After 9/11 animator and designer Antonio Bolfo felt the call of duty and became a New York cop. Now, armed with a camera as well as his gun, and an interest in photography, Officer Bolfo documents life in the South Bronx.

A Super Bowl advertisement from Honda does a riff on the 1986 movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off,'' complete with Matthew Broderick feigning illness. Is that copyright infringement? Honda apparently didn't take the chance.

If it’s so much better to give than receive, why are some Facebook users sitting on their hands?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a new report today that suggests Facebook users are not a uniformly active bunch. According to the study, the typical Facebook user gets more friend requests than she sends, is tagged in photos more than she tags, and has posts Liked more often than she Likes herself.

But wait — shouldn’t it all even out? After all, every friend request has a requester and a requestee. If a typical user is skews passive on Facebook, where’s all the action coming from?

The answer: a collection of “power users” who, according to the report, are becoming specialists of a sort. You know that friend who only posts tons of photos, or the one who goes on a Liking spree, or the one who seems to rack up an inordinate amount of friends? Yup, they’re doing the work for the rest of us. Even on a flat platform, behavior still moves toward a division of labor:

A proportion of Facebook participants — ranging between 20% and 30% of users depending on the type of activity — were power users who performed these same activities at a much higher rate; daily or more than weekly.

Essentially, in the funny parlance you could only get in a report about Facebook: “People are liked more than they like.” Some data:

Facebook users in our sample on average contributed about four comments for every status update that they made. On average, users make nine status updates per month and contribute 21 comments. Some 33% of Facebook users here updated their status at least once per week. Still, half of our sample made no status updates in the month of our analysis.

Discussion of social media circles around the word “engagement” — but even for many users of social networks, the experience is more about taking-it-all-in than about response and conversation. For a news industry with a long history of one-way communication, that might be a little…comforting? Facebook’s value, at least to media and other companies looking to tap into audiences, is that it’s a super-broad platform built for content and transactional activity. A link is posted; it’s rewarded with a like. A question is asked; it elicits comments. The Pew survey paints a picture where that action is less than reliable:

A third of our sample (33%) used the like button at least once per week during this month, and 37% had content they contributed liked by a friend at least once per week. However, the majority of Facebook users neither liked content, nor was their content liked by others, in our month of observation.

If Facebook activity disproportionately relies on a subset of power users with busy hands, that’s an opening for news outlets or individual journalists to fill that need. The conversation is far more distributed than it was pre-Internet, but it’s still not evenly distributed.

Pew says that Facebook comment-leaving is a bit more reciprocal than some other kinds of Facebook behavior:

More than half our sample (55%) commented on a friend’s content at least once in the month, and 51% received comments from a friend. A large segment of users, a little over 20%, contributed or received a comment every day. The average of 21 comments given on friends’ content was nearly identical to the average of 20 that were received. Again, there are some extreme users as well, about 5% of our sample contributed and received over 100 comments in the month of our observation.

Pew’s data is based on a sample of 269 Facebook users, initially identified through a random phone survey, but who then allowed Pew to track their trails on the site. While its findings may give a (slight) challenge to the idea that Facebook is a heavily engaged network where everyone’s sharing all the time, the report still found big, enticing numbers for any publishing looking to reach a big audience: The median user in their sample is within two degrees of separation (friends of friends) of 31,170 people on Facebook. (For one uber-connected user, that number was 7,821,772.) We already know Facebook is growing as a top referrer to many news sites, so what’s clear from this report is that they need to keep it up. If power users are the straw that stirs the drink on Facebook, then it’s more important than ever journalists and media companies play an active role.

Meh button by Ken Murphy used under a Creative Commons license.

Follow us as we find out what the Guardian developers have built in their two-day hack day

3.52pm: Also at the event was Nicola Hughes, who has joined us as part of the Knight-Mozilla news fellowship programme. She tells me her hack will be finished over the weekend, and wrote this blurb for it:

How Far Have We Come - measuring the sporting achievement of the human race

What would happen if you lined up all the track and field world record holders and got them to perform their sporting achievement back to back from your front door? How far would they go and how long would it take them?

We can all read world records and go oooh, but do we really comprehend the speed, the distance and how useless we are in comparison? For that we need spacetime relativity! In fact, we just need a hack.

I have repurposed code that makes videos of routes from Google Street View images. Instead of creating a video it builds a website where you can scroll through the images. I call it the Street View Flipbook. Code can be found here.

The idea is to build finer grained flipbooks from iconic locations and make the athletes relay (heading towards the Olympic site) where every time the Olympic torch is passed on you get information on that particular record, the locations they traveled from and in what time. There should be a a map of them going along the route and a time clock that expands where hovered over. And that can all be done by linking the JQuery events to the scroll position. Like on this page.

