journal

CallitADay is an easy, inviting app that helps you create an electronic diary, with text, images, and even audio and video recording.

CallitADay's streamlined interface suits its straightforward purpose: the main, three-part window has a calendar (to start an entry, you select the date you want), a sidebar of previous entries (which you can organize by topic and browse as thumbnails, in a grid or Cover Flow-style), and a large editing pane, with controls for zooming, changing fonts and color, and browsing back through previous entries. This main window also has buttons for quickly creating audio and video recordings (… Read more

It's not always easy to keep ideas organized, especially when you're working on a big project. TreeNotes is a simple but effective way to organize notes in a tree hierarchy. We think this intuitive program could be useful for a wide range of people including students, creative writers, project managers, and many more.

The program's interface is basic and easy to navigate, with large buttons representing the program's major features. A toolbar across the top is similar to that found in many word-processing programs. Down the left side of the interface the tree hierarchy is displayed, … Read more

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A prominent consumer electronics company has asked authorities to help it retrieve a prototype phone from the journalist who revealed it--prematurely--to the world.

Sounds a lot like the Gizmodo/iPhone 4 prototype debacle, doesn't it? But it's not. This time, the consumer electronics company is Nokia, the journalist is Eldar Murtazin, editor-in-chief of Moscow-based mobile-review.com, and the authorities are the Russian police.

Claiming that it's been unable to recover the prototype N8 that Murtazin previewed unfavorably earlier this year, Nokia has turned to Russia's Ministry of … Read more

Is YouTube getting into the local news business? No. Not really.

But! SF Weekly has a weird, confusing tale about YouTube's sort-of secretive efforts to launch a "local news experiment" in San Francisco. You can read the whole thing here, but the gist is that staffers at the Google site have tapped local bloggers, reporters, etc., to gauge their interest in a project where "citizen videographers--anyone with a video-capable phone or camera, really" helps cover local news.

Since the YouTube folks have been vague about what they're up to, and have told potential participants … Read more

Dealbreaker, a self-described "Wall Street tabloid," is scrambling to answer questions Monday about why it would give a freelancer--especially one with a history of questionable conduct--access to readers' personal information.

Zachery Kouwe, the former New York Times reporter who resigned in February after acknowledging he plagiarized material from competing publications, apparently tried to intimidate readers who made critical comments about his stories by informing them he knew where they worked, according to a report in Reuters.

Managers at Dealbreaker, owned by Breaking Media, told Reuters that they severed ties with Kouwe on Thursday, after learning that he "… Read more

Technology has made it possible for more of us to not only read the news but also write it via blogs and social-media sites. But do stories on the blogosphere differ from those in traditional media, and if so, how?

To peek behind the world of new media versus old media, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) spent about a year looking at the top news stories covered on blogs and social-media pages. It also kept tabs on seven months' worth of tweets on Twitter and a year's worth of news-related videos courtesy of … Read more

HT Professional Recorder is a dictation-recording software with several useful features for recording your thoughts and comments. Though the iPhone comes with a voice memo app, with HT Professional Recorder you get tons of options for serious dictation recording. The interface has a unique swooshlike design with buttons across the top for creating a new recording, starting your recording, playback, and pause. There also are buttons to advance or "rewind" the playback in 5-second increments so you can scan for specific parts of your recording. On the bottom of the swoosh design, you also can use a slider … Read more

Facebook's privacy policy promises, in no uncertain terms, that it doesn't "share your information with advertisers without your consent." Only "non-personally identifiable" data, it says, are shared.

But the social-networking site confirmed late Thursday that it has, at least in some circumstances, sent the user name of a Facebook member to its advertising partners. That can be used to glean a person's name, interests, and list of friends.

A Facebook spokesman told CNET that the apparent privacy leak has been fixed.

News of this data sharing, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal … Read more

The linchpin of the topic of ethics on online journalism is, of course, "Gizmodogate," in which tech blog Gizmodo paid to acquire a prototype iPhone that an Apple employee left behind in a bar and picked up by someone else.

But the iPhone story isn't the only time that the ethics of tech blogs have been called into question, and in fact traditional journalism has its own high-profile ethical lapses. Think of the plagarism and fabrication scandal around reporter Jayson Blair at the New York Times, or NBC's Dateline TV investigation where producers rigged explosives into GM trucks to prove that they were prone to exploding in accidents.

Online journalism and blogging does change things, however. Today we're going to look at how and why. Our guests are CNET's own editor-in-chief Scott Ard. Also: Kelly McBride from the Poynter Institute. Kelly is a journalist and journalism ethics expert with a deep and fascinating background covering complex news stories. The Poynter Institue is a resource for journalists at all levels in their careers.

Show notes and talking points… Read more