Kevin: Ushahidi launches a free cloud-based service of its crowd-sourced crisis reporting platform. The new service, CrowdMap cuts the time to create a deployment. Instead of having to install it on a server, all you need to do is fill out a form with your password, a valid subdomain, name and tagline, according to a description on the Ushahidi blog.

Kevin: James Ledbetter at Slate looks at some strange traffic numbers from Demand Media ahead of its IPO. Publicly available figures from Quantcast report a 75% drop in traffic, but the service also reports that traffic at Demand's eHow.com dropped to zero in July. Ledbetter posits some possible explanations.

Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick says that Facebook's location service, Places, will launch soon. According to reports in CNet, it will not be a standalone service to compete with existing location services but rather an API for other location services to use. "I expect that several of these motivations will apply to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users as well, not just the single-digit millions of early adopters using services like Foursquare and Gowalla today."

Kevin: Visualisations of investment money (right now, mostly in the US) and the connections between investors.

Kevin: Hitwise reports that Facebook now accounts for one in six of all page views in the UK.

Kevin: Slate creates a home for their experiments in multimedia journalism. Check out the visualisation they created mining Meetup for events related to the Tea Party to show areas of Tea Party activity in the US.

Kevin: Yahoo's guide on how to write for the web including how to write a strong headline.

Kevin: A simple way to visualise your check-ins on FourSquare.

Kevin: Mark Hachman at PCMag.com describes a feature Yahoo had been trialling called "infinite browse". "The feature, in testing now at Yahoo News, adds a small window of search results at the end of a Yahoo News story, with results on the topics found within the news story." Yahoo product manager Mark Davis said that in its first week, Infinite Browse showed double the user engagement that they have seen with similar features.

Kevin: Larry Kramer, former CEO of Marketwatch.com says that new news sites lack strong editorial leadership and voice. "Almost none of these sites have built a true journalistic infrastructure, with a powerful editorial voice at the top and a collective group of people who both worry continuously about how their content is being presented and who lead the army of reporters down their many paths with critical review and the benefit of experience. Together, these forces create journalistic greatness"

Kevin: Allourideas.org has a widget that allows you to create an "idea marketplace" on your site much as you would embed a YouTube video.

Kevin: Christian Christensen says that the real power of Wikileaks isn't in the technology but the trust "readers have in the authenticity of what they are reading". He believes several myths are surround the story such as the power of social media and the death of the nation-state and journalism.

Kevin: Mark Briggs says that journalism grads are finding jobs but they are not of the traditional repoter/editor variety. Online community managers are in demand, and new media companies such as Yahoo and AOL are hiring. Mark flags up a new job with the Tribune Corporation (bankrupt publisher of the Chicago Tribune among other things) for producer/editors or "preditors".

Kevin: Amy Starlight Lawrence looks at "four transformational trends" in journalism education. The second one is very interesting: Journalism and communication schools as content and technology innovators. "We see the early adopters among you experimenting with new story forms, teaching everything from data visualisation, web scraping and computational journalism, even developing new software".

Kevin: Tom Simonite at MIT's Technology Review looks at a new service called PeerIndex, launched by former Reuters innovation head Azeem Azhar, that tries to show influence of Twitter users. There are other companies in this field, most notably Klout, but Azhar says that his service is different. PeerIndex looks "at the information contained in the tweets, and how that information spreads, to find authority in specific subject areas".

Kevin: paidContent.org reports Demand Media's financial filings with US securities regulator, SEC, before its anticipated IPO. They skip OBIDA numbers that Demand is pushing and focus on the standard financials to show a $22.2m loss for the first half of 2010 on revenue of $114m.

Kevin: Peter Kafka, writing the Media Memo at the Wall Street Journal's All Things D, looks at the numbers that Demand Media is highlighting ahead of its reportedly $1 to $1.5bn IPO or market floatation. Depending on what numbers you look at, the company either has made or lost money, and Goldman Sachs looks to be highlighting non-GAAP numbers to make the balance sheet look quite a bit better than it is. Well worth a read.