The ultimate hack would be to embed it in a site as an iframe and build the scroll bar to look like a video player where the play button is set to scroll through the events.

3.49pm: I've actually rushed back across London, where I've been at news:rewired, a conference about journalism and technology. There were quite a few Guardian staff talking, including Alastair Dant talking about puzzles and games, Simon Rogers teaching people about data journalism tools, and John Domokos talking about video. I was talking about the Guardian Facebook app.

3.45pm: Why have hack days? Well, firstly they are fun. But secondly, they provide the opportunity to prototype new ideas. Next week we'll have a Star Chamber meeting to assess the viability of the ideas. The best ones will get assigned to a Product Manager, and may end up in production.

3.44pm: The format of the presentations is as follows. Each developer or team of developers gets just ninety seconds to explain and demo what they've spent the last two days working on. So far it looks like 25 hacks have been registered. If the URLs are available on the wider web, not just internally, we'll be sharing the links on here.

3.41pm: Welcome back to the Guardian's hack day live blog. If you were around yesterday, you'll know that our software developers have had two days off their normal work. Instead they've been hacking and working on prototypes of what the future of the Guardian's webs site and digital services might look like.

Hello, world!

The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung.

1. Netflix and WaPo bought a combined $8M in Facebook ads last year, IPO says (All Facebook)



2. Analysis: A sobering look at Facebook (Reuters)



3. How the Huffington Post became a new-media behemoth (GigaOM)



4. News Corp. names Bloomberg exec as Dow Jones CEO (The Wrap Media)



5. Tumblr has hired its first executive editor (Reuters)



6. New York Times to expand health blog (paidContent)



7. Google can't weigh in on 'used' digital music case (Online Media Daily)



8. Google convicted in France for offering free maps (paidContent)

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Twitter spells out its censorship policy: Just a couple of weeks after the SOPA/PIPA fight came to a head, Twitter pushed the discussion about online censorship a bit further when it announced late last week a new policy for censoring tweets: When Twitter gets requests from governments to block tweets containing what they deem illegal speech, its new policy will allow it to block those tweets only to readers within that country, leaving it visible to the rest of the world. Twitter will send notice that it’s blocked a tweet to the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects.

As the Guardian and The New York Times noted, much of the initial response among Twitter users consisted of complaints about censorship and the chilling of free speech in countries with oppressive regimes. The policy had critics elsewhere, too: BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin said “it’s hard to see this as anything but a huge setback and disappointment,” and the international group Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter to Twitter questioning the policy and urging the company to reconsider. And later, BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza pointed out that even though Twitter implied that it had already been blocking tweets at the request of governments (which would have made the new policy a reduction in censorship), it’s never actually done so — only in response to legal challenges on copyright issues.

But perhaps surprisingly, Twitter had far more defenders than critics among media observers. Alex Howard of GovFresh put together the most comprehensive roundup of opinions on the subject, praising Twitter himself for “sticking up for users where it can.” Two free-speech advocates, Mike Masnick of TechDirt and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York, made similar arguments: When a government is demanding censorship, Twitter can either refuse and be blocked entirely in that country, or it can comply. Twitter, they said, has chosen the latter in as limited and transparent fashion as possible.

Others, like The Next Web’s Nancy Messieh, commended Twitter for shifting the censorship focus to the government — as Reuters’ Paul Smalera argued, the gray box noting that a tweet has been censored in a certain country is a black mark for that government, not Twitter. The broadest argument in Twitter’s defense came from sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who, in addition to these arguments, also praised Twitter for its transparency and for allowing users an easy way to circumvent censorship.

Still others weren’t firmly on either side regarding the policy itself, but pointed to larger issues surrounding it. Media prof C.W. Anderson said that while Twitter did the best it could under the circumstances but showed it doesn’t have any values that override its place as a business: “non-market values are, in the long run, incompatible with the logic of the market, and what Twitter is trying to do now is reconcile what it believes with what the market needs it to do.” Tech pioneer Dave Winer called for people to learn to be able to organize themselves outside of Twitter’s infrastructure and the possibly of censorship.

In a pair of thoughtful posts, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram advised caution in trusting Twitter, recognizing that like Google and Facebook, it’s a business whose interests might not align with our own. The EFF’s York and Eva Galperin encouraged users and observers to keep a close eye on Twitter in order to keep them accountable for adhering to their professed beliefs.

