Facebook sets out best practices for news sites

This is actually a pretty fascinating read — so much so that, given my relative lack of anything better to do up here in Reno at the fam fam reunion, it actually spurred me to create this blog and add to it some special features, such as the devilish Facebook like button.

On an interesting sidenote, Poynter's web site, itself frequently a fount of social media best practices, doesn't make the sharing of its content very easy. Hit the share button and all you get is an unannotated link to the article named after the website rather than the article.

In any case, here's the article:

7 Ways to Use Facebook to Merge News with the Social Web

Jonathan Thompson coulda died but lived to tell about it

Jonathan was my editor at High Country News and now he's writing sardonically about his experiences in Germany. It's well worth the read. And in the tradition of writing well about that which tortures us, it is, of course, hysterically funny.

Read the post here:

gin gelato: Das Krankenhaus: Or how I got Pneumonia in Berlin and (hopefully) live.

How much would YOU pay to read the NY Times online?

Here's a link about the NY Times latest attempt to capitalize its online presence.

And here's my weigh-in:

I'm a radically undercompensated journalist and a notorious cheapskate, and still I'm thinking if it wasn't much, I'd be more than happy to toss a few dollars in the kitty to keep reading the New York Times online. I know I'm probably not representative of most of the Times online readers, but still I say, if the payment system were easy and the price point was fairly low — maybe like $5/month — it'd be a deal to support and receive high quality journalism. Pluswhich, unlike the Wall Street Journal, which is a joy to read in cellulose (below the fold and middle column, especially), I get sick of seeing the daily carnage on the front page of the Times and prefer to read it online anyway.