I first started blogging back in 2007. But did you ever know that I ran and still do so solely using my phone ? My first blog was Aviation Sri Lanka (

The easiest way to create an interactive timeline gadget for Google Spreadsheets or iGoogle

Kevin: A list of the 5 best data visualisation projects of the year. Last.fm, BBC, Wordle. I liked the New York Museum of Modern Art's project exploring the world of online dating.

Kevin: Hat tip to Adam Tinworth. This is a wonderful visualisation of air traffic over the UK in a 24 hour period. Lovely stuff, and it really helps tell a story.

Kevin: "Is social media diplomatic window dressing or can the U.S. Twitter its way into the hearts and minds of other countries?" It's a lot more complicated than that, and many US foreign service staff will admit quietly that they've had a difficult time with public diplomacy during the Bush administration. But with Obama's social media efforts domestically, it will see if he tries to bring some social networking skills to US image rebuilding and repair.

Kevin: How to spot the real experts from those only expert at self-promotion.

Kevin: My friend and former colleague says it straight. "There is no reason to assume that print is the only or even the best vehicle for investigative journalism. The newspaper is a delivery vehicle for news. For a younger generation, that delivery vehicle is the internet."

Kevin: Alana Taylor reports on a panel about a MediaBistro panel talking about social media in general and about Twitter more specifically. NPR's Andy Carvin, BusinessWeek.com community editor Shirley Brady and Daily Beast columnist Rachel Sklar talk about why they use it. Also, Jay Rosen worries (but not too much) about finding a business model for news as we're in a platform shift, but he sees many possibilities with Twitter.

Kevin: Question and answers surrounding the copyfight over the now iconic Hope and Progress Barack Obama posters. The photographer is looking for some money but money that he plans to donate to charity. He's more interested in the recognition.

Kevin: A nice interactive graphic from the NYTimes showing Twiter keywords by state and over time

Suw: More social sites need to do usability testing. Yes, I'm looking at you, LinkedIn and Facebook. Just because you're big doesn't mean your site is usable. This guide ensures you have no excuses.

Kevin: The backstory behind a crowdsourced project to create a comment-able copy of the interim Digital Britain report.

Kevin: The Media is Thriving launches as a counterpoint to The Media is Dying, which charts job cuts, closures and financial losses in the media. The Media is Thriving was created by the marketing agency, The Barbarian Group. Also of good note for journalists is The Media is Hiring, a Twitter feed to help laid off employees find work.

Kevin: With the Digital Britain report being posted in a commentable form using CommentPress on Writetoreply.org, here is a good collection of how to post public documents for comment from Steph Gray, the social media manager for the UK Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills.

Kevin: The process of reinvention and prototyping. Good read on how start-ups start and how the iconic Twitter came into being.

Kevin: A good brief look at NBC 'digital correspondent' Mara Schiavocampo. Angela Grant picks out this fact to highlight: "(S)he now travels with a 30-pound rolling backpack filled with $10,000 worth of gear–about one fifth of the cost of a full size Sony digital Betacam."

Kevin: Fred Wilson has some good tips on how to live life online and in public and how to keep it from being destructive. I live by the rules, 'Be Nice' and 'Demand that others are nice'. Also try to deal with things with humour. It really helps.

Kevin: The US Congressional Budget Office now has a blog, and they have released their estimates for H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, more popularly known as Barack Obama's stimulus bill. Useful information about the fiscal impact of the proposed stimulus. Just waiting for some data-driven mashup fun. Where is the money going? What sectors of the economy? What is the impact of the US deficit?

Kevin: Adrian Holovaty thinks about the future of Everyblock.com. Their grant funding ends on 30 June, and they are going to open-source the code. What next?

Kevin: Howard Weaver sums up in 140 characters (probably a little less) my major concern about funding newspapers by endowment.

Kevin: This is a good roundup and response to the idea floated recently that newspapers be funded by endowment. Zach Seward looks at the economic issues, which aren't trivial. He also quotes Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo who says: "In my experience, and I get criticized for saying this sometimes, at the [nonprofit] magazine that I worked for before I started TPM, the fact that our continued existence was not based on size or interest level of our readership allowed us to be cut off and not particularly in touch with what our readership had a fine interest in. I think that was not just bad in business terms, but much more importantly, bad in journalistic terms."

Kevin: Crowdsourced project from Berkman Centre for Internet and Society to see if inaccessibility of a website is a shared problem.

Kevin: Stephen Fry has seen a massive spike in his Twitter following probably due to his recent Twitter evangelism on the Jonathan Ross show. He lays down some ground rules with humour, grace and wit. This is actually a good start for house rules, at least in tone, for a range of social media services. I'll keep this handy, although it would take me years to reach his number of followers. But I will remember his pleasant greeting to his new followers: "Welcome to my twitterworld, I am delighted to have you as a follower. Let’s enjoy ourselves and to hell with those who don’t get it."

