Kevin: A good, easy to understand tutorial on how to use the Google Maps API to create your own interactive maps.

Suw: Despite a silly headline, this is actually a very good opinion piece by Mike Altendorf, questioning the kneejerk reactions of HR and boardrooms towards social media in the business.

Kevin: Yahoo's Barcelona research lab has created a tool that will not only puts past articles on a timeline, but it also looks at predictions made in those past articles. For instance, Tom Simonite in the MIT Technology Review gives the example of a 2004 opinion piece that predicted that North Korea would have some 200 warheads. It's a clever use of semantic technology that extracts dates from articles and delivers more information to the reader. It's a clever riff on the idea of a timeline, and it's a great discovery tool for a news organisations archives.

Kevin: "Statistics can make or break a story. Used correctly they add weight and conviction, but it’s easy to be seduced by cherry-picked data and meaningless surveys." A talk at the Centre for Investigative Journalism by Nigel Hawkes on how to become savvy about data.

Kevin: "Polymaps is a free, open-source JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps. It is the result of a collaboration between Stamen Design and SimpleGeo. … Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps."

Kevin: Scott Rosenberg has written a very thoughtful post on the risks of trusting Facebook with the future's past. He write: "In fact, Facebook is relentlessly now-focused. And because it uses its own proprietary software that it regularly changes, there is no way to build your own alternate set of archive links to old posts and pages the way you can on the open Web." I think the issue of memory and archive in the digital age is a really interesting one, and it becomes even more important when we outsource digital memory to closed systems that have their own priorities.

Kevin: A good howto post by Tony Hirst of Open University on how to screen scrape data from Wikipedia. Tony has a number of excellent tutorials on his blog on how to do this. One thing to note is that a lot of the data in Wikipedia is now available on DBPedia so you might not have to go through this process.

Kevin: A nice brief look at a new visualisation project from the BBC called HowBigReally.com that puts news events in a physical context. For instance, with floods currently covering a fifth of Pakistan, how does that translate on a map of the United States, allowing readers in the US to appreciate the sense of scale. Really good thinking.

Kevin: Alan Mutter writes about how major metro newspapers in the US are finding some success in creating niche print products. "(F)oresighted publishers are creating niche products to try to capture readers who historically were unlikely to buy the legacy newspaper – and, of course, the advertisers who covet them as customers." This is smart. As Philip Meyer wrote in 2004 with The Vanishing Newspaper, whenever a new medium has challenged an existing one, it has always pushed the legacy media towards greater specialisation. Some newspapers are focusing on this not only with digital products but also with new targeted print products.

Kevin: Caroline McCarthy at CNET has written one of the best pieces on the roll out of Facebook places. With Facebook Places, there was not just a shift from location as a standalone feature but also in how location was being talked about. "Facebook Places' debut marks a shift in the rhetoric of the location-based services market because of the company's vocal connection of geolocation to permanence and memory, rather than the language of exciting immediacy (see what your friends are doing right now! In real time!) touted by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla." I wonder if this is simply a rhetorical shift for the purpose of marketing and differentiation or if it actually speaks fundamentally to how location will work on Facebook. They cynic in me thinks it's probably just a bit of marketing.

Kevin: Poynter has a great interview with Tiffany Campbell, a six-year veteran of the paper and a lead producer for SeattleTimes.com. She describes how mobile tools such as Twitter and live video service Qik are changing how they report news and interact with audiences. She talks about how they use Twitter not only as a distribution mechanism but also as a content creation platform. "By using Twitter as a mobile platform, we were able to give real-time updates and maintain users' interest in an event." They always see a spike in traffic when they go live with video or tweet a live event. She sees that this is not only changing reporting but also how audiences interact with journalism. People can interact with reporters in real time as they are reporting.

Kevin: Om Malik has a very plausible explanation of Foursquare's business strategy. "Foursquare wants more folks to use its application-programming interface (API), and thus build an ecosystem around Foursquare’s data." The more people who build apps using its API, the faster it will grow and the easier it will be start monetising its business. "Foursquare (and others like it) can essentially bring a cost-per-action business model to the real world, perhaps either supplanting or complementing traditional forms of advertising." Very intriguing idea.

Kevin: Larry Magid has some good thoughts about how location sharing is going mainstream with the release of Facebook places. Key to this will be easy systems that users can use to protect their location from being used in ways that they don't want or don't intend. I think this is where Facebook might be in some difficulty because they have shifted how they use and expose personal data over time.

Kevin: Air New Zealand rewards 'mayors' on Foursquare with access to its airport loungs. This is a good way use location-based technology to reward loyalty.

Kevin: Ed Chi explains the research they are doing at PARC to help overloaded information professionals deal not just with information overload but also what he describes as channel overload. This is a great post looking at research that as he says not only has application for professionals but also for consumers. This is definitely something that news organisations need to be aware of in terms of helping people find the information they want and need.

Kevin: AllAboutSymbian.com has a detailed tutorial on how to publish audio using the mobile audio recording and publishing app Audioboo using a Nokia Symbian-based smartphone. Audioboo has brilliant apps for the iPhone and Android, but Nokia users have to use a dialup service, which doesn't have the same level of clarity. This detailed tutorial shows you how to use a service called Pixelpipe, which looks like it has the ability to publish content to a number of services. This is a very detailed tutorial, well worth bookmarking.

