New York Times Technology reporter Nick Bilton writes "today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share. More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links."

It is clear that news organizations and professional journalists should use social media to listen and gather news and links from social channels.

It seems logical that journalists should reciprocate and help the public find useful links.

Is that where today's news organizations fit most naturally within the social media ecosystem? Sifting through information from the public and other news sources and then putting it into context that helps the community that it serves?

This sounds suspiciously similar to a core function of "traditional" journalism.

What do you think?

Nope. That's Comic Sans.

There it is.

Murdock is moving ahead with his plans to block search engines from spidering his content, at least at the TimesOnline site. Here's the robots.txt file, which clearly states 'spidering is not allowed'.

##ACAP version=1.0

#Robots.txt File#Version: 0.8#Last updated: 04/01/2010#Site contents Copyright Times Newspapers Ltd#Please note our terms and conditions http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,497,00.html #Spidering is not allowed by our terms and conditions #Authorised spidering is subject to permission #For authorisation please contact us - see http://www.nisyndication.com/about_us.html

# Globally Disallowed Sections: All Robots
User-agent: *
Disallow: /_gatools/
Disallow: /_nipd/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /img/
Disallow: /tol/Print.do
Disallow: /tol/sitesearch.do
Disallow: /tol/incomingFeeds
Disallow: /tol/arts_and_entertainment/commercial/vip_lounge
Disallow: /tol/viewArticle.arc
Disallow: /tol/tools_and_services/rss/times_mobile_content/
Disallow: /tol/tools_and_services/mobile_times/mobile_2/
Disallow: /tol/tools_and_services/mobile_times/mobile_3/
Disallow: /tol/tlskeywordsearch.tls

#Agent Specific Disallowed Sections
User-agent: NewsNow
Disallow: /

User-agent: Omgili
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebVac
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebZip
Disallow: /

User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

ACAP-crawler: *
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /_gatools/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /_nipd/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /images/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /img/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/Print.do
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/arts_and_entertainment/commercial/vip_lounge
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/viewArticle.arc
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/tools_and_services/rss/times_mobile_content/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/tools_and_services/mobile_times/mobile_2/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/tools_and_services/mobile_times/mobile_3/

ACAP-crawler: NewsNow
ACAP-crawler: Omgili
ACAP-crawler: WebVac
ACAP-crawler: WebZip
ACAP-crawler: psbot
ACAP-crawler: ia_archiver
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /

via www.timesonline.co.uk

[pointer by The NextWeb]

Excerpt: "Haarlem Oost is a branch library in the Netherlands that wanted to encourage visitors to add tags (descriptive keywords) to the books they read. These tags would be added to the books in the catalog to build a kind of recommendation system. To do this, the library didn't create a complicated computer system or send people online. Instead, they installed more book drops and return shelves, labeled with different descriptors like "boring," "great for kids," "funny," etc. This brilliant design allowed patrons to create new knowledge about the books in the library while only slightly adjusting their book-returning behavior."

Says Silicon Alley Insider "Newspaper employment has utterly collapsed in the last 15 years, with employment numbers now around where they were in the mid-1950s."