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.

As the battle for Silicon Valley engineering talent intensifies, it seems as if hot tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter have launched some sort of ridiculous competition as to who could can score the biggest Hollywood talent for an onsite appearance, in order to wow current and future employees

More than a week later, three News Foo themes continue to resonate with me: the future of long-form journalism, the challenge of delivering context online, and the need to rebuild trust. I take a look each theme in the sections that follow.

In that spirit, “saving newspapers” is confusing means with ends. Our problem isn’t saving newspapers. It’s protecting the social mission that journalists have taken on, and saving (or creating) jobs for the people, including journalists, who work in newspaper companies. The papers, as they exist now, are a distraction!

And that’s what it is: a theology. One need only read many of the bloggers and commentators in the wake of the announcement to see that what The Times is being accused of is not greed, but heresy.

News homepage on LinkedIn

Get data and images from any web page – 14 day free trial

In a nutshell, alkasir is a program that works together with its website (https://alkasir.com) and proxy servers to allow users to circumvent (bypass) censorship of URLs. It is predominantly used by persons in countries where there is censorship of political content such as news, opinion articles, blog entries, forum discussions, political videos, etc.

Its initial pricing — and it’s worth noting that all of this is initial; the FT, for example, has been tweaking pricing and access rules for nine years — is $15 per four weeks (now that’s a newspaper model, eschewing what most humans call “months,” to revenue advantage) month for a desktop/laptop + smartphone bundle, or $20 per four weeks for desktop + laptop + tablet or, finally, $35 per four weeks for “all digital access.” Print subscribers of any kind get digital access newly included at no extra cost.

In many ways it is no different to traditional subscriptions: it is the difference between paying for regular deliveries of the whole paper package, and picking up a newspaper that someone has left on the bus or the staff canteen, or borrowing one from a friend, for free.

A basic step-by-step process on how to use Twitter hash tags for beginners would be great. Please include any resources or tools that would be helpful.

Typogami is an animated typeface created in Adobe After Effects. The characters are inspired by origami and kirigami, Japanese artforms of folding paper.

Turn your Phones into Wireless Controllers

manda’s talk was great, however, and I highly recommend it to anyone thinking of using R as an exploratory tool for professional data visualization.

Those who say they will refuse to pay to read The Times and will opt for a free alternative instead shouldn't kid themselves that they are upholding a principle, sticking it to the man or benefiting a cause other than themselves. What they are really doing is saying this: news, comment, good writing, proper reporting, photo-journalism, and journalism as a whole, is worthless.

The Daily Mail does not have to identify the people behind two anonymously posted comments on its website because to do so would breach their rights to privacy, the high court has said.

It appears more than 50% of the fund has just been awarded to the International Press Institute, based in Vienna, which will be used to sponsor the IPI News Innovation Contest.

According to a Google blog post on the matter, Google wants to be part of the contest, which seeks to “find and fund breakthrough ideas that will have a lasting impact on the future of digital news in communities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa”.

The Commission considers that it can be acceptable in some circumstances for the press to publish information taken from such websites, even if the material was originally intended for a small group of acquaintances rather than a mass audience. This is normally, however, when the individual concerned has come to public attention as a result of their own actions, or are otherwise relevant to an incident currently in the news when they may expect to be the subject of some media scrutiny. Additionally, if the images used are freely available (rather than hidden behind strict privacy settings), innocuous and used simply to illustrate what someone looks like it is less likely that publication will amount to a privacy intrusion. Circumventing privacy settings to obtain information will require a public interest justification.

The Commission has recently made clear that it can be acceptable in some circumstances for the press to publish information taken from social networking websites, even when the material is originally intended for a small group of acquaintances and not publicly accessible. However, this will generally be only in cases where the public interest overrides the individual's right to privacy.

In response to Saatchi & Saatchi’s setting of the brief “get as many followers on twitter as you can” for their 2011 Scholarship, I pretended I worked for them, set up @Saatchi_grads and with a little design and carefully chosen words people began to assume I’m the official twitter feed.

I think it’s important to reiterate why I’m doing this experiment. There are a number of reasons, primarily:

1) I thought it would be funny to see how long Saatchi & Saatchi would let me go on pretending I’m them, and how far I could take it – a TV interview would be the pinnacle of success of the project.

TMG is talking to several digital agencies with a brief to overhaul Telegraph.co.uk, which features editorial content from The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.