It helps explains why the recession has hit US newspapers so hard. It's a good summary, and the report itself is worth reading as well.

Kevin: Laura Oliver looks at Rue89, pro-am news website launched in 2007. They expect to break even in the fourth quarter of this year. They have recently launched a monthly print magazine. They said it the site will become profitable regardless of the success of the print product. It was interesting to see how little sentimentality they had toward the magazine. "If it's a success, it will accelerate our development; if not, we'll stop it before it becomes a burden," said Pierre Haski. There isn't much detail on what has allowed them to move to profitability other than experimentation with online advertising formats.

Kevin: David Cohn of Spot.Us talks about a new way that they have increased engagement from users and funding for journalism projects on the site. He calls it "community centred advertising". Bill Mitchell of Poynter described the system as this: "In some ways, it seems like a no-brainer: Encourage consumer engagement with advertising by giving users a stake in deciding how the revenue gets spent … Spot.Us itself is an experiment in transparency and control of money for news. This is just a matter of applying it to advertising."

Kevin: I actually think that the headline is incorrect. Journalism isn't dead. Audiences are continuing their shift online. Jason Stverak says that newspaper websites seeing traffic at an all time high rebuts "studies that have shown traditional newspapers are no longer a thriving business model". How? If the newspapers were converting those large online audiences to revenue effectively, that observation might stand up, but the only economic bright spot is that advertising is returning after the recession and the deep cuts are allowing papers to return to profitability. I will agree that local newspapers drawing traffic from cable TV giants like CNN and MSNBC is good news from papers.

Kevin: The Times of London is offering tickets to Toy Story 3 and the chance to win a weekend at the Grosvenor Hotel in Dorset to entice people to pay for news online in its new paid content strategy. It's a step up from free DVDs to shift papers.

Kevin: From the World Editors Forum blog. Carole Wurzelbacher writes: "The University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute has recently announced the inauguration of WellCommons, a site designed to improve community communication about health issues." The site allows users to determine the credibility of the article with a sources section.

Kevin: Rachel McAthy at Journalism.co.uk has a good roundup of the 12 projects that won funding in the Knight Foundations News Challenge 2010. The 12 projects split the $2.74 in funding. They were all local projects of some description. Some like the one from Stamen Designs were meant to ease the production of local visualisations and many of the others were some variation on a theme of aggregating local information. The grants were relatively small, most in the hundreds of thousands of dollars category. However, that's about what it takes to run a small digital project team for a year.

Kevin: A news aggregator contacts Dow Jones asking them how to pay for and licence their content. The aggregator was told that no such licence was available. Furthermore, "We would not allow our content to be used in this form. Please do not archive, spider, link or otherwise mention or use any content from any Dow Jones International publications on your website. We hereby confirm that we do not allow the use of our IP on your site." The company has contradicted this statement since. What's the story? One would think that they would think about accepting money. Maybe not. It's pretty easy to see why the news industry is in trouble.

Kevin: Gina Chen has an excellent post on the Nieman Journalism lab blog looking at insights into news consumption patterns based from a recent Pew Research Center study. The study looked at news stories in the mainstream press and news that gained traction on blogs, Twitter and YouTube. "But the important point is that the loyalty isn’t to the platform, the application, the delivery system, or the brand. The loyalty is to the need for the information." Excellent post and excellent discussion after the post.

Kevin: George Brock, former editor for The Times and now head of journalism at City University London, has some great observations from a conference he spoke at recently in Germany. "German publishers – and they’re hardly alone – can register with their heads talks which stress unpredictability of the changes driven by new media; but in their hearts they yearn for the familiar." He says that the most successful platforms and editorial products on the web rely on "friction-free simplicity". Contrast that with the a quarterly lifestyle magazine recently launched by the group Axel Springer, The Iconist, that takes 40 minutes just to download. Hardly frictionless.

Kevin: Folio has an excellent overview of The Atlantic magazine's efforts to reverse a circulation and revenue decline that began in the 1960s. They made an effort to create a solid brand, which is useful although I argue that the brand is the experience. Brand building without delivery is wasted effort. The more compelling elements to me are how he set up a digital-first strategy as an internal insurgency. He wanted to disrupt his own business and 'unlock (print's) grip on traditional revenue sources'. They also increased events and marketing services. Good business sense, good content, good branding with a focus on talent mean that they are shifting to profit.

Kevin: My friend and former colleague Jemima Kiss has an excellent overview of what Apple's acquisition of the Siri, a very clever mobile service that reminds me of Tom Baker's intelligent agent in Hyperland. Jemima sees this as a big play into search by Apple. It's a bundle of artificial intelligence, natural language processing (voice recognition) and web search algorithms. Apple could be moving to challenge Google in mobile search, and with both companies having mobile ad networks, this could be an interesting bit of competition. As Jemima says, watch this space.

Kevin: Delia Cabe has a good overview of magazine apps on the iPad. She's not impressed by Time or Newsweek. Her verdict on Time? "The preview consists of postage-size photos with short article titles. Nothing interests me enough to drop five bucks. Never mind. K Thx Bye."
From the reviews and also the apps that I've played with, they still seem a rather unintelligent, poorly thought out mix of multimedia and flat print – I say flat because many apps actually break the benefits of digital by merely having text as images. No links. No search. No thanks. I'll stick to Safari on websites. I like my digital truly digital.

Kevin: Some good data from the US on how Americans are using the internet to get information about their communities. 22% of all adults (28% of US internet users) signed up to receive alerts about local issues. 20% of adults use digital tools to talk to their neighbours.

Kevin: From PBS MediaShift, an interview with Jim Barnett who launched his own non-profit news service in 2005. "Today, there are many more, small and large. And now, other non-profits that do advocacy and education are exploring how they can use the tools of journalism to help fill the void."

Kevin: Alan Mutter has some excellent advice for journalists looking to launch their own news sites. Alan is supportive, but realistic. Here is one bit of advice that stood out for me. "After talking to one enterprising journalist after another, I have found almost uniformly that they are making the mistake that has proven to be the downfall of many an entrepreneur: Instead of trying to build a business, they are trying to give themselves the job they always wanted."

Kevin: The Daily Mail 'reveals' how companies such as BT and Carphone Warehouse are 'spying' on customers by monitoring what people are saying about them on social networks. The Daily Mail quotes privacy advocates saying that this could be a breach of data protection legislation. If I publish something publicly on the internet, I have no expectation that this data is private.
This is a great blog post looking at all of the analytics technology that The Daily Mail uses to monitor traffic and respond to comments. Much of The Daily Mail's moralistic campaigning trade on hypocrisy so this all comes pretty much in line with my expectations. The difference now is that there are a lot more people watching the watchers.

Kevin: A good roundup of basic internet technology. Lisa Williams, the founder of Placeblogger, says that news entrepreneurs must understand the technology in order to make necessary business decisions.

Kevin: A great roundup of apps that you can load onto a flash drive and carry with you if you need web tools including GIMP, a powerful image editor (that suffers from a confusing interface), XAMPP and Inkscape, a powerful vector graphics tool

Kevin: UK advertising is predicted to rise sharply for TV, according to Group M, and the decline in 2010 for national newspapers has been cut from 6.6% to only a 2% drop. However, regional newspapers (which includes small local papers here) has been revised downward from a drop of 3.8% to a decline of almost double that, 7% in 2010. This is horrible news for a market that has already seen preciptious falls in 2009.