Emily Gould shares "What I gained — and lost — by writing about my intimate life online." Read the lengthy and controversial article featured on the cover of yesterday's New York Times Magazine: Exposed

According to a recent Chicago Tribune article by Ann Meyer, "Entrepreneurs find creating and running Weblogs or developing them for others to use as a marketing tool can be profitable."

Read the article: Blogging paying off for a few

Wired Magazine, has an interesting article about a Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and 90 other local newspapers. Gannett to Crowdsource News reports that the editorial side of Gannett's operations will be reorganized into an "Information Center" comprised of seven prmary job areas that indicate a shift in focus toward 1) more participation by their readership; 2) mulitmedia communication, beyond the printed page; 3) 24 hour news coverage; 4) more focus on local news and 5) greater leveraging of the information embedded in their news stories.

The plan is very much in line with our view of organizing news information which is why AlwaysBlogging is a "multi-media" blog and why it is focused on the topic of content management. Any given piece of information is relevant to many contexts - the key to extracting maximum value lies in organizing information so that it can be incorporated into as many contexts as apply. This suggests variations on both the medium and the message.

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Read about blogging in France.

I've been intrigued by Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" ever since they made it available for anyone to use by means of its Web Services API (application programmer interface). The inspiration for the name is a chess playing machine built in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen, who alleged that it used "artificial intelligence" to defeat most opponents. The "Turk" was a life-sized wooden model seated behind a cabinet that concealed a human chess master hidden behind an assortment of mechanical parts.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk site provides a technical and payment infrastructure that allows

...developers to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

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