contentious.com

AppLoop is a great little tool that is currently in beta that will take any RSS feed and turn it into an iPhone Application.

Great resource from NYTimes.com. All the data that's fit to mashup.

"When we first started talking about creating and releasing APIs for databases collected by The Times, campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission was a natural choice. The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign."

"At what point does metadata cross the line from useful to pollution? When it's not standardized. The kind of XML tagging we're primarily talking about can be sectioned into three buckets: rights data ('this picture is good for print products but not electronic ones,' 'we can use this graphic anywhere,' 'these animations are exclusively for the workbook'), formatting data ('this is a chapter,' 'this is a footnote'), and context data ('Paris,' '1955,' 'General Robert E. Lee,' 'noodles'). This is a perfect recipe for complete chaos."

"Political sites are usually very biased, but the casual reader often doesn’t know which way a particular site tends to rant. With the new script, also available as a Firefox plugin, sites are shaded towards blue (whiny cowards) or red (warmongers) depending on their linking behavior."

Service: "Media Get PR Pitches Via RSS, Not Email or Voicemail with new PitchFeed"

Good primer from Paul Bradshaw

The idea being posited is to make a parallel, open source "twittersphere" that supports the Twitter API. Let's call it Twitshadow.

Twitshadow is built to be a shadow of Twitter that all third party apps can use. The shadow could even be the way to talk to Twitter, by implementing what would essentially be something like a write-through cache. Third-party apps write to Twitshadow, and Twitshadow writes to Twitter.

Or it could just be a second call that all third-party apps make along with writting directly to Twitter. When Twitter goes down, this open source, non-centralized Twitshadow keeps on chugging. And the more time that passes, the less important Twitter actually becomes, because most of your data is in Twitshadow. Twitshadow could even support sucking in tweets from Twitter, so it could be a full replacement of Twitter, history and all.

This whole conversation is fascinating to me.

Digital Media entrepreneur Elizabeth Osder told a group of USC Annenberg j-students this week: "Start with the impact you want to have. Figure out how what audience you need to assemble to have that impact. And what kind of content is needed to do that. Then price it out: How much money do you need to do it?"

"If I wanted to do that, I'd have gone to Marshall (USC's business school)," a student groaned in reply.

Understandable, said Osder, but having to do this kind of thinking brings a needed discipline. "It forces you to be relevant and useful versus arrogant and entitled."

Hmmmm. This nostalgia we're feeling: Is it for The Wall, which guaranteed the purity of our journalism — or for the folks on the other side of it, who had to worry about whether it was read and paid for?

"There’s an ink-stained elephant in the room that needs to be faced if Thompson’s feeling that “we’re on the verge of an epochal advancement in journalism” is to come true. I’m talking, of course, about the Associated Press."