links for 2009-10-04

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  Knight Foundation rethinks its stance on for-profit deals Nieman Journalism Lab
  “Everyblock won a $1,100,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in 2007 to build its innovative platform for aggregating local news and information. Two years later, soon after the Knight grant had expired, founder Adrian Holovaty announced that MSNBC had acquired EveryBlock. The sale raised questions about nonprofit funding of for-profit ventures. After all, Knight had essentially seeded EveryBlock’s development, while Holovaty profited from its sale.”
  (tags: Media&Journalism adrianholovarty EveryBlock msnbc knightfoundation)
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  Epeus’ epigone: Tummling, SideWiki, Twitter and the Tragedy of the Comments revisited
  Kevin Marks tries to look into the muddy Sidewiki and see something gleaming “Google attempts to show the ‘most important’ comments first, using a combination of voting and other ranking algorithms, but it is still attempting to show everyone the same comment ordering, not taking personal ‘following’ into account. For SideWiki to succeed, I think this will need to change. Sidewiki does another interesting thing - it matches comments to the same words elsewhere on the web. For example, my comment on Douglas Adams excellent 1999 piece also shows up in SideWiki on JP Rangiswami’s blog where he quotes Douglas Adams too. This hints at a greater possibility for SideWiki - to weave the web together by better by showing commentary across the web from all places that quote and cite each other, correlating by textual quotation and adding annotated links to the commentary from people we trust most. This is a way Google could use it’s scale of indexing to weave a better
  (tags: Technology sidewiki)
• 
  Colorado Independent Rocky Mountain Independent, online magazine experiment, folds
  This experiment might have stretched itself too wide — covering sports, business, and culture — which is just what traditional (failing) newspapers try to do.
  (tags: Media&Journalism rockymountainindependent deathofnewspapers)