Kevin: Writing on the Facebook Developer Blog, Justin Osofsky writes about how media organisations are using the social network and gives examples of best practices. Just to highlight point one, sites using Facebook's "Like Button" see three to five times higher click-through rates.

Kevin: Ken Doctor looks at the local site launched earlier this year in Hawaii with the backing of eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar. Civil Beat asks people for $19.99 to participate. Ken says: " In my community, I’d have great local news reporting, great community discussion — and great Yelp-like functionality, great Open Table-like functionality, great-Angie’s List like-functionality, hey, great eBay-like-functionality-mixed with craigslist (aka The New Classifieds!)." Ken is really asking where is the broader business model.

Kevin: A live chat at the Poynter journalism institute with Jim Brady and Steve Buttry of the new local news site in Washington DC in the US, TBD.com. It is a partnership with a local television station, and Jim talks about integrating a web operation with a TV station. Steve, head of community engagement at the site, talks about their blog network and ad and revenue sharing.

Kevin: A comparison of different local news strategies in the Boston area. They compare AOL's patch, part of the internet providers efforts to remake itself as a digital content company. Each site has one full-time editor who also writes and shoots video. They compared this with local newspaper chain GateHouse. Their Wicked Local sites benefit from coverage by its more than 100 community newspapers. Patch and Wicked Local also combine aggregation, highlighting local bloggers content. It's too early to declare one model the winner, but worthwhile knowing the different models in play.

Kevin: A great post on Poynter E-Media Tidbits by Megan Taylor that builds on ideas about computational thinking by Greg Linch. Megan breaks down Greg's ideas into three simple concepts: Automation, algorithms and abstraction. She flags up a great example of how APIs at the New York Times allow them to cut down on repetitive work, according to Derek Willis.

Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick writes that Hunch, founded by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and angel investor Chris Dixon, has relaunched as a "taste-graph recommendation engine". Answer 20 quick questions and get recommendations for movies, books, magazines, computers, meals, vacation destinations, etc.

Kevin: Edward Boches lists four lessons to learn from the New York Times, which now looks like it is starting to turn a corner in terms of their business. Just to highlight the first of his four points. "Get over the not invented here syndrome." Edward highlights their willingness to syndicate content from other niche sites like ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. I'd also highlight not only their use but also investment in WordPress. Definitely worth checking out the four other points.

Kevin: My friend Andy Carvin with NPR highlights some results they found from canvasing opinion from some of the US public radio network's 1m fans on Facebook. More than 40,000 people responded. They have a compiled the results and shared them on their blog and also on Slideshare. Some highlights, almost all, 96% use Facebook at least once a day. The majority of the respondents listen between 1-3 hrs a day, while the average listener listens about 4.25 hrs a week. Almost three-quarters agreed that Facebook was a major way for them to receive news and information from NPR.

Kevin: Check-in service Gowalla has launched a service tied to political campaigns in the US. Campaigns can create events on Gowalla that supporters can check in at. As with many check-in services, they will get a badge related to the campaign. Supporters will also be able to register their own events. Gowalla also says that advocacy groups can use the service to "highlight their causes".

Kevin: This is a frank and brave post-mortem of a project created for the 2008 US elections. An associate professor had the idea to create a site that would bring together coverage from a few outlets in Missouri, where the project was based. However, she candidly lists her incorrect assumptions and also lessons she learned in promotion and community building.

Kevin: The DBpedia data set and some examples of how to access it including use cases. DBpedia has created a set of linked data derived from Wikipedia.

Kevin: DocumentCloud program manager Amanda Hickman looks at recent uses of the document hosting tool including an annotated version of the controversial Arizona immigration law. The annotations highlight and explain what parts of the law were subject to a judges injunction.

Kevin: Benjamin Nowack takes the concept of "dynamic semantic publishing" that the BBC is pioneering and has come up with a system that could be used by smaller publishers, including bloggers to more easily pull together a much richer collection of related content and data using linked data content and semantic APIs such as OpenCalais and Zemanta. This is the first part in a two part series. He's going to demonstrate a proof of this concept on 9000 articles from ReadWriteWeb.

