I've not updated the blog for a few months. Partly it's because the hard drive on my Asus EEE has packed up. Partly because I've been busy. And partly because I've not had a lot to say.
I'm still following a lot of what's being said about the future of journalism but there's not been any big ideas that have grabbed my attention.
I've not been working on the online news network - it was taking up my a lot of my time and I'm unsure of its worth. If anyone is interested in working with me on it I might start again.
One thing I thought people migjht find interesting is that I also wasn't able to follow through with the Change Tracker for the Scottish Government website. Turns out that the Government's webmasters have blocked the spider that Versionista uses to monitor sites. Why would they do this? The folk from Versionista say they'll try to find out. I'll let you know.
One thing that's saddened me a bit is Iain Hepburn's http://iainmhepburn.com/ decision to stop doing his blog Please Stand By; he's one of the few social media journalists in Scotland and his blog was always interesting. Sorry he's stopping.
And lastly, could I please encourage everyone to take part in the BBC Trust consultation about the future of BBC Alba; more info here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/news/press_releases/october/alba_review.shtml

The news about News Corp charging for access to all its news websites is very, very interesting.
There's lots of comment on it - you can find more links on my Friend Feed. Or Google.
My reaction when I heard about it was the same as Jay Rosen's.
There's been a lot of speculation about what Murdoch's motivation is. For me, it's simple. News Corp is a listed company. The stated aim of every listed company is to make profits and deliver shareholder value. Murdoch thinks he can make money out of this.
And I think if any news group is in a position to make money out of the paywall model, it's probably News Corp. On one end of the scale the Wall Street Journal has a working paywall model that the group as a whole can learn from. On the other end, you can imagine that the kind of exclusive content provided by papers like The Sun could attract paying punters.
For example, at the moment if The Sun gets a video exclusive like this the way it can make money from it is to give clips to the broadcasters with the proviso that The Sun logo is prominently displayed, in the hope that folk will buy the paper or visit thesun.co.uk to see more.
In a paywall model, if you want to see a celeb snorting coke you'd either have to be a subscribed member of the site, or maybe pay 20p or so via some kind of micropayment system.
Hand-in-hand with this though will come attacks on Google - and there's already talk of possible lawsuits. That way madness lies. How can you drive traffic to your site without links?
We'll see what happens. I'm not sure how it'll work out and I'm still thinking through the implications.
I think there's something in there about community support though. If Murdoch's model make it more normal and acceptable for people to pay for websites, could that make it easier for smaller, more focussed community supported and even community-owned sites to start up - either with or without paywalls?

We're in Edinburgh on the second week of our holidays, having spent the first week in East Lothian.
I've not been getting online much in the last few days - been spending a lot of time swimming in the sea, walking, sight-seeing and reading books. Unfortunately my planned surf lesson was cancelled due to lack of waves - a relief to wetsuit manufacturers everywhere no doubt.
Apologies to anyone who might have been wondering about the disappearance of my last blog post about the Scottish Affairs Committee's Report on the Crisis in the Scottish Press Industry. Have a read of what our MPs had to say for yourself and let us know what you think about it.
Before I came away on holiday I'd been working on the online news network I mentioned in earlier posts. It's coming together, slowly. I managed to configure the Advanced Profile Kit which means that users will have a Facebook-style page, including a Wall. Thanks very much to Michelle for all her hard work.
Now if I can get the Advanced Dynamic Display Block going, I'll be laughing.
Another thing I'm working on is creating a ChangeTracker for the Scottish Government website. The main stumbling block at the moment seems to be that Versionista isn't registering changes made to the site. I've stuck a help request in, so we'll see what happens.
And finally for the moment, I had a look at the new Herald beta website. Ian Hepburn has written a good review of it. I'm pleased to see user comments and Most Read functions making an appearance and I'm looking forward to what the blogs could bring.