Kevin: David Westphal at the Knight Digital Media Center says: "Could newspapers and local broadcasters begin seeking philanthropic support from the civic foundations and private donors that are starting to bankroll news non-profits? It appears entirely likely. With for-profit media watching their news-gathering resources dwindle, some editors say they're open to the idea of seeking help from donors."

Kevin: I've often that there is value in helping people see the connections between things. The intersections and inter-relations are very important to understanding the big picture. I'm sure that we'll see more services like this.

Kevin: Interesting concept of pitting liberal and conservative commenters against each other, letting them set the topic and having other commenters vote on who wins. It could be a moderation nightmare, but at the moment, it seems mostly civil, but dominated by liberal commenters.

Kevin: Cory Bergman at Lost Remote has an excellent summary of the Seattle Council debate over the future of newspapers as the Seattle PI is just weeks away from possibly ceasing operations. Cory says: "The vast majority of the discussion missed the point, straying into common misconceptions and old-school thinking about journalism in a new connected world." And he quotes Tracy Record from WestSeattleBlog.com who told the council, "newspapers are a delivery model. What needs saving is journalism, not newspapers."

Kevin: This is well worth a read explaining the investment strategy of Union Square Ventures, well represented on the web by Fred Wilson.

Kevin: I think this post slightly overstates the death of email at least from the data that it quotes. It also seem to conflate the reading of marketing emails with the use of email as a form of communication. Millenials do use email. The stats quoted in the post say it's their second most used form of communication. They just don't respond to email marketing.

Kevin: Very handy if you want to try playing around with their APIs.

SHANGHAI — When Tang Xiaozhao first saw a copy of the pro-democracy petition in her e-mail inbox, she silently acknowledged she agreed with everything in it but didn't want to get involved.

Kevin: A plan to save newspapers. "Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities." I'm not sure about this. I think that one of the problems with newspapers is that they aren't connected with communities. Insulating them from profit-loss might make the journalism loftier but also more irrelevant. Having said, having worked for the BBC and now the Guardian, having some insulation from market fluctuations has its benefits.

Kevin: Henry Blodget of the Silicon Insider says: "George Soros just predicted that the global economic collapse could end up being worse than the Great Depression. How do we know? Because Reuters' editor in chief, David Schlesinger, Twittered the speech live from Davos. Journalism evolves!"

Kevin: You'll have to download a PDF, but it's an interesting look at Barack Obama's use of social media. "Although the Obama campaign was revolutionary in some respects, it ultimately used the same
tools that many campaigns had previously employed. However, the campaign did everything
incrementally better than its competitors." Pay special attention to the section on mobile.

Kevin: An interesting analysis (much of which I agree with) about the upcoming report by Andrew Currah from the Reuters Institute about journalism. "This report is not without value, but as an analysis of how newspapers are dealing with the transition online it doesn’t really offer an fresh insights."

Kevin: Joanna Geary talks with Mark Comerford about the 'new journalism' and when she had her aha moment.

Kevin: Straight shooting from Dan Gillmor who watched and blogged about the housing bubble from one of the centres of the catastrophe, California. He writes: "Our government's current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars.

Why? Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to covering the reckless behavior, sleaze and willful ignorance of fundamental economics, much of which was reasonably obvious to anyone who was paying attention, that inflated the housing and credit bubbles of the past decade."

Suw: Psychologists discover that "People procrastinate when asked to think in the abstract". Seems like the core of GTD to me – think about your next action, not the project as a whole.

Kevin: Tim Windsor interrogates the statement: "Newspaper revenue dollars become online pennies." He says that it's not just down to inertia from advertisers or a lack of imagination at newspapers. He also attributes the lower revenue rates to a loss of scarcity. A post worth reading the comments on as well.

Kevin: Jeff Jarvis says that we should subsidise broadband internet access not newspapers.

Kevin: Wilson Miner talks about the progress that the EveryBlock has made in its first year. "There are lots of ways to measure how far we’ve come since that first day. We launched in three cities, and today we cover eleven cities across the U.S. We started with 37 types of data, and today we have more than 130 unique data types, with 602 different sources of news and blogs alone."

Kevin: Laura Oliver reports: "Flat Earth News author and journalist Nick Davies called upon journalists to be ‘whistleblowers on our own newsrooms’…Exposing flaws in managements’ running of newsrooms and putting state aid into the hands of journalists and not corporations would help provide a practical solution to a financial problem, he added."

Kevin: A good list of articles with practical tips on how to encourage adoption of social media in the face of opposition and scepticism.

Kevin: An interesting way to track whether President Obama is keeping the promises he made as candidate Obama.

Kevin: The US government collects and publishes mountains of data that are easily used for these types of visualisations. The Obama administration will release most of the content from WhiteHouse.gov under public domain and licenced under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. I wonder whether this will drive even more open data publication by the US government.

Kevin: "The Washington Post today is launching Who Runs Gov, a site primarily made up of a database of personalities in the United States government. If you're looking for info on your state's senator or representative, or details about a cabinet or high-ranking military official, it looks like the site could be a valuable resource." It's a wiki running on MindTouch. Edits will not go live until approved by Washington Post staff.