Facebook goes public: Facebook’s much-anticipated filing for a public stock offering came on Wednesday, and The New York Times and Danny Sullivan at Marketing Land have the best quick-hit summaries of the S-1 document. The big numbers are mind-bogglingly big: 845 million monthly active users, $5 billion in stock, $3.71 billion in revenue last year, $1 billion in profit. Of that revenue, 85% came from advertising, and 12% came from the social gaming giant Zynga alone. (All Things D has the background on that relationship.) And when you average it out, Facebook’s only getting $4.39 in revenue per active user.

Aside from the numbers, among the other items of interest from the filings was its risk assessment — as summarized by Mashable, it sees slowing expected growth, difficulty in making money off of mobile access, competition from the likes of Google and Twitter, and global government censorship as some of its main risk factors. There’s also Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders, annotated with delightful snark by Wired’s Tim Carmody, which includes the explanation of a company code Zuckerberg calls “The Hacker Way.” Forbes’ Andy Greenberg made one of the first of what’s sure to be many comparisons between The Hacker Way and Google’s “Don’t Be Evil.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram took note of the grandiosity of Zuckerberg’s stated mission to rewire the world.

Two main questions emerged in commentary on the filing: How much is Facebook really worth? And what happens to Facebook now? To the first question, as The New York Times pointed out on the eve of Facebook’s filing, the company’s massive net worth is a stark indicator of the booming value of personal data collected online. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum took the opposite tack, wondering why Facebook gets so little money out of each of its hundreds of millions of users before concluding that “Facebook is still a young business figuring out how to sell ads and figuring it how aggressive it can get without ticking off users.”

To the second question, Mathew Ingram noted that going public is usually a way for tech companies to get the financing they need to build up for some major growth — something Facebook has already done. So, he asked, is this just an attempt for Facebook’s employees and backers to cash out, and the end of the company’s most productive growth phase? Leaning on tech entrepreneurship leader John Battelle, Wired’s Tim Carmody and Mike Isaac reasoned that Facebook is mature enough already that in order to attain the growth it’s promising, it needs to be in the midst of some massive changes as a company. A couple of guesses at some of those specific changes: More ads and purchases of tech companies (Fast Company) and a big ramp-up in mobile ads (Marketing Land).

Murdoch’s candor amid scandal: The phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has continued to spread (rather quietly here in the States, but much more prominently in the U.K.), and it may have turned yet another corner with the arrest last weekend of four journalists from News Corp.’s Sun, significantly deepening the scandal beyond the now-defunct News of the World, where it began.

News Corp. has also turned over an enormous new trove of data which, along with the arrests, could begin to seriously threaten News Corp.’s other British newspapers, including the Times, according to the Guardian’s Nick Davies. British j-prof Roy Greenslade reported that many Sun staffers are worried that they may not be part of News Corp. much longer.

In the midst of all this, Murdoch’s feisty Twitter account continues unfettered, prompting praise from The New York Times’ David Carr for his refreshing candor. Mathew Ingram agreed that this “sources go direct” approach should be viewed as a boon, not a challenge, to serious journalism. The AP’s Jonathan Stray had perhaps the best summation of the relationship between sources using their own platforms and journalism: “When they want you to know, sources will go direct. When they don’t… that’s journalism.”

Reading roundup: It was a relatively quiet week outside of the big Twitter and Facebook stories, but there were still some cool nuggets to be found:

— Facebook’s relatively new Twitter-like Subscribe feature continues to draw complaints of rampant spam. Those criticisms have been led by Jim Romenesko, but this week the New York Daily News and Slate’s Katherine Goldstein chimed in, voicing concerns in particular about inappropriate comments directed toward women. Meanwhile, Mashable’s Todd Wasserman said Subscribe is ruining the News Feed.

— Big news in the journalism-academy world: Columbia and Stanford are teaming up to create a new Institute for Media Innovation, thanks to a $30 million gift from longtime Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown.

— Jay Rosen posted an inspiring interview with the Chicago Tribune’s Tracy Samantha Schmidt, gleaning some useful insights on how to nurture an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit within a large organization, rather than a startup.

— Megan Garber of The Atlantic presented the results of a Hot or Not-style study that determined what type of Twitter content people like. Here’s what they don’t like: Old news, Twitter jargon, personal details, negativity, and lack of context.

Rupert Murdoch photo by David Shankbone and original Twitter bird by Matt Hamm used under a Creative Commons license.

Are we reaching the tipping point at which the downloading of games begins to dominate the industry? And will it be more about old games than new ones? Some interesting events this week suggest we're close

During a conference call to investors and analysts on Wednesday, Electronic Arts revealed some rather impressive – and telling – figures. Apparently, the company's revenue from digital games exceeded $1bn in 2011.

Its controversial download service Origin generated $100m through the year, its social and casual games performed well, and its online multiplayer release – Star Wars: the Old Republic – managed to attracted 1.7 million paid subscribers barely a month after its launch.