I was lucky at Southside Media. I was surrounded by people who were young, enthusiastic and had a positive outlook on life.
That's not me. My mind's crammed with negative thoughts a lot of the time. Things I've done wrong - or think I've done wrong - follow me around like a sneery, snappy, black dug - always looking up at me and occasionally biting my ankles.
That's the reason I had g41.org.uk and g42.org.uk taken down. While they were still up and running I felt like the little black dug was getting fed with chewy titbits.
But there's a lesson here. If I'd have kept these community networks up and running, and continued the work I'd planned to create other sites for the southside of Glasgow and beyond, there could have been new opportunities to build on them again.
Every time I look at the 4iP website I feel sick. Almost physically.
We fitted that bill so well. With their help we could have taken the concept of hyperlocal not-for-profit open media to a new level.
But all that work is gone. And the worst thing about it is that although I was the one who built the sites and worked to get people in the community to use them, by taking them down I've also destroyed the work of those many individuals.
So here's the lesson folks. If you're interested in getting involved in rebooting the news or becoming a news cadre, stay positive. Even when things look bleakest, take a deep breath and take comfort in the fact that what you're doing is reshaping the way that humans tell each other important stories and share important knowledge.
And whatever the ultimate fate of the structures that you create to help people in that task - don't ditch them! Have faith in the foundation of what you've built and keep it safe. Create copies. Back them up.

This is either the daftest or scariest idea that's yet been formulated to try and protect newspaper revenues.
It's daft because the Web is links. Take away the connections and you no longer have a network.
But that's a scary prospect; if the newspaper industry succeeds in lobbying for this kind of legislation, the idea of an open Web is under threat.
It's an idea that chimes nicely with some of the national security havers that we hear from governments too: if the legislation is to be enforced then the use of the Web has to be restricted and monitored.
Throw in the rise of the cloud and you could have the ingredients for a fundamental challenge to the way the Web has developed until now.

The problem with Twitter is fitting your message into just 140 characters. It's something that Dave Winer's talked about before and he's now come up with a method of determing how long tweets should be allowed to be
The reason I'm raising this is because of my last post, where I picked up on a tweet from Steve Yelvington.
When you read his blog post about "death to the death of journalism meme" you get a much more considered view of things: papers are losing money; several are in real danger; but some are still doing ok and will survive into the future, albeit by changing their business model as they go. Video did not kill the radio star.
I can't disagree with this really. I think papers will be around for a good while to come; some folk still have black and white tellies - it takes time for the new technology to become ubiquitous.
But the world's changing so quickly now that I don't think it will be long until the use value of newspapers becomes so devalued in comparison to other forms of news media, that they find themselves no longer used as vehicles for journalism. Niche newspapers like The Economist and weekly locals might carry on longer than others, but national and regional dailies?
Anyway, if you compare Steve's Tweet and his blog post, it shows how Twitter will have to evolve if it's going to carry on being useful. Shouting links at each other isn't enough - we need to be able to contextualise them. Some folk - like Steve - do that in their blogs, but Twitter is the only blogging tool for hundreds of thousands of people; it's lowered the bar for entry into the blogosphere but it now needs to give these new bloggers the opportunity to become more expansive and thoughtful.
And on a different point, I've started work on building a not-for-profit news network using Drupal. I asked for suggestions for names on Facebook and Twitter but didn't get much of a response. So I'm calling it Your Scotland. Once I've got it built I'll open it up to people for comments and suggestions.

When I was working at Southide Media and changing things as we went along, one of the models I came across was Bluffton Today. From there I started following Steve Yelvington's blog.
And now I follow him on Twitter too.
Today on Twitter, he asked: "If bunches of newspapers make 30 pct profit margins in depths of recession, does that mean 'death of newspapers' meme is BS?"
He then posted a link to these numbers which I'd actually seen before.
And then he followed up with: "The big mistake in reporting about newspaper 'woes' is to look just at a few big metros. They do not represent the broader newspaper biz."
But these figures are out of date. As Jim Hopkins himself says in a post under the blog entry:
"All the papers were profitable as of a year ago -- except for the Detroit Free Press. Since then, however, any number of Gannett papers may have become money losers this year after the housing bubble's collapse and the nation's dip into a recession. Papers most at risk would be those that had low, single-digit margins a year ago."
Not a good base to build an argument on.

