contentious.com

"This will sound alarms and seem heretical to all of us who grew up in the old “journalism on one side of a wall, business on the other” world. And yes, media businesses conceived along Graham’s lines will need not only a business plan but a plan for earning and keeping their readers’ trust.

"I’m not too worried about that. It’s the easy problem, one that smart journalists already know how to handle. The business side, that’s the wicked problem. Ideas for solving it ought to make good starting points."

"The reason newspapers and magazines are dying is that what they do is no longer related to how they make money from it. In fact, most journalists probably don't even realize that the definition of journalism they take for granted was not something that sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus, but is rather a direct though somewhat atrophied consequence of a very successful 20th century business model.

Paul Graham's tech incubator Ycombinator is calling for journalism startups. Nail on the head here!

"What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money—as print media once did—instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought? (The good news is, we think the writing will actually end up being better.) "

"TechRadium’s patents concern its emergency notification system IRIS, the Immediate Response Information System, which has dozens of paying clients. The system, TechRadium clams, “simultaneously delivers uniform, reliable and verifiable emergency messages to an unlimited number of contacts within seconds, across all means and devices of communication.”

"Its customers include the military, schools, utilities and local governments. Among them are the U.S. Army, Littleton Police Department, QWest Communications, Lincoln University, San Antonio School District, American Red Cross, United Way and others.

"Twitter breaches the patents, according to TechRadium, because Twitter’s messaging system also is carried across various “means and devices of communication” – including texting, websites, cellphones and RSS feeds."

"ToBeeDo is an online todo list and task management tool that saves your time and helps you get stuff done easier and faster. How? ToBeeDo is simple and intuitive so you spend more time on your job and less time on management routines. Once you setup FreshBooks synchronization for your project, ToBeeDo will automatically push your task and time entries into your FreshBooks account."

Useful iPhone app for Freshbooks users (like me).

"The newspaper business watched the potential gold mine develop. And yesterday, the newspaper business watched EveryBlock join forces with MSNBC.

"That’s probably a great match. Instead of dealing with the glacial pace of newspaper organizations, Holovaty has hooked up with a national news force that’s focused on the web. Perhaps local newspapers will be able to affiliate with EveryBlock, gathering the local data and selling local ads. Or perhaps local NBC affiliate web sites will play that role, representing another lost opportunity for newspapers.

"Newsosaur blogger Alan Mutter wrote that MSNBC “scooped” the newspaper industry, asking, “How did newspapers lose EveryBlock?”

"We lost EveryBlock because we’ve been slow at understanding the importance of data for years.

Mark Glaser, in this podcast, said that in my final Tidbits post I apologized for being "too critical" toward mainstream journos, news orgs, and j-schools. Actually, that's NOT what I apologized for. I specifically said I stood by all the criticism I leveled there. I left a comment clarifying what I did apologize for.

Does Yahoo have a chance to turn Delicious around? Yes. But Delicious could have been a lot more relevant and useful right now, and Joshua knows it. Knowing that has to be heartbreaking.

Remember Boulder's Naked Pumpkin Runners last year? Mandatory sex offender registration can be used by law enforcement for intimidation. It's not black and white. Brian Boyer looks at another angle.