Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

Clay Shirky has another great essay out that I’m still taking time to digest. It argues that radical change causes complex systems to collapse because they’re unable to change. Not because they don’t want to but because their complexity causes them to lock up.

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

Mathew Ingram also sums it up on Gigaom.

Poet Edward Carson argues that our familiarity with the internet is changing the shape of non-fiction.

David Sasaki, over at the PBS Idealab looks at why curation is becoming more important in today’s news environment.

Finally, some eye candy: A gallery of Penguin covers sorted by decade.

One other face-palm inducing stat that I pulled out of that PR Week study that was published last week:

Among the total respondents, the use of blogs and social networks for research increased significantly in 2010 as compared to 2009; however this spike appears to be skewed by online magazine/news reporters and bloggers. While 91% of bloggers and 68% of online reporters “always” or “sometimes” use blogs for research, only 35% of newspaper and 38% of print magazine journalists suggested the same.

This divergence was also seen when using social networks for research. Overall, 33% of respondents indicated using such assets, but blogger usage (48%) was greater than newspaper (31%) and print magazine (27%).

The emphasis is mine. That figure is mindbogglingly low. Lets flip that around, almost two-thirds of newspaper journalists don’t use blogs or social media when doing their research. I can’t think of many beats where you wouldn’t do some research on blogs or social media. More importantly, print and magazine journalists, need to realize one fact;  your stories are going online. There’s even a chance that your stories are being read by more people online than in print. Whether you like it or not you might just be an online journalist. Maybe it’s time to start acting like one.