Kevin: Mark Davis has a brilliantly brief but insightful post. As he points out, survival of newspapers still will depend on what it always has "connecting businesses to consumers". I tend to think more of this will be transactional rather than simple branding, but I agree with him.

Kevin: Another insightful and critical article looking at iPad 'app' design. I'd have to agree that the first generation of magazine apps is little more than multimedia brochure-ware. It really is as many predicted a throw-back to the CD-ROM era of the early 1990s. I still am completely amazed that Wired charges you $5 for a deck of image files. The articles aren't text but images of pages. It's a ridiculous retrograde step, and frankly, I think the market will punish them, as well it should. The print fundamentalists are hijacking digital. They might make some money in the short term, but it will be a brief victory.

Kevin: A good overview of how to geotag your photos. The author uses a Eye-Fi Explorer SD card tethered to his Android phone to automatically tag photos. I have a geotagger from GiSTeq, and frankly, I think that solution is a bit easier and overall less expensive than a special purpose SD card and an Android phone. It also isn't reliant on a data connection, just GPS. However, this article is chock full of good details on how to geo-tag photos.

Kevin: My former colleague Charles Arthur has an interesting post looking at how Digg just lost a third of its visitors in a month. A blip or a sign of decline? Charles' quote form webmagazine provides a bit more critical detail. They imply that it was a bit of a traffic ponzi scheme with Diggers sending traffic to each others' sites. I guess we'll have to wait for next months's figures to see if we have the two data points that make up a trend in the minds of most journalists.

Kevin: The Austin-American Statesman in Texas is working with location based network Gowalla (also based in Austin). The project aims to help locals "explore the city and discover new spots of interest". Users collect pins to show where they have been, and if they complete a 'trip', they earn a special badge. The paper has created a set of eight trips that will highlight local attractions based on content from the newspaper

Kevin: Mathew Ingram takes issue with Steve Jobs of Apple who has said that he believes that creating an iTunes marketplace for news is possible. This might work in terms of selling news applications, but it's not going to work for individual news stories. As Mathew points (and several others before him), news is not the same as music or movies. People don't buy a news story to read over and over again as they listen to a song over and over again. People have free options, which they have said they would choose over paid options. The market supportable price would most like be "pennies, or even fractions of pennies, instead of dollars". News orgs would also be handing over control to Apple. It is an act of delusion, desperation or probably both.

Kevin: Daniel Bennett looks at some of the problems with traditional content analysis in terms of blogs and their use of content from traditional media, and vice versa. Daniel also refers to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism suggesting that blogs did very little original reporting, but he quotes Amy Gahran in highlighting flaws with the analysis because it focused on a part of the blogosphere that discussed mainstream news organisations. Other studies have suffered from selection bias and a very narrow definition of news such that they defined news as what newspapers cover. If you looked at other blogs, especially ones focused on niche coverage areas, blogs do often carry original information and analysis. It's one of the problems in defining the blogosphere in a monolithic way. Blogs cover a range of topics, not just traditional news. Focusing on that misses a lot of the complexity in the content published on blogs.

Kevin: Lots of fuzzy thinking from David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. To accuse web 'evangelists' of dogmatic, monolithic thinking and then lob grendades at the 'information wants to be free' brigade shows how polarised this discussion has become. The New Yorker is not a general news publication. It is a very high production value magazine. It is premium content, and I have gladly paid for it in the past. (I'm less willing to pay for its price here in the UK.) Comparing The New Yorker to almost any newspaper is like comparing a Porsche to mass produced family sedan. They are two entirely different beasts, and the economic models that sustain them will be different.

Kevin: Responding to an article by New York Times' journalist Nicholas Carr, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb looks at inline links. Are they a detriment, a distraction, a problem for comprehension? Marshall says: "aybe links could be added tastefully and well to the footer of posts. It might not be as good for machines, but it could be better for the human brain. Linking may be what blogging is largely about – but let's be honest: if links to read more where always found and well-placed at the end of articles, wouldn't you get used to it as a reader?"

