Interesting links for 2009-07-31

'Amazingly, failing old media is throwing away their most valuable assets. And AOL is eagerly picking those assets up for a song. Before anyone knows it, AOL may be the most powerful news outlet in the world.Journalists still matter. A lot. Especially the good ones.'

'… if a newspaper is both increasingly reliant on paper subscription revenues and is seeing its paper subscriber numbers decline, there might indeed be a colorable case for implementing a subscription firewall in front of the online content.'

'With time, the quality of CSS tutorials out there on the web has increased considerably. Here are 21 amazing CSS Techniques that you might not have thought could be done by CSS.'

'Indeed, AnnArbor.com — which launched the day after The Ann Arbor News shuttered — looks more like Digg and Twitter than it does the Detroit Free Press. At least right now, an investigative enterprise story is featured no more prominently than a 200-word blog post. Everything — design, content, even advertising — is different.'

'The Associated Press, reeling from the newspaper apocalypse, has a new plan to "wrap" and "protect" its content though a "digital permissions framework. But there's (way) less here than meets the eye.'

'Friend Mark Potts is announcing a new company today, called GrowthSpur, which will help support what I believe will be the future ecosystem of local news.'

'Google's image search engine added an expandable toolbelt with search options that allow you to refine the results without visiting the advanced search page.'

'Technorati, the world's first blog search engine, just unveiled Twittorati – a site where the top 100 bloggers' tweets are featured and analyzed. The service allows users to view the links most tweeted as well as displaying Technorati's original concept of showcasing the internet's top trafficked blogs and content from its contributors.'