An Impressive list of notable examples of programmatic journalism from Dan Sinker; something I must return to.

"It’s a bit like augmented reality, a layer inserted between what leaves the server and what hits your brain." Yes. Also: see Ben's comment about the browser as weapon.

"EON has a full-time staff of six, headed up by editor Zapatero (known to his grandma as Richie Shoemaker), who told Wired.co.uk that around two-thirds of the content of the magazine is written by EVE players, who are paid in in-game currency for their work. It acquires the reserves of in-game cash to pay its writers by selling ads to in-game organisations, like banks or insurance companies, which pay their ad bills in the game's currency too. The setup means that gamers who play EVE have more ways to make in-game cash than just mining or trading in the game universe. They can also be a journalist, reporting on galactic events." This is completely brilliant/nuts. Also: I love the idea that people want to collect the historiography of the universe.

"Trust is the key to breaking [this cycle]. And I think Talese’s method shows us how we might gain it: by checking with our subjects and making sure we understand what they’re trying to express, beyond what they actually say. Because if our subjects are interesting enough to report on, they’re deserving of respect. And if we respect them, they will respect us. That’s a much more virtuous circle." I think Alex is right, you know.

Madden isn't very big over here at all; it's hard to underestimate its cultural standing in the US. This article goes a long way to both explaining that and looking at the history of a juggernaut franchise that once started out very small. I really liked it as a piece of journalism.

Strictly speaking, "The Best of *American* Journalism", but there's lots on here I'd like to read sometime.

"Magick is all about naming and control. So is journalism, and software engineering—related disciplines." yes yes yes a thousand times yes (the most wonderful sentence in James' write-up of a non-conference I didn't attend).

"Unless your surname's Coren you're going to need some help getting into the journalism industry." Great advertising from the Press Gazette

"With every piece of metadata that you don’t throw away, you gain a factor more potential ways of slicing through your content and delivering it as a separate product, simply as a result of a database lookup. In the case of Vogue today, say, commissioning an editorial product that simply shows every dress designed by Christian Dior that appears in the archive would involve weeks of intern-work, instantly making it unprofitable or too late. A metadata-complete archive in the future would give you that with a single line of code." Hammersley on the value to journalism of sensible datastorage. Data-driven journalism in the sense that it is not *about* data, but in that it is *treated as data* - and from this more stories can flow.

"The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found. The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret. The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations." Oh, I'm looking forward to the next Private Eye.

"...he and his brethren were plotting a future in which all writers and musicians would be at the mercy of the mathematicians and the electronic and numerological world they have created. Art is now content. It merely embellishes a "platform" of the kind I struggle to read about in the media pages which are now indistinguishable from the technology pages." I like Andrew Martin's writing a lot, but this article is both rubbish and angry-making. Grr.

"Accept that everything you say will be forgotten and ignored but write as if you and your words are immortal. Don’t just describe but justify – make sure the reader knows WHY the record exists whether the reasons are righteous or rascally. And always remember you’re not here to give consumer advice or help with people’s filing. You’re here to set people’s heads on fire."

"The Tower of London tweets every time it opens and shuts..." Nice sub-editing, Daily Mail!

"For the past three decades, Popovich has been one of a secret tribe of big game hunters who specialize in stealing jets from the jungle hideouts of corrupt landowners in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and swiping go-fast boats from Wall Street titans in Miami and East Hampton. Super repos have been known to hire swat teams, hijack supertankers and fly off with eastern bloc military helicopters. For a cut of the overall value, they'll repossess anything." As jobs go, this one is pretty extreme; it's a great article.

Alan Taylor on a year of the Big Picture. It's been a successful one, if you ask me, and it's a wonderful site; there are few updates in my RSS reader I look forward to as much as it.

Jolly good, that man; speaking sense and pointing out the hypocrisy of the media talking this all up. And: how is this different to the hoo-haa over expenses in any other year? No, I don't know, either.

"For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need." Late to link to this, but as everyone else who has done already would point out: it's great.

