Fraser looked after me when I was on work experience at The Times back in 2008. He was very kind to me – he let me have a joint byline on a story about BHP Biliton and Slough Estates.

"Windows: LicenseCrawler is a portable and free tool for retrieving serial numbers and product keys from your computer. A simple scan with LicenseCrawler ensures you'll never be left trying to reinstall software without the proper key."

These rates have been reported by members of the National Union of Journalists and others, and printed in the Freelance, newsletter of London Freelance Branch. They are sorted by publisher/publication, then by date (most recent first).

Seven days a week, Timmy sits by a store-bought police scanner and live-blogs emergency calls—all from the confines of his bedroom in the house where he has lived all his life with his mother and 18-year-old sister.

I am always impressed by the way The Post tries to consult its readers about what it does. Yes, there are limited options in difficult times, but it's an attitude towards its community that makes me very proud to have worked there.

Yesterday Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves outlined the challenges facing the newspaper and called for readers to send in their views on the options being considered for survival. Here are some of the responses.

"… we need to provide users with the tools to build their own customized feeds of that data."

"…in reality most people will do anything for a discount. Hand over all your shopping data for a penny back in every £10? – sure thing, here's my supermarket card!"

What's great about this approach is that you don't need corporate social media policies — just let your staff do what they do. What's challenging about this approach, at least for other companies, is that most don't hire with same intent and fervor.

hile it is easy to understand why a relatively young company or one started by a tech-savvy founder would so completely embrace social media communication tools, it is quite a bit more remarkable for an almost 30 year old established brick and mortar company with roughly 50,000 employees and over 270 stores worldwide to have done so.

The London Evening Standard deputy editor Andrew Bordiss has resigned after more than 11 years in the job.

After News International’s decision to shut its freesheet thelondonpaper, now Associated Newspapers’ national freesheet rival Metro is planning to make up to 30 redundancies on its regional arts and entertainment sections

"Trinity Mirror is considering taking the Birmingham Post weekly after revealing that its Midlands titles are on course to lose more than £6m in 2010."

"…the silent readers are very active members of the community. They just make decisions not to make themselves visible in the permanent online space"

Internet getting you down? Tired of reading tales of doom and disaster? Ever wanted to cheer yourself up by looking at floofy kittins? Of course you have. And now you can! With this little bookmarkelet that replaces all images on the page with pictures of kittens.

Circulation figures for UK national daily newspapers for July 2009

"…in the hands of a more capable investigator, it’s possible that the information underneath all of the Tweets, Facebook updates, Flickr comments, etc. that I am broadcasting everyday could reveal a lot more that I would want to share.

"Brands must have a kick start plan to be successful with their community.

"Taking responsibility" falls on their ears as "taking the blame". In their experience, this is adding insult to injury – taking the heat after taking the loss. It's too much to take according to them.

"We concluded that the routine publication of these pages and the nature of the articles strongly suggested a commercial arrangement existed between the newspaper and the advertiser and that the advertiser exerted a sufficient degree of control over the content of the articles to warrant the term 'advertisement feature' or the like being placed above the articles".

Worth reading. Fascinating to see how the UK compares when it comes to pricing of mobile broadband.

"…the students went through a three-day intensive workshop, called Ready…Set…Blog! Fellow CUNY Graduate School of Journalism student and Local intern Lois DeSocio and I developed the curriculum and led the workshops."

"The common form of news storytelling that evolved in print journalism over the last century was shaped by not only the technology and scarcity of print, but also by consumption patterns that differed from what we're seeing today."

"In the 36 hours after securing the Michael Jackson footage, Us Weekly was able to cut the video down to a minute and 35 seconds, secure advertisers (the video was embeddable by any user, carrying with it a pre-roll ad), warn Ooyala — which used Akamai as its CDN — about the incoming load, and sync up with that week’s newsstand release. In the meantime, Ooyala readied its adaptive bitrate streaming to ensure that video views were uninterrupted by demand or bandwidth issues."

"Can we get a feeling for the audience the event is being amplified to? Are there members of that audience who seem to be a member of the community but aren’t really known to the community? Can we find the lurkers and pull them in with a personal invite (and is this even ethical?)"

Sony's e-book reader and Amazon's Kindle have attracted a great deal of attention during 2009. However, the devices still suffer from proprietary file formats and digital rights management technologies, which along with price, are limiting their adoption and will drive them into the Trough of Disillusionment.

"So, news at 3%, and lets assume "the rest excluding spam and babble" – about 57% – has about 1/6th relevance (a figure derived by a quick count on Tweetdeck) gives about a 10% signal, the rest is pretty much noise. A lot if it is diverting noise of course, and herein lies the problem – poor filtering!"

"…if you want your boss to commit to using social media and/or launching a blog, you need to show them how their business will benefit from doing so."

"Online advertising as we know it today would be dead for sure. Consumers ignore it, publishers don't need it anymore, and the ad world is struggling to get it to work with any amount of efficiency, so we'd have to completely rethink how to engage a consumer online."

"Chi has identified one model that Wikipedia's growth pattern matches. "In my experience, the only thing we've seen these growth patterns [in] before is in population growth studies – where there's some sort of resource constraint that results in this model." The site, he suggests, is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out. "As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power.""