Kevin: Onnik Krikorian looks at how mobile phones, especially ones with multimedia capabilities, are being used for reporting. He highlights the Nokia N82, the phone I have, and the work of Guy Degen in Africa and the Caucasus with such a phone.

Kevin: An article looking at the global trends in mobile TV. "Free, on-the-go viewing is common just about everywhere except the United States and Europe, where operator resistance and a maze of conflicting technical standards and program licensing hurdles have kept the technology out of the global mainstream." It looks like it is gaining some critical mass in terms of key players in the US market to begin a roll out with major operators in that space coming together to pool spectrum (a major issue in developed markets) to provide mobile TV.

Kevin: Andy Carvin talks about an app for the iPhone and Android phones that allows people to upload reports about the oil washing ashore from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. The app was developed by the CrisisCommons coalition of volunteer software developers. "Oil Reporter lets you to snap a picture of the oil or tar ball, describe the context and offer additional details regarding wildlife and wetlands impact. When you submit your report, the app detects your location using your phone’s GPS, so your report can be pinpointed on a map."

Kevin: I don't want to focus on the politics of this piece but rather a good overview of the use of free media tools by activists trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. There are a lot of low-cost and no-cost tools here that could easily be used by media organisations. It is really surprising to me that media organisations, especially ones struggling with their finances, continue to favour high-cost, proprietary solutions. Five years ago I might have understood because low-cost tools lacked the ease of use of some proprietary solutions. Now, the competitive advantage of proprietary solutions is much less compelling, especially on cost.

Kevin: Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, pulls out another slide from Google Chief Economist Hal Varian's recent presentation about media economics. This one looks at the US advertising market and compares the share of total spend of US advertising. Fred says that the slide showing the internet growing from zero to 5% of US advertising spend in a decade is bullish.
I see other interesting elements of this graph. Look at how the growth in TV and cable ad share almost mirrors the steady decline of newspaper advertising since 1949. What is really interesting is how the decline in newspaper advertising plateaus in the first part of the 1970s only to accelerate in the latter 70s and early 80s, which was the arrival of cable TV in the US. Again, it's another sign that the internet isn't solely responsible for papers' woes.

The Sunlight Foundation in the US announces winners of its digital design competition. "Submissions ranged from an impressive redesign of the IRS to a brilliant infographic showing how a bill becomes a law, to scrollable guide to the Senate, to an inspired UI redesign of the Social Security Administration."

Kevin: Mark Sweeney of The Guardian writes: "The tie-up with Facebook and Twitter, which will allow iPlayer users to recommend programming to their friends as long as they log into the BBC website first, forms part of a strategy to make the service more social.
However, users will have to sign up to the BBC's own website ID service, already used for posting comments on the site, so that the corporation can maintain a "complete social eco-system" with iPlayer users. The corporation has more than one million users already signed up to BBC ID."

Kevin: A Dubai-based public relations agency, Spot On PR, says that there are more Facebook users in the Arab world than newspaper readers. There are 15m Facebook users and newspapers have a circulation of 14m.

Kevin: The amazing data viz people at Gapminder release an Adobe Air app to explore the data and visualisations at Gapminder.

Kevin: A good overview of a report by business and technology analysts Ovum by Laura Oliver at Journalism.co.uk. "News and magazine publishers should instead be developing products and a workflow that caters for the iPad as just one of a range of digital and non-digital readers, says the Reformatting News & Magazine Media report." The iPad is part of a multi-platform strategy, not a single solution for all that ails traditional publishers.

Kevin: A very clear post on how to use Processing both to gather data and to create simple visualisations. This is an excellent tutorial walking you through the data collection and also the visualisation of the data. Highly recommended. I've tried Processing before, but this will help me understand it much more.