Kevin: Jem Rayfield of the BBC describes a major change in how the public service broadcaster publishes content. With the extensive use of metadata, they have delivered a "far deeper and richer use of content than can be achieved through traditional CMS-driven publishing solutions.
"The site features 700-plus team, group and player pages, which are powered by a high-performance dynamic semantic publishing framework. This framework facilitates the publication of automated metadata-driven web pages that are light-touch, requiring minimal journalistic management, as they automatically aggregate and render links to relevant stories."

Kevin: Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic gives his 5 key steps for Tumblr for media outlets. As many people have said, Tumblr is somewhere between blogging and Twitter. In fact, it combines much of the best of both platforms, allowing you to do short, status update like posts as well as longer form posts if you life. Tumblr is low-effort, interactive and viral, he says.

Kevin: A good quick guide to Google Analytics for journalists.

Kevin: The dismal state of the finances at Newsweek and possible succession plans as the Washington Post Company finalises a sale. (It will be difficult, even for a billionaire to right this ship.)

Kevin: Journalism professor and sage Jay Rosen goes through his daily information diet and gives insight on how he manages all of the information that comes his way in this information saturated world. Using a mix of Twitter (and two lists that he has created), email and aggregators such as Gabe Rivera's Techmeme, Memeorandum and Mediagazer, he chooses topics for three to five posts that he will write in any given day.

Kevin: Just a link to have handy to Google's Android app inventor, basically a integrated development environment for Android Apps.

Kevin: Samy Kamkar demonstrated a hack at the 2010 Blackhat conference that could trick your router into giving your location information. Using a malformed URL, he could gain access your router and get the MAC address. Using Firefox's location technology and information from services such as Google and Skyhook, he could then find out where you were. Pretty scary stuff and worth reviewing good security practices.

Kevin: ReadWriteWeb describes Hotlist as "a trend-tracker that connects users with upcoming events in the area and across their social networks". They have just launched an iPhone app, which makes a lot of sense because location-based services work much better on mobile when people can act on the recommendations and trends. What's interesting about Hotlist is that it doesn't require you to check-in as do services like Foursquare and Gowalla. It analyses real-time updates on Twitter and aggregates location-specific data from it. It then uses Facebook, Google and Yelp to find specific events from your network of friends. It's definitely another step in the evolution of location-based services.

Kevin: Mahendra Palsule, an editor at TechMeme, looks at various ways that sites and services are filtering information based on relevance including algorithmic filtering, filtering based on one's social graph, various forms of human filtering and influence and shared source filtering. He looks at the pros and cons of each approach and concludes that the best solution is support for multiple forms of filtering and also for flexibility to the degree of filtering. I also like his idea that you'd want to be able to act based on these recommendations.

Kevin: Josh Benton at Nieman Lab has said that the current crisis in journalism is actually an opportunity to rethink its grammar, and Megan Garber has an excellent post on a good first step: Rethink the news cycle.

“Because we choose, essentially, topic over time as journalism’s core ordering principle, we don’t generally think about time as an order unto itself. Newness, and nowness, become our default settings, and our default objectives. The ‘tyranny of recency,’ Thompson calls it.”

Or, put another way in this post, the tyranny of the news peg. This is a very thoughtful post pointing at possibilities in how to rethink journalism.

Kevin: Hotline is a high-priced ($15,000) subscription only political news aggregator in Washington that made its name in the mid-1990s when it was delivered by fax machine. Now competition online is driving a rethink of its business model.