Kevin: Location-based network Foursquare announced its first editorial partnership with Canadian free daily nwspaper, Metro News, in early 2010. Metro's Foursquare presence will include restaurant reviews, tips, to-dos and "even articles that mobile app users can stumble upon as they traverse Canadian points of interest".

Kevin: A sponsored post on ReadWriteWeb with some tips on how businesses can best use the location-based network Foursquare. One good tip is to use a tool called Foursquare Perspectives to find out information about how users are interacting with your business.

Kevin: My former colleague Jack Schofield interrogates the numbers behind Wired's proclamation that "the web is dead". Like a lot of pieces, Wired's headline bleeds out the nuance in the piece itself. Jack also points out problems of comparing video to text content in terms of the size of the files. It's a good piece from someone with a lot of knowledge both in terms of technology and journalism.

Kevin: Rebecca Denison of Edelman Digital in Chicago gives a great list of social search tools that help to follow conversations on Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz. Great resources for journalists looking to find conversations about stories that they are working on.

Kevin: A look at SMS-driven question-and-answer services ChaCha and KGB. KGB uses people to answer its questions for the price of 99 cents a text. Danny Sullivan, who follows search engines, thinks that human-powered search has a place but is unlikely to ever threaten Google. However, the services have found a place with teens and early-20-somethings.

Kevin: A look at howbigreally.com and the thinking behind it from BERG and the BBC. "We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. the Apollo 11 Moon walk explored an area smaller than Trafalgar Square; the distance between your WW1 trench and the enemy could only be as much s from your front door to the street corner." The website is currently (as of August 2010) a public prototype. It was crashing a few hours after its launch, but it's worth a look.

Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb writes: "Wisconsin developer Marc Harter has released a new Web service, command line tool and open source software called Ogre, which transforms geographic data from 16 different formats into GeoJSON, the preferred new format for geolocation Web app developers."

Kevin: My friend and former colleague, Jemima Kiss at The Guardian, writes about the imminent launch of location features in Facebook. She says, "the only thing that matters about adding location data to Facebook profiles is how secure and uncomplicated the privacy settings are." I think privacy is one issue, an issue that is much more important with location than with other services. I also think that Facebook has to deliver value to its users, not just to advertisers. If it can do that, it will definitely have added another important element to ensure its continued growth.

Kevin: Steve Yelvington has an excellent post on the forces who are declaring that the Web is dead. "Those with power always seek to retain and increase it, so it should come as no surprise that corporations like Verizon and Comcast and individuals like Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch want to create a future where they can decide what's available, to whom, and how it works. Their digital future would be built on approved applications sold in controlled, closed-system markets, delivered over private networks prioritized by economic power, throttling independent voices and open competition."

Kevin: Interesting tool. "SurveyMapper is a free real-time geographic survey and polling tool from the nice people at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London."

Kevin: The genesis of the Hack/Hackers group that began in Silicon Valley, spread across the US and now has spread across the pond with a group in London. The meeting brings together technologists, developers and journalists to discuss the future of journalism and the media and build bridges between groups that had previously been quite separate.

Kevin: Andrew Finlayson takes a look at the impact that the semantic web will have on journalism. It's a layman's view of semantic web technology and linked data. I think he misunderstands Wolfram Alpha, and I think concerns about semantic web technology replacing reporters are irrelevant in the current context. Cut to the end: "the real promise for journalists is that it should soon offer us easy access to thousands of sources of raw data that we will use to tell meaningful stories about our communities."

Kevin: Firm numbers have been difficult to come by in terms of how The Times paywall experiment is playing out, but in terms of traffic, Alexa shows a 44.9% decline in reach over the last three months since the paywall went up. We always knew that traffic would decline, but the question remains whether the loss of revenue from reduced ad impressions is made up by subscribers to the site.

Kevin: An in-depth look at the history of Slide, a social development company recently acquired by Google. The post is an excellent look at the history of Slide and what it might mean. "We would not be surprised to see Google Me (or whatever it is called) making self-expression a priority, complete with ways for users to do things like customize and auto-play slideshows on their profiles. And we also expect to see Levchin and his team to integrate the most social, self-expression focused parts of Google, like YouTube, Picasa (sort of), Blogger, Orkut and whatever else it can."

Kevin: Visual timelines for investigation. This is alpha software so your mileage may very. However, it looks like a very good tool for collecting information for complex events. 

Kevin: Chris O'Brien thinks that Silicon Valley is getting irrationally exuberant about location based check-in services such as FourSquare. It's not a question of whether it will happen but whether it is the right time. At the moment, it still is an emerging behaviour, according to analysts.

Kevin: Peter Kirwan takes a look at the two-track recovery in advertising in the UK media market. Broadcasting and national newspapers are roaring back strongly in 2010, but B2B publishers and regional publishers are struggling to gain traction in what still is a difficult market.

Kevin: A good summary of the discussion about paywalls between John Witherow, editor of The Sunday Times (of London), and Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger. Witherow said that they needed to look for another model instead of simply laying off more journalists, and Rusbridger said that although opposed to paywalls, if the experiment worked, The Guardian would have to consider it.