What sites, topics and stories are most popular across social networks?

But Guardian Local was always an experiment. It survived GNM’s big restructure of 2010, but there was little commercial model of any heft on which it could stand on its own two feet – no significant foray in to dedicated local ad sales, just a city-specific feed of Guardian.co.uk Soulmates dates and, later, small local adds supplied via the Addiply service. It’s understood these £10-a-week small ads made the sites just £500 per year in total.

A BBC spokesperson confirmed it was sending more than 850 staff to cover the wedding. Around 550 staff will help produce coverage for BBC1, and a further 300 for Radio 2, Radio 4, Radio 5 Live, BBC News 24 and Newsnight.

Even though journalists may not be the first on the scene, they select the most reliable sources, digest loads of information and provide context for events, said Burt Herman, a founder of Storify and a longtime Associated Press reporter.

News.me is a different kind of social news experience that shows you not just what your friends are sharing, but what they are reading as well.

The Amazon Web Services status dashboard is reporting an ongoing failure of its EC2 service on its servers based in Northern Virgina. Foursquare, Quora, and Reddit are reported to have been affected. I’ve got a call in to Amazon asking what happened and will update this post as more information becomes available.

Like XML, JSON provides structured data about information. But whereas XML uses tags in angled brackets followed by the value – e.g. <name>Paul Bradshaw</name>, JSON separates the tag and the value with a colon, both of which are contained within a curly bracket

Asked to characterize the articles they placed into Foursquare, the editors used phrases such as “feature-y”, “evergreen”, “opinion”, “not hard-core news” and “useful to people over a longer period of time.” They cited successful efforts in using editorial content such as a film festival guide, a commentary on transit users and reviews of hip urban restaurants.

His goal in creating his visualization, Kandangath says, was to present the data in a compelling enough way that people would actually remember it — the stickiness factor that everyone from engineers to academics to journalists is trying to figure out at the same time. Kandangath’s answer? Narrative. “People remember stories,” he notes. They may not recall individual facts; but when you can craft those facts together in a compelling arc, those facts become part of something more than the sum of their parts: a memorable tale. Even when it’s not rendered in text alone. So Kandangath essentially imposed on himself the task of plotting flat information so that it would come to life via…a plot.

Participants had five weeks to build their projects, and we received more than 40 fantastic entries. Many people formed teams; in all, over 75 people contributed to the completed submissions. Our jury of experts will award $5,000 to the winner, as well as $5,000 in additional awards, announced on Tax Day (April 18).

“I’ve gone from paying £230 a year for (The Guardian newspaper) to £4 (for the mobile app),” Coles writes. “I read anything new on my iPhone (app) on the way to and from work. I read most of the news from the next day’s newspaper on The Guardian website on my iPad the evening before.”

If you’re interested in taking better photos with your phone, then have a look through the gallery for some hints, tips, tricks and ideas for shooting success with your camera phone. Let us know your tips in the comments below.

The Web site, called iWatch News, will be updated daily with 10 to 12 original investigative pieces and aggregated content from other sources. The site will include articles that focus on money and politics, government accountability, health care, the environment and national security.

This is the nature of working in networks: our connections are key assets we need to work to build, and the ability to access expertise and advice a key skill. You do not achieve either by learning in isolation, producing in seclusion – the traditional mode of education. As these students go forward to specialise in online audio or video, slideshows, infographics and data, they do so within networks.

You’re not going to create one every week, but a timeline is a useful — and helpful — type of information graphic, and fairly common in journalism.

It is not just about doing journalism in more “technologised” ways.

Rather it is about understanding the shift from publishing to participation, from broadcast to dialogue, from individual to collective intelligence, from sole to collaborative authorship.

VG’s approach has been to figure out how we can help the readers help each other.

Hansen highlighted how last year during the travel disruption caused by the Icelandic volcano, a developer created a quick and dirty site to help people help each other get home.

The whys are interesting but a sideshow, what will be interesting is to see the rate of value dissipation at Olde Engadget. One has to factor in the corporate peanut butter effect of AOL – but fortuntely we can map that to a recent acquisition – TechCrunch – and watch its position over the next 2 years as a reference line.

Journalists with an interest in realtime data should keep an eye on a forthcoming service from DataSift which promises to allow users to access a feed of Twitter tweets filtered along any combination of over 40 qualities.

Now, with the Apple iPhone 4 and several apps, I can produce intricate audio and video reports, broadcast live, take and edit photos, write web content and distribute it through social media from a single device.

TVTak does exactly this. Download the app, point your iPhone at the TV, take a picture and TVTak will present more information, links and a way to Tweet or Facebook what you are watching. It’s literally magic.

A nice little list!

There is something extraordinarily rich in the intersection of computer science and journalism. It feels like there’s a nascent field in the making, tied to the rise of the internet. The last few years have seen calls for a new class of  “programmer journalist” and the birth of a community of hacks and hackers. Meanwhile, several schools are now offering joint degrees. But we’ll need more than competent programmers in newsrooms. What are the key problems of computational journalism? What other fields can we draw upon for ideas and theory? For that matter, what is it?

"I know it’s an oldie, but it’s a goodie, and many of you may not have seen it, so it will be new to you."

The secret to referrals is to ensure that each referral benefits the member.

What would otherwise be a footnote for CMS geeks now brings the mistake into focus. And that brings us to the takeaway: It only takes one click to embarrass yourself and your company. We've seen it before. This isn't the first time and it won't be the last. It's easy to click quickly, especially if you're in a hurry. It's not obsessive-compulsive or paranoid to slow down to double-check; it's part of being responsible.

The point is not blocking sites, but the ease with which it might be done. If distribution van drivers ‘self-regulated’ to stop delivering newspapers whenever anyone complained, publishers and journalists would have a problem. An avenue to appeal doesn’t solve it, because by then the editorial moment will likely have passed – not to mention the extra costs it incurs for content producers.

One such initiative is “Open Story” that pulls together traditional reporting, user-generated content and data. Open Story is a collaborative story-telling interface, such as this one on Japan.

There is a fantastic design lesson for news organisations there. As an industry we are all very excited about our news apps and tablet devices and the wild promise of 4G networks and ubiquitous connections. However, a truly global audience now follows every development in the stories that affect them across a worldwide range of news sources. If you don’t ensure that your news articles can be read quickly and easily on a low-grade “feature phone” device in the streets of every continent, you are doing your journalism a disservice.