Kevin: Google has opened up its Places API (which differs from its Latitude API). Some of the first developers to get access to these services will be developers creating check-in services ala Foursquare and Gowalla. As TechCrunch points out, this doesn't mean that Foursquare and Gowalla will have new competition (they are beating up on each other quite well). However, the pure check-in space is going to get quite a bit noisier. This also supports my view that location is much more of a platform than a specific service. Foursquare really is built around using game play to get people to check in, and using that information to provide access to businesses wishing to market to those people. However, location has many other applications and business models, and as Forrester recently found, Foursquare is still a relatively minority sport. (4% in the US)

Kevin: My friend and former colleague Roy Greenslade says in the wake of the Wikileaks Afghan War Logs story: "Confidential sources have therefore come to be seen as the lifeblood of modern journalism, as I have said so often down the years to my journalism students. But I now concede that I have overstated the point and downplayed the important, and often crucial, business of discovering, reading and analyzing raw data." Roy is really beating the drum for journalists analysing raw data. Computer-assisted reporting has been an important boutique skill in the US, and it is now good to see the recognition of its importance in the UK.

Kevin: Some really smart analysis and links to more really smart analysis about the Wikileaks Afghan War Logs release by CW Anderson: "To understand the world of Wikileaks, and what it means for journalism, you have to understand the world of geeks, of hackers, and of techno-dissidents. Understanding reporting and reporters isn’t enough." I couldn't agree more, and it shows why understanding this world is important to a broader range of stories. This culture is becoming much more widespread and mainstream, and it has a different ethos to traditional culture. Furthermore, Anderson says: "We’re seeing here the full-throated emergence of what a lot of smart people have been talking about for years now: data-driven journalism, but data in the service of somehow getting to the “big picture” about what’s really going on in the world." Good piece of analysis.

Kevin: Releases of sensitive material such as the Afghan War Logs could become much easier and more distributed if Wikileaks carries through on its plan to create a widget that would allow people to upload a disclosure to news and other sites. As Dan Nystedt at Computer World says: "The upload system will give potential whistleblowers around the world the ability to leak sensitive documents to an organization or journalist they trust over a secure connection, while giving the receiver legal protection they might not otherwise enjoy."

Kevin: Major UK local newspaper publisher Northcliffe fails to see a return to growth in 2010 and says that "it lacks visibility" (has no idea) when the division will fully recover. I wonder if this is just due to softness in the British economy outside of London and the southeast or whether this is down to a continuing decline in the sector.

Kevin: A good question and answer piece with Jonathan Zittrain, (a friend and) a law and computer science professor at Harvard and one of the founders of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, about the Wikieaks Afghan War Logs release. My key take-away: "I see WikiLeaks as just a new intermediary, not something that gets rid of intermediaries. So the function it’s serving if any is not something alone that should strike fear into traditional newspaper editors.

The people at WikiLeaks have learned that if they want to get a message out, they should hand it to the mainstream media under embargo."

Kevin: Richard McManus considers the decline of startpages such as NetVibes, PageFlakes and iGoogle. "Startpages have undoubtedly faded in recent years, despite my positive outlook for them 4 years ago (although I also correctly predicted that the enterprise market would provide revenue opportunities). The main reason for the decline of startpages in the consumer market is Facebook."

Kevin: A look at various curation platforms that newspapers are using including OneSpot, Daylife, Publish2 and Loud3r. It's an interesting look at how technology is being used by newspapers to sift through large amounts of content.

Kevin: Lawrence Meyer at the Nieman Watchdog blog says that the internet has put a premium on speed. Some of it is fair comment, but I'd argue that the 24-hour news cycle brought about by cable television started this trend long before the internet was a force in journalism. It's a thought provoking piece though. I just might quibble with the causality.

Kevin: The post looks at five tools that allow you to send audio via Twitter. They focus mostly on desktop applications but also include AudioBoo, which has a mobile application (on Apple and Android) as well.

Kevin: Romenesko highlights a quote from Adrian Holovaty from a recent Time story on hyperlocal news organisations in the US. "As much as I love a compelling story, I think good journalism can also be about organizing information in intelligent ways and giving people tools that let them help each other," Adrian said.

Kevin: Good ideas from Janet Titterton on how publications can deliver value added services to their readers. Publishers already have a lot of data on their readers, and they need to use this data to provide services not just to their core print readers but also to their larger online readership. She not only talks about it in the abstract but provides good examples.