Of course, the publisher's boxed big-hitters – Fifa 12 and Battlefield 3 – did good business too, selling 10m units each, but the thrust of the company's attempts to claw back into profit are coming from the digital sector.

Meanwhile, fellow publishing veteran THQ is reported to be in dire straights, cutting staff and facing a Nasdaq delisting.

Although the company was one of the first publishers to recognise the rise of mobile gaming with its THQ Wireless arm, it has not succeeded in transferring major brands such as Saints Row and Darksiders to mobile and social platforms. In fact, it sold its Wireless division in February 2011, while a lacklustre Facebook version of Saints Row did little to take on the likes of Mafia Wars at its own game.

THQ's problems no doubt run deeper than failing to exploit the rise of digital downloading, but it seems as though the future of traditional publishers is going to rest on how well they're able to explore the online, mobile and downloadable possibilities of their brands.

Physical media, though beloved of hardcore gamers, is generally suffering. The high street chain Game is facing its own major difficulties – financing problems have led to rumours that its stores would be unable to stock the week's new releases; though the company has since confirmed that the likes of Metal Gear Solid HD and Final Fantasy XIII-2 will be on sale this weekend, and that it has secured new deals with lenders.

Meawhile, digital newcomers are flourishing. Freemium publisher BigPoint announced on Tuesday that it now has 250 million users of its free-to-play online games; on the same day, web gaming company Spil Games, revealed that it now boasted 170 million unique users, with many of its customers spending up to £38 a month on virtual goods. A recent report by Juniper Research claimed that in-game purchasers would be spending $4.8 billion by 2016.

"My basic argument for digital generally is that, first, it allows the publisher to reach a massive audience at no marginal cost, by going free," says games industry analyst Nicholas Lovell.

"Secondly, it allows you to let the people who love what you do to spend lots of money – for example, the Bigpoint users spending €1,000 on a drone.".

Unsurprisingly then, smaller developers are increasingly adopting digital-only agendas. On Monday, the UK game developer trade body, Tiga, released a report showing the impact of digital downloads on British studios.

Apparently, 102 British games companies are currently developing browser and download-based casual online PC games. These studios released more than 600 titles in 2011 and employed nearly 700 development staff, contributing £70m to the UK's GDP.

"We are fast approaching the tipping point," says Tiga managing director Dr Richard Wilson. "UK retail sales figures for video games have been in decline for several years now, but all the indications are that digital consumption of games is increasing.

"Tiga research from 2011 shows that 50% of UK developers regard retail as the largest monetisation mechanic for their games. However, 47% say their games are also sold via online stores such as XBLA and the Apple App Store. 13% generate money from subscriptions, 26% via micro transactions and 29% use free-to-play mechanics.

"Additionally, almost half of UK developers are now self-publishing online or on mobile. The shift towards digital distribution is enabling developers to become self-publishers and reduce their dependency on publishers. It should also allow more innovation and choice for consumers."

But more telling than new titles and fresh ideas are the possibilities for older brands in the digital space.

Earlier this week, the veteran MMORPG Everquest became a free-to-play title after 15 years as a subscription service. Long past its incredible peak as a massively multiplayer phenomenon, profit can still be made via a freemium model that will make the game more attractive to casual users.

Meanwhile, publishers such as Ubisoft, Konami and Capcom are busy filling the online stores of the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii consoles with spruced up versions of classic titles, as well as fresh additions to nostalgic lines such as Rayman.

While the ability to sell DLC and create free-to-play titles is enticing, it might be that the real driver into a digital-first business is the ability to exploit that old internet chestnut, the long tail.

In packaged-goods retail, games have a very short shelf life and need to make all their money in the space of a couple of weeks. After that, titles get shoved into the back catalogue. Years ago, there was another opportunity to make money here via special cheaper editions of old games – the PlayStation Platinum range, for example.

However, that market has been all but destroyed for publishers by the rise of the pre-owned sector. Go into any branch of HMV or Game and you'll usually only see a chart display of new titles, and then a huge area dedicated to second-hand titles.

That's because retailers make 100% of the revenue from these second purchases – there's little benefit for them in providing shelf space to first-hand copies of older titles.

In the digital space, though, publishers can keep flogging old titles indefinitely. When the title is out of the charts, it can be kept alive with DLC; after this, there are price reductions on digitally distributed versions of the original games. And then, on titles like Everquest and Lord of the Rings Online, there's the option to convert to a freemium model.

For new titles, the digital arena is more complex. As Lovell points out: "Chris Anderson's original definition of the long tail is that in a world of infinite space, everyone can get on the shelf. But the App Store shows that just being on the shelf is no guarantee of sales.

