"Is it possible to run an online-only local news site that serves a city's readers well while turning a profit? Is a digital news product a viable solution for cities whose papers can no longer afford to operate? We think so."

"What caught my eye, though, was that professional services firms were building up support for various SaaS applications such as Safesforce.com and GoogleApps. As such an ecosystem develops around software as a service, it’s clear to me that the phenomenon, which essentially requires trusting a service based in the cloud, heralds the eventual acceptance of actual cloud computing, where IT infrastructure is delivered from the cloud."

"In preparation for the 2009 South by Southwest music festival (March 18-21), NPR Music's spent weeks sampling songs by more than 1,000 of the acts in attendance. Some of the music induced swooning, some of it induced sleepiness, and some of it made us want to pry out our eardrums and swallow them for safe keeping. (We're looking at you, Gaybomb.) Arranged alphabetically by artist, the 100 songs in this ridiculously bountiful — but by no means definitive — mix all passed a simple litmus test, summed up in six simple words: "Yeah, I'd listen to that again." "

"It’s clear to anyone who watches a twitterstream that people put out questions to Twitter similar to how they use search engines. But if anecdotal examples aren’t enough, a survey I conducted last week confirms that Twitter is used as a search resource."

"10,000 new followers per day sounds like an astounding number but are all of these followers legitimate?"

"We are witnessing the rise of a social nervous system"

"With Twitter, I feel like I’m interacting with the world–or at least a few million folks who inhabit it. And I kind of like the bustling, fast-moving anything-can-happen feel. Facebook, by contrast, is a quieter, more mundane, more predictable place. Generally speaking, I know who I’ll run into there."

So here’s an unanswered question: Will Facebook ever open up more, in the sense of encouraging looser, more far-flung interaction between members, whether they’ve friended each other or not?

"Billing is the heart of the new business model and the solution. People already buy subscriptions and pay for them through a variety of electronic payment systems such as credit cards. But electronic billing for a subscription to a physical product like a paper is not the billing model needed for digital news delivery. A subscription to an on-line paper must be capable of being shared among the people in a household, simultaneously and on multiple devices. Newspapers need a digital business model whose heart is a digital subscription billing model."