links for 2010-03-03

nice riff on the competitive dynamics behind foursquare, and the ways in which the game mechanics – tacked on to a social search tool – ate the main product

Clever news visualization from Slate using entity extraction from Calais

Adam Klawonn shuts the doors on The Zonie Report, a Knight-funded citizen media project that covered Arizona news online. Interesting post-mortem, both for the causes that Klawonn identifies and for the overall sense of how difficult and exhausting the process was for him. An interesting caution for a model that quite a few former professional journos are looking into pursuing

Good advice from Melissa Loudon on reporting from mobile phones. The bad news – mobile telephony is an extremely difficult space for anonymity. The guide points to one mostly working tool – Tor's software for Android… though I've been warned by my Tor friends that they're not happy with how Android handles aspects of their connections. And she offers some good advice for getting https running on mobile browsers. Overall… a good reminder of just how challenging the space is.

Impressive example of the sorts of cross-language dialog made possible on the Meedan platform, using automated and human translation of English/Arabic.