"The App Store has hundreds of thousands of apps, and the long tail players are not making much money." Indeed, research released last autumn by developer Owen Goss showed that 50% of game apps on the App Store make less than $3,000 (£1,900).

And over in the social and casual gaming spaces, it's not old brands that are being regurgitated, it's old ideas. Zynga's release of Dream Heights on iOS has prompted a furious response from bloggers who feel it is effectively a rip off of NimbleBit's hugely successful iphone game Tiny Tower, merely adding a social layer.

The cloning of games has become a huge issue in the sector, but with little in the way of legal recourse, it is running amok.

And really, the digital gaming princples behind continually re-inventing old brands for new business models and continually "borrowing" other studios' successful ideas are the same.

It's all about mining proven concepts for all they're worth in a marketplace that allows swift development, easy distribution and lightening fast iteration based on rapid customer feedback.

Those who imagine that the tipping point from physical media to digital distribution will herald a new era of fresh innovative gaming experiences could well be hugely mistaken.

We may be about to enter a new epoch in which the digital sector transmogrifies into one giant thirft store – your favourite game ideas served back to you in different forms on different platforms by different publishers, forever.

Also, federal authorities seize 16 sites that were allegedly streaming live sporting events and how Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook in his own image.

Detective in charge of phone-hacking investigation to give evidence, while Times and Sun editors will return

The Metropolitan police commissioner in charge of three major investigations into alleged illegal activity by newspapers will give evidence to the Leveson inquiry next week along with Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre.

Also scheduled to appear next week is Ian Edmondson, the former News of the World newsdesk executive, one of the first of 28 people arrested and bailed by police in April 2011 by Operation Weeting, the Scotland Yard investigation into alleged phone hacking at the News of the World.

Edmondson is one of the witnesses confirmed on Friday for the final week of the inquiry's first module, before it takes a two-week break.

Returning next week for their second witness appearances are the editors of the Times and the Sun, James Harding and Dominic Mohan; also expected to appear are the former head of the PCC, Baroness Buscombe, the owner of one of the country's leading picture agencies, and the British boss of one of the biggest photo agencies in Los Angeles.

Sue Akers, a detective assistant commissioner at the Met, is expected to give Lord Justice Leveson an update on Operation Weeting. The Met launched the investigation into phone hacking last January in response to criticism that the police had failed to take the original allegations about widespread wrongdoing at the News of the World seriously.

Akers is also likely to update the inquiry on Operation Elveden, the Scotland Yard investigation into illegal payments by the press to police, and Operating Tuleta, into computer hacking by or on behalf of newspapers.

Last weekend more than 50 officers working for Operation Elveden arrested four current and former Sun journalists and took evidence away from the paper's Wapping office.

Dacre, widely seen as one of the most successful and powerful editors of his generation, who also plays a key role at the Press Complaints Commission, will appear before the inquiry on Monday.

He is unlikely to pull his punches and is expected to offer another powerful defence of tabloid journalism and Associated Newspapers' national titles, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday.

At a Leveson inquiry seminar last autumn, Dacre said he "unequivocally condemned phone hacking and payments to police" but criticised the government for responding to the scandal at the NoW by setting up "a judicial inquiry with more powers" than the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.

He also criticised the panel who are advising Leveson, describing them as "a panel of experts who, while honourable and distinguished people, don't have the faintest clue how mass-selling newspapers operate".

He is expected to be asked to address criticism by public figures, celebrities and the families of victims of crime who have told Leveson to tell of alleged harassment by Mail reporters and photographers.

On Thursday Baroness Hollins, mother of stab attack victim Abigail Witchalls, cited the Daily Mail as the "worst culprit" in relation to press intrusion, while Hugh Grant launched a savage attack on the Associated titles in relation to their reports on his relationships and the birth of his baby. Grant's former girlfriend Jemima Khan will submit written evidence on Monday.

On Monday the other witnesses include the News of the World's former showbusiness editor, Dan Wootton, and Nick Owens, a reporter for the Sunday Mirror.

The following day the inquiry will hear from Harding, who is expected to be asked, briefly, about alleged computer hacking by a former reporter on the paper. Mohan will appear the same day, as will Gary Morgan the founder of the Splash picture agency in Los Angeles, and executives from Twitter, Yahoo and Bing.

Also appearing on Tuesday is Baroness Buscombe, the former chair of the PCC, who dismissed allegations that phone hacking was rife at the News of the World in a report it published in 2009. She has since said she was "misled by News International".

On Wednesday the inquiry will hear from the Huffington Post, the Media Standards Trust and Paul Staines, who is better known as political blogger Guido Fawkes.