Looks like the owners of the Wee County News are doing well enough.
I'm glad that some people out there are making a go of local newspapers. I've only seen the Wee County once - when I was in Alloa during the last Westminster elections for the Politics Show - and it was a good read.
I've not seen their Eastwood paper yet. In fact I didn't know it existed, which is pretty bad because it's on the border of the patch that Southside Media covered and it's where I went to high school.
Elsewhere however, things are not looking so rosy for local newspaper owners. The NUJ has launched its own plan to inject a bit of fiscal stimulus.
It's been met with some scepticism though.
For me, the case against the existing newspaper owners - smaller players like the Wee County maybe excepted - is open and shut. They should not get a penny of government support. If you're a Plc, forget it.
For years, these companies have racked up incredible profit margins. Instead of investing in the papers they owned, they distributed dividends to shareholders and used some of their profits as leverage to take on huge debts in order to acquire more papers.
The communities they served - the people who bought their papers, the advertisers who stuck with them - saw very little improvement in their local newspapers for the investment they were putting in.

I got a namecheck on Paul Bradshaw and Jon Hickman's podcast.
I'd asked via Twitter: "Will sites like Help Me Investigate will always need some kind of professional journalist/mentor/organiser/news cadre?"
(I could have done with someone like that to sub out the un-needed second 'will')
Here's Paul's reply:
"No is the short answer. The only difference between a professional journalist and a non-professional journalist is that a professional journalist happens to get paid.
"There are lots of examples of outstanding journalism by people who are not paid to be journalists. I'm talking about activism, engaged citizens and creative people.
"The model that we're adopting is that it needs some sort of leadership, for want of a better word, to help shape that community and establish the rules of that community. That's a lesson that the websites have learned - Wikipedia is a great example.
"But I think the idea is that the culture of the website becomes strong enough and the users have advanced to such a point that they can maintain their own culture. We'll need to wait and see if that actually happens."
I think that idea of creating the culture by exhortation and example is really powerful. I used the phrase 'news cadre' in my question. I like it. I'm going to keep it. I think journalists need to become news cadres.
Just to be clear - I don't believe you need a professional journalist to have legitimate journalism. I agree with Paul Bradshaw about that 100%.
But I think there will always be a need for news cadres. Look how groups within communities organise themselves: people come together for a specific purpose, whether it's to set up a bowling club or protest against the closure of a park. They elect people to different tasks. If their work grows, then they employ people to carry out tasks on their behalf.

I've realised that I've been looking a lot at what's been happening in the US newspaper industry.
That's partly because that's where papers are really suffering at the moment. It's also because through Twitter I've discovered a lot of smart people in the States who are talking about what the decline of the traditional newspaper model means for journalism and how the traditional media companies there are failing to deal with the changing times.
But I saw something this week which confirms that media companies on this side of the Atlantic are just as short-sighted and uncaring about the communities they serve.
Across central Scotland Trinity Mirror is closing local newspaper offices and merging production centres. One of the papers affected is the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser.
This is one of the papers I grew up with. It would be delivered to my gran's house in Plains every week, full of local news: everything from the latest carry-on at Monklands District Council, to the real parish pump stuff from the villages. As kids, we'd look at the Sammy Squirrel page to see whose parents had stumped up the cash for them to have a photo and birthday greeting printed in the paper.
The Advertiser is a good local paper, providing a real community service. It's well-known for its campaigning journalism, with the best example maybe being the campaign to save A&E services at Monklands District Hospital - a campaign it led from the front, and won.