The Guardian Open Platform launches, with their Content API, their Data Store, and a selection of client libraries for the API (one of which I did a smidge of work on). This is not just a good thing, it's a good thing Done Right, and I'm looking forward to what's next from the Open Platform team.

"It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens." Chris Remo documents the end of Tabula Rasa from the frontlines.

"...after careful consideration [the editors in charge of style guidelines at the NYT] decided to alter our style. As of now, the spelling whisky will be used not only for Scotch but for Canadian liquor as well. The spelling whiskey will be used for all appropriate liquors from other sources." As it should be.

"Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end." Yes.

"Our team of investigative journalists has compiled a database from four years' worth of company accounts to show how much the FTSE 100 companies make in pre-tax profits, and how much they pay in tax. We have published this data as a user-friendly interactive guide at guardian.co.uk/taxgap/data." But, as well as the user-friendly guide, there's also all the data. Bravo.

"It is a commonplace that if it weren’t for computers we couldn’t fly to the moon, or even keep an accurate record of the national debt. On the question of how it does what it does, however, the computer has always remained essentially mysterious—unfathomable to all but a small handful of initiates. An officer of one major computer concern guessed recently that not more than 2% of his employees really know how it works." 2% seems awfully high these days. Detailed, technical article from Life in 1967.

The comments thread on this is pretty epic, and I'm really not wading into that one. Suffice to say: it's quite a while before somebody mentions the word "criticism", and it's not in the main body of the article at all. That's the important word, to my mind.

"Maps, databases and other resources that help you dig deeper." A shame the raw data isn't available, but great they're collating this stuff and seeing it as another channel of news they provide.

"If I only have so many hours in the day to devote to genuinely insightful things, Gladwell’s track record screams at me to ignore Outliers. At least for now. At least until I’m stuck on a cross-country flight, liquored up, and ready for a good fight." Jack Shedd is bored of anecdotes.

"...while almost all of the game’s residents are free to go as they please, heading off to new towns and lives on a whim, once you step off the bus and choose a house in which to settle, you’re here for good.... you are the local constant, the hick who’s never left its borders and there is some comfort in the knowledge that the places the other animals leave for can never be known by you." Simon's original version of his Wii Animal Crossing review; some lovely analysis of the series to date.

"Wow. Ever get the feeling you've been thrown for a loop? I did just that, when I worked out that GSW commenter and erudite game blogger, PixelVixen707, appears to be not just a smart game blogger, but a fictitious front for some kind of damn weird ARG/online story." Down the rabbit hole we go, again.

"Paine does have a descendent, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another." Fantastic article

"Still, it’s 110 days (or 2,663.18 hours) that I’m sort of responsible for taking from a girl’s life. Phileas Fog circumnavigated the globe in less time than that." A lovely piece of writing from Simon Parkin, tracking down a digital life he sold long ago.

"For one, there's an undercurrent of a siege mentality in journalism right now, with newsrooms cutting staff and print operations frozen stiff in the headlights of the internet. The focus on narrative and story gives a softer edge and an escape valve, though - this group is not primarily a tech-driven community, but they catch on to new developments quickly and bend them into the service of storytelling." Interesting round-up from Mike, particularly with respect to the NYT's election coverage.

"An almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature."

"...you can’t do one of these bits and expect everything to work out great. You have to think about what can and needs to be done in each bucket." Another part of the it's-not-a-software-problem issue, with some good points on community.

"Where did we lose our nuance? When did we all become so beastly that we forgot how to have a conversation? Or was it always like so?" Some lovely writing from Simon Parkin.

"I am stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs... My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language."

"Charles Wheeler, who has died at the age of 85, set the standard to which all broadcast journalists of my generation aspired. We never reached it, but we knew that if we got close we were doing well." Martin Bell on Charles Wheeler.

Some good stuff and choice quotes about the background to the Big Picture, a truly wonderful blog of the stories hidden inside wire photojournalism.