PR Max Clifford is also appearing on Thursday, as is Darryn Lyons from London photo agency Big Pictures.

The inquiry will also hear on Thursday from the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer.

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Yale Daily News
Diana Li and Christopher Peak compare the New Haven Register, the corporate-owned newspaper reinventing itself as “digital first,” and the New Haven Independent, the upstart nonprofit news site. Editors at the newspaper describe how they’re opening up the… Read more

Big Faces

Just put up another quick side project: Big Faces, which aggregates the excellent Big Picture Blog (by the Boston Globe and its many contributors) and just shows the faces. I used the Face.com API to crop the faces before uploading them.

The process is simliar to the Congressmiles demo I did last week.

On the front end, this uses the excellent isotope JQuery plugin. It also has Backbone.js though I vastly simplified the project so much that I pretty much ditched using any of Backbone’s useful features. The Backbone boilerplate was extremely helpful, though, in organizing the project.

I’m doing my News Rewired blogging a bit out of order because I’m also doing moderator duty.

Liz Heron, the social media editor for the New York Times, kicked off News Rewired.

She succinctly summed up the goal of the New York Times with social media as:

Engaging users without wavering from our high journalistic standards.

She started by talking about how social media had moved into the mainstream in newsrooms. In 2010, she and her team were focused on evangelising, but in 2011, her team was in demand due to events such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Some 400 New York Times journalists are on Twitter, and she said that 50 journalists had enabled the subscribe feature in Facebook. She said that a Times’ reporter reached out to Facebook users for a story about students and depression. The reporter interviewed dozens of people on Facebook and had a sidebar focusing just on the comments on Facebook.

She gave another example of using social media to enhance New York Times’ journalism. On the recent story that they did looking at labour conditions at Apple contract manufacturer Foxconn in China, they translated the story into Mandarin and released this on Chinese social media, gathering comments there that then supplemented the main story.

As social media has moved to the mainstream of journalism she said it was becoming more of a challenge to become distinctive. Adam Tinworth, who has an excellent live blog of the session, had this great insight from Liz:

The question is no longer “wether to engage” on social media, but how to distinguish themselves from  others doing it. And how do they scale as new platforms emerge?

In focusing on being distinctive, she said that they had to pick and choose from new platforms. She said that Google+ originally “flummoxed” them. She said Google+ had a “very exciting but very uncertain future”. However, they have found that Google+ has some deep discussions and a “potentially revolutionary feature” with Hangouts.

The Times is also evaluating Tumblr and Quora.

Her three tips for news organisation social media success:

• Be strategic.
• Be different.
• Strive for meaningful interactions. “Don’t be content to skate on social media’s surface.”

The first question came from Darren Waters of MSN who asked how to measure success.

A lot of people will focus on traffic, but they were looking more at engagement metrics. She also said the Times asked:

Did we get something out of journalistic value? Were we there first with the story? Did we start an excellent conversation? Did we get our content out there in the global conversation?

This week on CounterSpin: U.S. media are abuzz with stories about the growing threat Iran poses to the U.S. The stories seem to embellish recent remarks by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who says Iran is a larger threat than al Qaeda and is prepared to carry out attacks in the Western Hemisphere, including in the US. We'll be joined by Vijay Prashad, Director of International Studies at Trinity College to talk about Iran.

It is a far cry from the usual James Bond scenes of car chases and beautiful women. But MI6, has taken out a series of low-key newspaper ads designed to filter out wannabe Bonds with a low attention span. "Waiting is passive. Boring. A waste of time. But wait. Is that always the case?" asked yesterday's ad in the Evening Standard, which featured heavy paragraphs of text and a shadowy man sat in a hotel bedroom. "By reading between the lines, you've probably guessed what we're after." Oooh! Where can we sign up?!

From Rooney Mara's hair to the art deco set, Mario Testino's shot of '1920s pure beauty' presents the dream factory in full effect

Rooney Mara, star of the US version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, poses in this year's cover photograph for the annual Hollywood special of the magazine Vanity Fair with raven black hair sculpted to evoke the legendary silent- era film beauty Louise Brooks. Her 1920s look gives the ethereally nostalgic keynote to a clever formal gathering of 11 young women across a fold-out cover, shimmering in a bright white space especially built for the photographic shoot in imitation – explains an article within – of works by the art deco interior designer Syrie Maugham.

