links for 2011-05-16

Mapping breaking news: We’ve just added a map on BreakingNews.com that pinpoints the locations of the latest breaking news stories. Just click “map” in the main navigation and it will reveal on the home page. This is our first tentative step into mapping the news as it happens, and there’s a lot more we could do with it. Ideas? Let us know in comments below…

What does n0tice do?
The service operates in two modes – reading and posting. #

n0tice.com – what's near you nowWhen you go to n0tice.com it will first detect whether or not you’re coming from a mobile device. It was designed for the iPhone first, but the desktop version is making it possible to integrate a lot of useful features, too

Here are my 10 best practices for social media (written for newsroom leaders; the list would vary for other journalists):

Chapter One News From Everywhere: The Economics of Digital Journalism

Chapter Two Traffic Patterns: Why Big Audiences aren't always profitable

Using Twitter and a Facebook page is the obvious starting point but I'm open to suggestions for developing it (and expanding it). These accounts aren't about pushing links to the website or giving cryptic hints followed with a 'buy Sunday's paper'; I want them to be about what we're doing. Or about what we should be doing as far as our audience is concerned.

Thompson theorised that we are no longer offline beings, but the online is part of us. That switching it down is a deliberate act of mental sabotage, as our brain synapses are being made to rewire to include these new external limbs. Like Neo in the Matrix we are part of the machine. For Thompson, this is not just a liberation, but a victory in a war. The geeks (or, at the very least, the information workers) have won the war, and the losers, though they should not be ignored or treated unfairly, are as disenfranchised as the Anglo-Saxon farmers who were stripped of their lands by the Norman Earls.

We, "the digital", are no longer the future; this is no longer a bet that could have gone either way (like Betamax v. VHS), but are inheritors of the present.