links for 2011-09-08

only 12 percent of smartphone owners use the device for checking into location services like Foursquare or Gowalla.

Is the media industry in turmoil? Sure it is. And everywhere you look there are “amateur bloggers” causing trouble by disobeying the supposed laws of journalism — whether by quoting anonymous sources or engaging in conflicts of interest, or a hundred other things that “real” journalists supposedly never do. But licensing some small group of journalists and excluding others would not resolve any of those issues (although it might reduce the numbers of people engaging in them). All it would do is restrict the amount of information available, and that’s a much bigger problem.

Using my iPad, I asked people on the street where they liked to eat and then looked up the restaurant’s inspection report online. I was able to capture their reactions when they heard the details — things like evidence of live vermin at their favorite restaurants. It was tape I could not have gotten in the moment without an iPad.