From Mara's hair to the statuesque pose of Adepero Oduye, star of the film Pariah, to the pink fur worn by British actress Lily Collins, the picture is a panorama of wittily contrived nostalgia for Hollywood in the 1920s. It was taken by Mario Testino, best known for his portraits of Princess Diana, and it is not hard to see the connection with current Hollywood: the two most nominated films for this year's Oscars, Hugo and The Artist, both linger in the early days of cinema. The Artist is famous for being silent and in black and white. But Martin Scorsese's Hugo is also set in the 1920s, and includes extensive clips from early films such as Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon and Harold Lloyd's funny and terrifying stunt in the 1923 film Safety Last! when he dangles from a clock high above a city street.

Testino claims his recreation of what he calls "a 1920s pure beauty" has a political as well as cinematic agenda. "With everything happening in the world, dreaming of beauty felt right," he told Vanity Fair. Let's escape today's deficits and debts and fears of decline in fantasies of golden age glamour.

If you compare this cover with previous Vanity Fair Hollywood issues – and you can do so because the magazine offers, inside, a history of what it modestly calls its "artful, innovative, prescient" Hollywood covers – it really is very different and thought-provoking. Realism and personality have previously been the dominant themes, with the images often deliberately dressing the A-list participants in "normal" high street clothes. Or, if glamorous, the glamour was bold and brash. Here instead is a photograph that seems utterly unreal, and is contrived to suggest some 1920s producer's mansion, where the latest stars are gathered for their screen tests.

It's all nonsense, of course. The cinema of nine decades ago has little to do with the mainstream of cinema today. In Hollywood itself, vast copies of the fabled white elephants of Babylon from DW Griffith's film Intolerance now decorate a shopping mall. Like the Vanity Fair cover, these decorations don't really capture the history of Hollywood, partly because they efface its dark side. The drugs, depravity and scandal so lovingly chronicled in Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon are as much part of the 1920s golden age as is the "pure beauty" Testino longs for. Anger begins his history with those fantastic elephants, built at great expense for Griffith and later left to rot.

And yet … this photograph hits a vein deeper than mere nostalgia. The dream factory is America's secret weapon. The desire, this Oscar season, to celebrate cinema history is actually a subtle way to remind the world who is boss. Hollywood, the mythological expression of America, has been shaping our minds, crafting our desires, fantasies, longings and ambitions, since before any of us were born. The Hollywood of the 1920s is not dead, because the basic elements of modern entertainment it created – sex, action, spectacle – still work.

The most genuinely profound of this year's Oscar hopefuls, Scorsese's film about film, Hugo, suggests through its juxtaposition of state-of-the-art 3D effects and quotations of early cinema classics that we may actually be at an uncanny point where the innocence and wonder of new technology gives film a chance to return to its fairytale origins. That return to the magic of the movies of yesteryear is also an evocation – on the Vanity Fair cover – of the American century – the 20th century – whose best and most beautiful images were American, from screen sirens to skyscrapers.

Art deco daydreams of an America that built the modern mind are not mere wishful thinking. Where will salvation from today's crisis come from? Probably from those dreams and that place. While the European economy chokes and splutters, there are promising signs of growth in the US. Even if those green shoots prove misleading, the perennial cry of the global left that the US is in terminal decline is mocked, every year, by the global fascination with the Oscars. It would take massive disruptions in the psychic makeup of the modern world for us to stop caring who gets Oscars, for us to resist the movies and their pounding American heartbeat.

Vanity Fair may seem to be fleeing the present in its Hollywood cover. In reality it is subtly displaying the power to shape our fantasies that makes America impossible to kill. For as long ago as the 1920s era this picture evokes, America wrote the DNA of my dreams and yours.

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As continuous, TV-like streaming video served over the Web seems more and more desirable from both an advertising and content standpoint, the Huffington Post is going all in.

AOL will dedicate $30 million and 100 employees to HuffPost's new streaming video service, the content of which will all be made in-house, Digiday reports.

And this isn't going to be some occasional burst of programming, either.

Called the Huffington Post Streaming Network, or HPSN, the channel plans to launch this summer with 12 hours of live content a day five days a week, and 16 hours a day by 2013.

Other AOL properties like Engadget and TechCrunch will also contribute.

According to Digiday, they've yet to sign up any advertisers, so that's the next step. Shouldn't be hard when you can boast of those 36 million unique visitors in December 2011 (comScore numbers) — up 49% from a year prior.

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See Also:

• Patch Traffic Was Basically Flat From Q3 To Q4
• The Easiest Way To Buy Cheap AOL Ad Inventory Is Now Through Yahoo
• NSFW: Check Out Bloomberg Businessweek's Pornographic Cover On The United-Continental Merger

Yahoo PR just sent us a note announcing that AOL ad inventory will now be available on the Right Media Exchange.

We wonder how this is sitting with sales people over at Advertising.com, AOL's ad network.

