links for 2009-07-20

The Sun is a right-wing, reactionary, flag-waving, nationalist newspaper (”support our boys” at war in Iraq). It is also populist and demagogical. So of course, it would be a sexy Brit not a sexy Arab.

Some journalism could become a kind of volunteer work, performed by eyewitnesses, passionate amateurs or professionals in other fields who use journalism as a loss leader to sell their books or build their brands.

They then tweet stuff from the unmissable #xmklwfdf09 conference every five minutes for six hours, AS THOUGH THEY ARE WITNESSING THE BLOODY OBAMA INAUGURATION. Clearly, they aren’t.

Now it is the turn of Stockport to get the Independent's 50/50 mix of local 'soft' news and advertising in a monthly free-to-pick-up format.

The site also leverages an array of publicly available information like census data and hospital ratings. For example, there are options to see a map with an overlay of the highest concentration of ‘Yuppies’ (young professionals who make $100,000 or more) or ‘Cougars’ (defined by the site as women aged 35-50 who are single or divorced). Obviously some of these are mostly for fun, but they can definitely come in handy, especially when you’re trying to price out different neighborhoods.

Professor Neil Blain told us that someone had calculated that if the New York Times wanted to have an online business model as successful as its print-based model then its website would have to be one of the half dozen most popular websites on the internet

Assuming those tech hurdles can be overcome in the next few years, many geo-app makers envision physical space marked up with interesting information that actively pops up when you walk past a particular location.
In the long run, we could find ourselves living in a world where long, threaded discussions and conversations occur not only on blog postings or Facebook status updates but in specific cafes, public buildings, or rooms.

"An offering by Material PR (who, as always, played a blinder for most of the weekend) that was either out and out genius or the 21st Century Faustian bargain. In short, it was this: “unable to cover all the acts you need/want to cover? Tell us, the T in the Park PR company and we’ll arrange for words and pics for you.”

Thanks to the wonderful caching qualities of Twitter Search, the offensive tweets live on long enough to capture the evidence, but regardless of whether deleted or not, the damage to the brand has been done. The response tweets and the retweets will live on long after their offensive hashtag spam effort.

“This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world,” said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.”

The following grid includes opinions from industry leaders who answered questions about everything from defining multimedia to ethics to contests to the future. Click on their faces to read a short biography and listen to a three-minute summary of their full interview.

twitdone is one of those applications that has the potential to really catch on with a lot of Twitter users. I can see it being used as a to-do tool as well as a way to bookmark interesting posts and URLs. Who knows, maybe twitdone will become the Twitter verison of Remember the Milk.

Talk About Local will help support that innovation here in Hyperlocal Labs – even if the Lab is just a web page with some bright ideas on it. If you have a clever idea you want to feature drop me a line via info@talkaboutlocal.org – even if you can’t build it yourself but want some help or support.

Hyperlocal news wire

Perhaps the best thing that could come out of Matthew Robson’s pithy note could be that people like Morgan Stanley commission some serious and longitudinal research – ideally involving teenagers as researchers as well as subjects.