At PBS MediaShift, Mark Glaser takes a look at newspaper print veteran Andrew Malcolm’s rebirth as a political blogger at LATimes.com with Top of the Ticket.

From the citizen media site GroundReport comes this interesting March 28 panel on politics, technology and the 2008 election, moderated by Jeff Jarvis with  Arianna Huffington, Jay Rosen, Micah Sifry and Lisa Tozzi. Don’t like the website, though. Where’s the place for conversation?

It’s hard to keep up with all the updates from your Twitter friends, right? (I’m at twitter.com/jdlasica.) Here’s an application that makes it easier: Twhirl. Several of my Twitter friends have recommended it, and I’m liking it better than Twitterific, another desktop client for Twitter.

You may not have heard of Adobe AIR, but SheGeeks offers a list of cool, lightweight AIR applications — including Twhirl, WebKut, Shrink O’Matic and others — that have the potential to tubocharge your productivity. Or your fun quotient.

San Francisco Chronicle: Building a better box for the world’s data. Excerpt:

Libraries might store both
the hardware and software for playback – like an old phonograph that
plays wax records – a tactic called encapsulation.

Whatever the approach, it should have started yesterday and now must
run faster to keep up with tomorrow because, as Keller said,
"everybody’s a creator, everybody’s a publisher."

That’s why I continue to use Ourmedia and the Internet Archive — a nonprofit devoted to long-term preservation — for publishing my videos, given that many of the 600-plus commercially driven video hosting sites will be out of business in a few years.

San Jose Mercury News: Google’s gPhone and Android draw raves at conference. Excerpt:

The prototype of a phone
using Google’s free software for mobile devices shown Wednesday
resembled the iPhone in its minimalist design and responsiveness to
gentle touches and taps. But it also sported some fresh features that
may prompt a few iPhone users to upgrade.

A clear geek favorite was the device’s ability to double as a compass
so that mobile maps constantly reorient themselves, even in the
stereoscopic street view. …

Chris O’Brien at his San Jose Mercury News blog: NetSquared: Harnessing the power of social media to solve social problems.