Here's the release:

Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange, the leading global private marketplace (NASDAQ:YHOO) and AOL (NYSE: AOL) today announced that AOL has selected Right Media Exchange as the platform to provide real time access to AOL inventory as part of thedisplay advertising agreements announced in Q4 2011.  The inventory AOL makes available under the display advertising agreement will be surfaced through the Right Media Exchange across the US and Canada.  The overall agreement aims to improve the process of buying and selling premium online display inventory in the non-reserved space. 

Right Media is the first and leading global advertising exchange with robust and proven technology designed to drive maximum performance and yield for buyers and sellers in real-time, in a private marketplace set up. 

“Advertising.com has been a long-standing seat holder on the Right Media Exchange, having utilized the Right Media Exchange’s RTB capabilities since 2009. Now, with the addition of inventory from AOL sites, we look forward to AOL continuing to drive yield through their existing advertisers while connecting them with the exchange’s premium advertisers for maximizing yield while delivering on our mutual objectives,” said Brian Silver, Yahoo! VP, Ad Platforms for the Americas.  “AOL’s selection validates Right Media’s commitment to building a premium marketplace on a global scale.”

“We have had a long term partnership with Yahoo and Right Media, and are excited to continue this partnership through this agreement.  The agreement provides for Advertising.com to continue to access AOL inventory for our existing advertisers while providing increased competition through additional demand sources,” said David Jacobs, Senior Vice President, Advertising.com.

Please follow SAI: Media on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Patch Traffic Was Basically Flat From Q3 To Q4
• AOL Is Investing $30 Million To Create 12 Hours Of Video A Day For HuffPo's Web TV Channel
• NSFW: Check Out Bloomberg Businessweek's Pornographic Cover On The United-Continental Merger

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What will we do with no more Wagbo, no more bits of scenery that look like faces, no more 'there's only one way to find out' fights? Hopefully Burp will go out on a high

After just over a decade, it seems as though the new series of TV Burp will be Harry Hill's last. Whether the show will continue without him remains unclear, which might give us just eight more editions of inspired lunacy to relish – and then no more knitted character, no more Wagbo, no more bits of scenery that look like faces, no more "there's only one way to find out" fights or ludicrously banal TV Highlights of the Week.

Hopefully Burp will go out on a high. It has certainly had its ups and downs but may turn out to be one of the few programmes to jump the shark and then reverse back over it. For a while it seemed to trade too much on mocking tawdry reality TV and I was not mad about the way celebrities appeared desperate to be in on the joke – a situation that reached its undeniable apotheosis when a phone directory of stars, including Ricky Gervais and Noel Fielding, allowed themselves to be filmed saying the phrase "Ear cataracts".

But at its best TV Burp did something very few comedy programmes – The Simpsons in its heyday is another that comes to mind – have managed in recent years. It is rare for a programme to appeal to absolutely all ages. Not even Dr Who can mange that. Like Springfield's finest yellow family, TV Burp works on all sorts of levels. There are knowing smirks from Hill for adults, puppets for the toddlers, pop culture references for hipsters and stupid soap send-ups for everybody.

This across-the-board appeal is summed up by the way TV Burp repeats have popped up everywhere from Sunday afternoon to post-pub slots. And while ITV has never really been able to build a comedy roster to follow it, despite trying with Al Murray and Jason Manford, TV Burp has arguably changed the way new comedians feel about doing populist telly. It is a pity Hill is going. ITV will never be the same again. Particularly if Paddy McGuinness is its face of Saturday night.

Oscar Wilde said that each man kills the thing he loves but I get the impression Harry Hill has actually fallen out of love with TV Burp. There were stories that he felt watching television for work spoiled the fun of it and rumours that he did not like his catchphrases – he allegedly refused to continue saying "chippy chips" at one point. Hill certainly had influence on broadcasting though: he should probably take a cut of Louie Spence's appearance fees, having "discovered" him on Sky's Pineapple Dance Studios.

There are many things I'll miss about Hill's TV Burp: Poetry Corner; his demolition of BBC3's reality TV output, from Freaky Eaters to Snog, Marry, Avoid even if his critiques did come over rather superior; and his ability to home in on the you-couldn't-make-it-up brand of programming, typified by Muslim Driving School. And then of course there is Hill's judiciously selected "Of The Week" moments.

Sometimes Hill may have stated the obvious – did we need someone to highlight the innate absurdity of Kilroy, for instance? But he stated the obvious in such a brilliant way we enjoyed hearing it.

If the series does survive in some form it will never be the same without Hill's playful postmodernism. Maybe there is a way back for him. Can we all have a whip-round to raise enough cash to get him to stay? Set Wagbo on him if he still tries to leave? Otherwise this is one TV Highlight of the Week that will be sorely missed.

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