"Google has to search through those blobs of stories to pull out that raw data again, thus undoing the work of the journalist. The two need to meet in the middle, argues Holovaty." More data-driven journalism stuff; all spot on, really.

"I may not hear the Rocky theme song, or see the sunset anywhere, but for me, this may be a sort of conclusion." Delightful Murakami article on running.

I've been enjoying the Reuters Photographers blog for a while now; this post reminds me how remarkable some of the lengths their correspondants go to.

Simon Wistow with a sensible, insightful post - starting from Andy Baio's remarkable discovery of Milliways - on how the web (and bloggers) need to grow up, and how telling smart people "you don't get the web" isn't actually an answer at all. Bravo.

Forty+ years of Sports Illustrated, all under one roof online, and free. Worth it for the photography alone, even if you're not a sportsfan.

"TimesMachine can take you back to any issue [of the NYT between 1851 and 1922]". Some lovely flourishes in the interface, and some remarkable content, as you might expect.

"Yesterday, I discovered that The Times (UK), a well-respected newspaper owned by News Corp., is involved in an extensive campaign to spam social media websites with links to Timesonline.co.uk articles." Andy Baio on the Times' involvement with SEO.

"The Telegraph will soon become the first newspaper in the world, and the first British media company, to become an OpenID provider. Readers will be able to begin using the service from the end of February." That's an interesting - and savvy - move.

"Before the unexpected series of events that began yesterday afternoon, for example, Hansen had no intention of ever being here, outside this house, waiting for a SWAT team on an overcast Sunday afternoon." God, US Esquire can be good.

"I cannot, in all conscience, remain within a union I now regard, albeit reluctantly, as reactionary. The digital revolution is here and I am digital revolutionary." Roy Greenslade on leaving the NUJ.

"...it sums up the particular strain of globollocks in Monocle that both entices and infuriates, like a coke-fiend friend" - great post from Nick Sweeney on Monocle and cultures of their own creation

"...indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users..." - you don't say?

"For five years I also wrote a monthly column of the same title in the industry's critical Bible, Edge magazine. All those columns are archived"... on Poole's website. Excellent.

"FHM was selling 800,000 for a reason, and it wasn’t to those of us who’ve seen all three endings of Deus Ex" Gillen talks about the resurgence of PC Accelerator.

"Why is the girl in the centre smiling? Her fiancé lies at death's door after being rescued from the sea. She smiles because she saw a press cameraman and knew her picture was going in the papers." Nice article on press photographers.

Not a bad list, really.

"On Tuesday, he will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America." Joshua Bell busks for the Washington Post.

Strong article on newsroom-developers, and about more than just Adrian Holovaty for once. Good quotations, too.

The 2007 contest winners are now up. They're very impressive.

Nico Macdonald, mainly on the money, back in August.

"He might have been the smartest criminal I've ever encountered [...] but as smart as he was, being noticed seemed to mean more to him than staying out of jail." Remarkable story of the downfall of Stefan Eriksson and Gizmondo

if you're writing an article or a blog post about this issue, and your argument revolves around one or more of these points -- and doesn't add anything else of substance -- STOP WRITING. Pick a new topic. Move on. There's nothing to see here.

Jeff Jarvis rambling on as ever - some good quotes in it, though

The internet is changing, very disruptive technology and there are new inventions coming along every month. One has to stay awake and race to stay up with it, or if you get enough brilliant people around maybe you can get ahead of it.

I have been a print journalist for 42 years and up until, say, three years or so ago I expected to die a print journalist. But there is no point in looking backwards, in being an inky dinosaur, so I have come to accept that the only way forward, for the m

Definitely worth reading. I'm behind on my current review, too!

Interesting course on writing game reviews from Bolton University. Some interesting questions - tricky, rather than hard - and nice and diverse. Also, rating something from 0 to 10 depending on how New Games Journalism it is...

In reponse to Roger Ebert; apparently it's journalists to blame...

In part, on the NYT redesign. Newspaper sites becoming more bloglike, etc

relevant to the whole flickr/moblogging/grassroots journalism movement