Kevin: Mark Potts writes about the porous paywall at the Wall Street Journal. He also wonders why it would have been cheaper for him to subscribe both to the website and to the print edition. (My guess is that print ads are still far more lucrative to the Journal than online advertising.) This is an interesting post that covers a lot of issues about paywalls, pricing and also the relaxed attitude that newspaper sales teams have towards subscribers. Well worth a read.

Kevin: Excellent piece from Patrick Smith comparing the nascent market for media apps with RSS feeds and either online or application-based readers. He doesn't have a lot to say positively about smartphone and iPad apps. RSS is an invisible technology for mot news consumers. They aren't even aware of it but use it in a number of applications. I think Patrick's point at the end is intelligent and nuanced: "Of course, the everyday Man On The Clapham Omnibus doesn’t care or want to know about RSS, much less mobile apps that create a mobile version of their OPML file. But Journalism.co.uk readers are media professionals – and I’d wager that most of you are capable of using free or cheap software to create a mobile news experience that no branded premium app can match."

Kevin: What I call the 'war for the living room' is definitely getting more interesting. With so much video shifting to IP-based delivery, it's suddenly addressable, findable and sharable in a way that TV hasn't been before. Definitely worth watching these videos to see what kind of features these startups are pursuing. They are definitely the 'Davids' in this battle with the likes of Sony, Intel, Logitech and Google teaming up for GoogleTV and Yahoo already having a presence on other connected sets, but features tend to be poached from these startups. Look to the edges for the innovation.

Kevin: Another great visualisation and chart generating site. Upload your data and easily create graphs, maps and other charts.

Kevin: It's great when I learn something while I'm doing training. ChartBeat is a great simple web analytics package that allows you to easily see the activity on your site. Referrals, real-time data and 'engagement' all easily available on a rich graphical interface.

Kevin: A good summary of a discussion on BBC Radio 4's Media Show talking about the impact of the paywall that The Times will shortly be building around its site. The headline says it all. Is The Times really preparing to lose 90% of its traffic when it puts up the paywall? Will the revenue from 61,000 readers really be enough to offset the revenue from advertising? We shall see soon enough. It's about time that we had experiments and not just assertions. (Having said that, I'm not sure we'll see honesty and transparency about the outcome. The Times did remove itself from the ABCes ahead of this move.)

Kevin: Google, Sony, Intel and Logitech, will demonstrate technology this week enabling users to flip seamlessly among shows, YouTube videos and home videos on their sets. It's called SmartTV, and while big backers don't guarantee adoption, this is definitely a major move in the "War for the Living Room". With consumers adapting apps on their mobile phones, there is an increasing expectation that previously closed devices should use software much the same way that computers do. With consumers also watching more video content via their computers, both trends are driving adoption of apps for the television set. There is a great stat in this story. There are already 1m internet-enabled TVs, and another 10m will be sold this year. It is estimate that a quarter of all TVs sold in Europe in 2010 will have networking capability.

Kevin: Yahoo buys low-cost content producer Associated Content. We've now got Deman Media, Associated Media and SEED all competing in the "low-cost, crowd-sourced content". This is going to be a brutal, hyper-competitive space. I'm not entirely sure what value this adds to Yahoo. As a hedge against long-time rival AOL, it might make sense. However, I just don't see what they stand to gain by entering a market that will be all about cutting costs at any cost.

Kevin: A look at five new news websites by Mashable with the conclusion: "Enterprising communities, a DIY culture, mobile devices, and better ways to sort through the flood of information (like semantic web) will be essential to the new ways in which we’ll stay informed each day." Everyblock, Spot.us, Wikileaks, Chicago Now and Fwix. Most of these sites aren't new, but they are trying new things in terms of news and information.

Kevin: Mark Potts looks at the community interaction on the new site Civil Beat in Hawaii. Only subscribers can comment. The site has already tackled the issue of civil unions, which usually would be a cue for a god awful fight on most sites. However, the discussion is polite. It's an interesting model where anyone can read comments but only subscribers can contribute to them.

