Today I have mostly been reading

• Motorway camera map – JP’s deal with the highways agency produces a neat little map. The next step is to make it mobile friendly and I think this could attract quite a bit of ad revenue.
• New York Times lets users build things with its content (open API) | Online Journalism Blog – “Here’s another case study to add to the list of examples of distributed journalism: the New York Times has finally launched its articles API.” I missed this article whilst on holiday but it keys in to my new years conviction about going open source.
• 10 things you can tweet about on Twitter | Online Journalism Blog – “If you’re struggling to think of what to talk about on Twitter, here are some suggestions” Paul Bradshaw has some top tips for things to post other than ‘trying this twitter thing” :)
• BJP documents Terrorism Act photography event | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog – “The British Journal of Photography (BJP) is covering the photographic ‘event’ against the new Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which comes into force today, with live updates and images posted to Twitter.” Important stuff
• What Facebook’s revised terms of use mean for your content | Jacobson Attorneys: the new media law firm – “Onerous terms of use are not unusual on the Web but Facebook’s terms of use go further than Google’s and certainly much further than Plaxo’s, a possible competitor for Facebook’s users in the near future” A US focus but some interesting ‘legal’ perspective on the Facebook TOC debate
• Free Twitter SMS Updates For Europe and the Rest of the World – TWe2 may bring sms back to UK twitterers who have been missing it
• The BBC’s “Points Of View” online culture clash – currybetdotnet – Great notes and reflections on “the way that the BBC has been trying to discuss future developments for their interactive online services like blogs and messageboards in an open way” and the reaction to it from other parts of the media.
• Redundant subeditors – a reply to my critics – Roy Greenslade replies to “critics” of his view on subs
• Kindle still seems unnecessary | Marginal Utility | PopMatters – “Basically publishers have no incentive to encourage people to read books on screens and every incentive to get them to enjoy the fetish of the object.” Thanks to Nigel Barlow for the tip
• Lego Follow Focus – A film geeky one this, but a great example of how lego is fast becoming the mother of invention
• ITV puts Friends Reunited up for sale – The big suprise here is that it’s take so long for them to do it. The article suggests that ITV looks to its version of iplayer to boost revenues. But a platform for content only works if you have content. Still, Friends Reunited was never going to do that and it seems that the only winners in this were Steve and Julie Pankhurst who sold the thing to ITV in the first place.
• Markmedia: Should journalists have separate twitter accounts for work and personal use? – Mark Comerford is in the middle of a post looking at the question of professional identity on Twitter and want’s your opinion. Go and take his poll and let him know what you thing via twitter at @markmedia
• MediaShift Idea Lab . Spot.Us Deals with the Good and Bad of Limitations | PBS – Dave Cohn does some reflecting on Spot Us. Some could do a lot worse than look at his list of ideas for Spot Us as a list of ideas to try in their newsrooms. But one spot of great news is that ” After this next round of development the source code will be in a much better state and I’ll do a blog post on how anyone can take it, launch their own “community funded reporting project” for very little cost and I hope some take me up on the challenge.”
• Microsoft Recite: Voice Record and Voice Search – ReadWriteWeb – “Recite lets you record short voice clips of ‘remembrances’ and then search for specific words, again by using your voice; essentially it’s an audio recorder with audio search capability.” I haven’t looked in to how long a note can be but this could be a cool J-tool. Especially as it’s aimed at mobile devices.
• Message to journalism & broadcast teachers… – “Toss this out to your classes – ask them what they love about each type of media and what they hate. Ask them to design the perfect media – what elements would they keep/what would they toss?” That’s my seminar written then : ) Seriously though. This kind of thing needs saying on a regular basis as we can get a bit complacent.
• Emily Bell: Fighting talk is not best start to a debate on press freedom – “More alarmingly for the PCC, its own members are now also engaged with this cross-section of regulators looking for some kind of salvation, which goes beyond self-help. It feels as though the pact of a free and self-regulated press in exchange for a free-market model is all but fractured.”