For a variety of reasons, these are dark days for journalism, with the public's appetite to hand over money in return for quality reporting apparently in inexorable decline. How cheering then to be able to report some good news.
On Wednesday two journalists, Bobbie Johnson and Jim Giles, set out on an unlikely mission. They gave themselves 30 days to raise $50,000 to fund a new online technology magazine called Matter that would seek to publish long articles and get people to pay small sums for each one.
How often have you seen a new product and immediately thought "wow - why didn't I think of that?" That's what happened to me one evening in the summer of 2009 when I went to the graduate show at the Royal College of Art (RCA). I came across a Korean postgraduate student displaying something so simple yet so clever that I immediately reached for my phone and recorded what I saw.
The folding three pin plug displayed at the RCA's Innovation Night by Min-Kyu Choi went on to win all sorts of prizes, notably the 2010 Design of The Year award. But turning it into a product that could go on sale proved quite a challenge.
After a decade of struggle, the social networking battlefield has quietened down. Facebook is the undisputed champion, while Twitter serves for instant news and comment. Google+ tries hard but, as one wag put it, it's like the gym - we all join but nobody uses it. But could there be another challenger - a visual network where people share images on a virtual pinboard?
Pinterest has been around for a couple of years, a place with a largely female and American audience, where people share ideas on design, fashion, travel, books - or anything else you can think of - by "pinning" photos to their various boards.
Take two scenarios where mobile technology should be able to make our lives easier. A migrant worker in Kenya wants to send your family some money without having to get on a bus and travel for days. A group of young professionals in London goes out for a meal with friends, and when one person pays, the others need to settle up with him.
In the first case, the money transfer system M-Pesa has been allowing people to transfer cash across the country for years now, proving hugely popular. In the second, it only becomes possible today for anyone with a smartphone to send cash to their friends and see it transferred instantly.
Apple doesn't like to talk about anything but its products - and how wonderful they are.
So today's announcement is a measure of how much the company has been stung by criticism of working conditions at the plants which make all those iPads and iPhones.
The internet community - if there is such a thing - has risen up in anger over recent weeks. The main cause of its concerns have been perceived attempts to curtail online freedom by governments and corporations. So what makes the internet angry - and when does that anger have any impact?
In the United States there was outrage over proposed anti-piracy legislation, Pipa and Sopa, which culminated in a concerted global campaign to highlight the issues by blacking out sites like Wikipedia for 24 hours. And it worked - American politicians who seemed to have assumed that this was a somewhat obscure and uncontroversial issue took fright, and the new laws have been put on the back-burner.
I'm betting you've never heard of Neal Mann, but for a while on Tuesday this young producer at Sky News became a cause celebre, on Twitter at least. Under the hashtag #savefieldproducer he became a trending topic, one of the most-discussed subjects on the social networking service.
The reason was the leaking of what appeared to be a very restrictive new social media policy at Sky. According to the Guardian, the policy included a ban on retweeting stories from rival news organisations or people on Twitter, and staff will now be instructed to stick to their own beat, only tweeting about stories to which they have been assigned - or retweeting other Sky journalists. What's more, Sky's newsdesk, not social media, should be the first port of call for any of its journalists with a breaking story.
Rory has been watching the technology scene like a hawk for the last 15 years.
From the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s to the rise of Google and Facebook, from the Psion organiser to the iPad, he's covered all the big gadget and business stories, and interviewed just about everyone who's played a part in the story of the web.
Dot.Rory, his previous blog, was named among the Top 100 blogs by the Sunday Times
He aims to look at the impact of the internet and digital technology on our lives and businesses. Rory has been described as "the non-geek's geek", and freely admits that he came late to technology - but he aims to explain its significance to anyone with an interest in the subject.
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