Kevin: Juliana Rotich of Ushahidi talks about using the platform for non-political purposes. "How do we inspire active participation in a project that is non-political, and not related to a crisis?" The key? "To make it work, however, this kind of application requires aggressive marketing and online awareness campaigns, and mixing and matching online and offline initiatives."

Kevin: CEO John Paton of the Journal Register Company is letting his actions speak for themselves. He has adopted a digital first strategy, and he's just announced the appointment of three digital execs to seniors posts.
"The Journal Register Company has adopted a strategy of Digital First,” CEO John Paton said in a statement. “The appointments of Dan, Adam and Jon to these important roles with a focus on digital rather than print are indicative of our commitment to that strategy."

Kevin: Brian Casel at Mashable has a look at five most important features in WordPress 3.0, set for release in June 2010. Those features include custom post types, menu management and multi-site capabilities. WordPress already was a very powerful blog CMS, and now it's starting to get sophisticated features that will appeal to a much wider range of online publishers.

Kevin: A Firefox plug-in to scrape data from websites.

Kevin: Some very interesting numbers if a very brief piece. What's unclear to me is where the table with the revenue and costs comes from. Is this a national average for US newspapers? However, what is really stunning is the fact that subscription revenue is only 3% of total revenue. That is utterly shocking. The other figure that is totally gob-smacking is that in print 52% of the costs come from production, distribution and raw materials. _52%_ That begs the question of when print will be completely economically unworkable. That day is not long off.

Kevin: Michelle Minkoff at Poynter's E-Media Tidbits highlights a great new tool for scraping data from websites. What is scraping data? Before the days of APIs, developers and hackers would often 'scrape' data from websites. This would take data, often from an HTML table, and output the data in a useful format such as CSV that could be more easily manipulated using data tools such as spreadsheet or database software.
Minkoff writes: "It often takes a lot of time and effort to produce programs that extract the information, so this is a specialty. But what if there were a tool that didn't require programming?

Enter OutWit Hub, a downloadable Firefox extension that allows you to point and click your way through different options to extract information from Web pages."

Kevin: The New York Times asked followers of its Lens blog: "Attention: everyone with a camera, amateur or pro. Please join us on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 (U.T.C./G.M.T.), as thousands of photographers simultaneously record “A Moment in Time.” The idea is to create an international mosaic, an astonishingly varied gallery of images that are cemented together by the common element of time." It's a beautiful, simple call to action with a stunning result. As Flickr has shown, digital cameras have made amateur photo enthusiasts of us all, and we love to share our images both with friends, family and complete strangers.

Kevin: JESSICA E. VASCELLARO writes: "Overall, Facebook.com served 176.3 billion display ads on its website over the first three months of 2010, or 16.2% of the total, said comScore. Yahoo served 131.6 billion banner ads to Yahoo users, and Microsoft served 60.2 billion, according to comScore. The data don't include ads that Yahoo and Microsoft delivered to other Web sites through their networks, a major source of revenue for each."
I'm curious whether the well documented competitive advantage in dwell time on Facebook is helping them sell advertising at premium rates, premium CPMs, or whether the dwell time is offset by low click through rates. Some people have posited that selling advertising on social networks is difficult due to people not wanting their social interactions interrupted by commercial messages.

Kevin: Journalism professor Mindy McAdams is taking a deep look at HTML5. Mindy is known for her excellent books on Flash, and this one in a series of posts about the new HTML standard. She's writing about the developments in the new HTML standard that will drive desktop, mobile and other device development for the next decade. She's writing for fellow educators and students, but this is invaluable for editors as well.

Kevin: This is a summary of a James Fallows piece in the Atlantic magazine in the US looking at Google's plans for the news business. After interviewing several Google staffers, Fallow is convinced that the search giant is serious about helping newspapers. Emma Heald at the Editor's Weblog writes: "In Google's vision of making news sustainable, the first thing to note is that print is ignored. And a key element of the company's advice to newspapers is to continuously experiment."

Kevin: A rather stunning visualisation of Twitter from Japan.