"As news organization try to figure out new business plans, they can’t afford not to give more attention to the estimated 149.1 million American women (or more than 3 billion worldwide). News organizations really cannot wait until they figure out how to make money before they woo women readers — because by then, many of them will be lost to the blogosphere."

"The saga has certainly proved disastrous for Dawson Holdings. Since the bulks story emerged in public it has all but exited the newspaper and distribution market."

"One change in particular is that a whopping £10 saving will in future be possible when paying application or search fees on a patent application, if filing electronically."

"Very few technologies (if any) have 2 year hype-to-mass-adoption curves, we all know that, yet time and again people let themselves be persuaded that this time, it will be different."

"I’m not an IP lawyer or even music copyright lawyer (yet), but I’d certainly thought things through enough that when I made a recording of my own music a few years ago I got an assignment signed by the session musicians I’d used (who’d been paid a fee for their services)."

"Personally, I consider that forcing or bullying people into disclosing their user / password details in order to access personal accounts is a step too far in the privacy invasion stakes. I await the outcome of the cheerleader's resulting claims against the school with interest."

"What has tended to happen in journalism schools, from what I can gather, is that teachers teach students about what it was like in the past when newspapers defined news, instruct students on how to write like it was back then, and then try to bring students up to speed on the complexities of the current situation."

"I figured that a frequent health care user as smart as Stephen Hawking would probably have an opinion on the subject of "Death Panel" medicine, so I went on his Web site and sent him an e-mail asking him about it. "

The model cannot predict whether a piece of content will go viral before it has been released; only its likely reach once it starts spreading. And the researchers think their approach to modelling should apply to information spreading via social networking sites and other online services as well as email.

"In this regard a couple of reports on enterprise and social networking / Web 2.0 are of interest."

"We're putting together a map of UK blogs. Add yourself – or a blog you know."

Nine staff have been sacked from their local authority jobs for snooping on personal records of celebrities and personal acquaintances held on the core database of the government's National Identity Scheme.

"…the result is wrong – people just don't use web sites in the way that the majority of their Lordships seem to think they do. Who's going to go through all the pages of a site carefully, really? Or realise that there's additional vital info that's not on the site?"

"All things considered though, the Mail's new comment moderation policy is an excellent idea. It doesn't mean no moderation at all, so any legal issues are likely to be dealt with pretty quickly, and the overall effect should be to make the website stickier."

"Mail Online is following Express Newspapers’ lead, which stopped moderating on its Daily Express and Daily Star sites over two years ago and relies on users to flag problems."

"But to be secure a media operation must entice an audience to enjoy what the web cannot supplant, a paid-for exclusivity and an opportunity for a unique participative experience."

"People are prepared to pay for online content when they get value from it. This might be because they trust it (why else pay for Which? content when you can read reviews at TestFreaks or alaTest). Or it might be because it’s the only way they can access certain content."

"When we consider the technicalities of getting income from the consumer, the secret may not be HOW to get people to pay for news, it’s WHEN that counts."

"No – we are not contemplating a pay wall, nor as far as I’m concerned would we ever….they are a stupid idea in that they restrict audiences for largely replicable content. Murdoch no doubt will find this out – even rudimentary maths suggests he will struggle with a completely free model to meet advertising revenue levels across the NI offerings."

"Play crosswords with your friends anywhere, anytime."

"The connection is that the activity of LA gangs – the way they form, grow, operate and interact – can be modelled by WoW. The same is true for the actions of insurgents and terrorist cells."

"It seems The Guardian is considering launching a members’ club of some sort as part of moves to increase revenue, an idea that was also mooted by the New York Times a few months ago."

The transatlantic cables changed communication forever, but the businesses that made use of it, in aggregate, were worth much more than the business of owning the cable.

"Facebook’s news stream will benefit from FriendFeed’s real-time expertise. "

The Norwich-based publisher Archant has announced a 61.1 per cent fall in operating profits for the year up to June 2009, despite a rise in digital revenues.

"Play crosswords with your friends anywhere, anytime."

"The connection is that the activity of LA gangs – the way they form, grow, operate and interact – can be modelled by WoW. The same is true for the actions of insurgents and terrorist cells."

"It seems The Guardian is considering launching a members’ club of some sort as part of moves to increase revenue, an idea that was also mooted by the New York Times a few months ago."

The transatlantic cables changed communication forever, but the businesses that made use of it, in aggregate, were worth much more than the business of owning the cable.

"Facebook’s news stream will benefit from FriendFeed’s real-time expertise. "

The Norwich-based publisher Archant has announced a 61.1 per cent fall in operating profits for the year up to June 2009, despite a rise in digital revenues.

"The portrayal of the news media in the Harry Potter series of books may have a significant impact on children's understanding of journalistic integrity or journalism as a career, according to a study by Baylor University researchers."

"Online journalism that you can charge for has to be either very good or very useful, and just being good probably won’t cut it for long either. There is too much excellent material that is free and will remain so."

"Hackers from Russia may have attacked Google, Twitter and Facebook in an attempt to silence a pro-Georgian blogger, it has emerged "

"Price is determined by the UNIQUE value your product provides TO THE CONSUMER."