The Berkman Center’s Media Re:Public project assessing the state of the media (old school and citizen/participatory) is now out. (The papers are here.)

The report points to six issues, which I’m paraphrasing rather crudely:

1. Traditional media are scaling back their reporting because they’re going broke.

2. Their webby equivalents are not replacing all their functions.

3. Online news sources are not uniformly reliable, and not everyone knows that.

4. Not everyone is online anyway.

5. Some of the functions not being replaced online are really important, but we don’t yet have good business models for them.

6. We don’t have good data about what’s really going on.

This status report tries to bring some empiricism to the cheerleading (guilt as charged). It also pairs up nicely with a 2005 report about a Berkman conference that brought bloggers and mainstream journalists together for 1.5 days of frank discussions.

[Tags: berkman media citizen_journalism blogging news newspapers participatory_journalism persephone_miel ]

Mamamusings points to Twalala, which shows you your Twitter stream on your iPhone (of which I don’t have), but includes what look to be some useful filters. For example, you can “mute” someone who perhaps is twittering some event excessively (= me). You can use Twalala in your Web browser, too.

[Tags: twitter everything_is_miscellaneous twalala liz_lawley ]

No, Ethan Zuckerman has not come out against same sex marriage. Rather, the Christian Science Monitor has a perfectly wonderful article by Vijaysree Venkatraman about Ethan’s concern that we spend too much time on line reading that which confirms our views and hanging out with people like us. Nice photo of him as well…

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman global_voices serendipity homophily echo_chambers ]

Tweetag automatically creates tags for tweets and shows you the tag cloud for any term you’re looking for. At the moment, it only looks at the past 24 hours’ tags, a limitation the Belgian folks behind this hope to remove if they get a little money coming in.

[Tags: twitter tagging everything_is_miscellaneous tagclouds folksonomy ]

Apture, a free app I’ve been using on this site for many months, enriches links. You select a phrase in your blog and click the magic button, and Apture suggests links to you from multiple sources and in multiple formats. You select the ones you want, and Apture then puts a link in your post that, when clicked, pops up the selected info, and will play even play the selected video or whatever that. For example, here’s an Apture link that will display info about Madonna that I’ve selected.

Now Apture has done a special data collection for Congresspeople. Great idea. In this sample from the Washington Post, Click on the little Congressional dome next to the linked Congressperson’s name to see an example.

[Tags: apture everything_is_miscellaneous congress transparency hyperlinks ]

Seb Chan blogs about the fascinating possibilities opened by the OCLC connecting their WorldCat record of library holdings with their collection of info about authors (WorldCat Identities), and making it available via an API. (Via Hanan Cohen)

[Tags: oclc opac worldcat metadata libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

NYTimes.com has come a looong way.

At first, all the links on the site pointed to more of its own content, except for ads, as if the NYT was the only place ever worth reading. Then the NYT took a big step backwards with the Times Select program, locking its most valuable content behind a pay wall. But the Times saw that, although they were making money, they were losing influence. So, they came up with Times Topics as a place where we could point our links, enabling the NYT to climb up the Google rankings. And they unlocked their oldest archives, which is a great social boon.

And now they’ve started Times Extra: Articles on the NYTimes.com site now are suffixed with links out to other newspapers and blogs that talk about the same topic. So, at the end of an article on, say, Obama’s economic pledge, there may be a link to a Washington Post story, a post at Crooks and Liars, and maybe even a comment section.

Consider how unlikely such a thing would have seemed ten or even give years ago. Well done, NYT

[Tags: nyt new_york_times ny_times times_extra everything_is_miscellaneous media journalism news newspapers ]

NYTimes.com has come a looong way.

At first, all the links on the site pointed to more of its own content, except for ads, as if the NYT was the only place ever worth reading. Then the NYT took a big step backwards with the Times Select program, locking its most valuable content behind a pay wall. But the Times saw that, although they were making money, they were losing influence. So, they came up with Times Topics as a place where we could point our links, enabling the NYT to climb up the Google rankings. And they unlocked their oldest archives, which is a great social boon.

And now they’ve started Times Extra: Articles on the NYTimes.com site now are suffixed with links out to other newspapers and blogs that talk about the same topic. So, at the end of an article on, say, Obama’s economic pledge, there may be a link to a Washington Post story, a post at Crooks and Liars, and maybe even a comment section.

Consider how unlikely such a thing would have seemed ten or even give years ago. Well done, NYT

[Tags: nyt new_york_times ny_times times_extra everything_is_miscellaneous media journalism news newspapers ]

#hohoto is shaping up to be a good-works good-time for all. It’s using the digital media we love so well to organize (in a bottom up way with scare quotes around it) a real world charitable event and party that will also push back out into the digital world. All the money goes to the Food Bank.

You have to love the way in which Twitter, which seems like the most evanescent means of communication since the polite nod, is enabling our deepest need to connect. From Twitter to community to social responsibility. +1 all around.

[Tags: twitter digital_culture toronto hohoto food_bank ]

I’m very proud that a photo that I snapped with my cellphone on a London sidewalk (and that I posted in this blog) is the fourth hit you get when you do a Google image search for “comb over”.

Now TinEye lets me feed in the photo’s URL and see the other places where it’s been used. You can even give upload the photo itself. TinEye spiders the Web, creating a hash for the images it finds, and then compares the search “term” to the hash. Of course this can be used to track down Violators, but it could also be useful to get more information about an image. The site’s “cool searches” page has some examples of searches that are, well, somewhat cool and that give a sense of the search engine’s tolerance for variations. (Thanks to Michael O’Conner Clarke for the link.)

[Tags: search images combovers ]