The New York Times and the non-profit investigative reporting outfit ProPublica are seeking $1 million from this year's Knight News Challenge
to launch DocumentCloud, an online repository of the primary-source
documents which reporters usually dig up and discard on a daily basis.

Zachary M. Seward at the newly launched Nieman Journalism Lab
kicks off his analysis of applications to the Knight News Challenge –
which is handing out around $5 million in 2009 for the development and
distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services,
and programs based on open-source digital technology which serves the
public interest — with a closer look at DocumentCloud:
"The proposal relies on a piece of software called DocViewer, which was
developed by the Times’ Interactive Newsroom Technologies team. The
head of that team, Aron Pilhofer, recently confirmed that the Times will release DocViewer as open source 'sometime after the election.'"

"The
project could lead to greater information sharing among news
organizations and their audience. [It] would let news organizations
upload their materials for public consumption and analysis. 'Readers
will also be able to quickly search, annotate and bookmark documents —
and for the first time link directly to specific pages or passages.'"

Jay Rosen seemed less than impressed by the news, tweeting
his take on the situation: "I'd think the New York Times would be
donating $1 million to the Knight News Challenge rather than applying
for that amount. But that's me."

The NYT subtext commentary as
Rosen sees it: "We didn't spend on R & D during the fat years. We
don't think much of citizen journalism. Our company foundation can't
help. So we'll apply."

Is Facebook's popularity its own undoing?
Jemima Kiss writing for the Media Guardian
reports that "Facebook overtook the BBC's network of websites in
September to become the UK's fifth most popular online destination."

Citing figures from web measurement firm comScore,
Kiss says: "The social networking site saw its UK traffic rise 80% from
September last year to to 18.4 million unique users the month before
last. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke in Europe for the first
time last month, appearing at the Future of Web Apps conference in
London, where he claimed the site's global userbase had risen to 100
million."

ComScore's figures put traffic to the BBC's websites,
including news, sport and its programming sites, as down by 2.7% year
on year to 18.2 million unique users.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch adds a dollop of glass-half-empty circumspection to the conversation with his detailed breakdown of why Facebook may be growing too fast
and what it may mean for the company's capital requirements: "It costs
a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on
at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth,
particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year
for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly
the opposite of printing money."

"If they don’t raise a big
chunk of money now from someone who’ll pay whatever it takes to own a
piece of Facebook, there may be a heavily dilutive down-valuation round
for Facebook in the next 12-18 months."

Sam Diaz at Between the Lines is following this story too: "In response, Facebook basically responds by telling VentureBeat
that it’s doing just fine – thank you very much – while other sources
say that something must be wrong with the TechCrunch calculator."

Sam lists a few Facebook services that he'd be willing to pay for,
adding: "Subscriptions and fees may not be the right path for Facebook
in the long-term, but if the company is really testing the waters on
revenue sources while staying focused on growth, one of my random ideas
to help bring in a few extra bucks just might be worth considering."

Wikis get Creative Commons licensing
The Free Software Foundation has updated its GNU Free Document License, which essentially means that the Wikipedia community can now relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license.

Lawrence Lessig heralds this as "enormously important news", explaining: "It would be hard to overstate the importance of this change to the Free Culture
community. A fundamental flaw in the Free Culture Movement to date is
that its most important element — Wikipedia — is licensed in a way
that makes it incompatible with an enormous range of other content in
the Free Culture Movement. One solution to this, of course, would be
for everything to move to the FDL. But that license was crafted
initially for manuals, and there were a number of technical reasons why
it would not work well (and in some cases, at all) for certain
important kinds of culture.

"This change would now permit
interoperability among Free Culture projects, just as the dominance of
the GNU GPL enables interoperability among Free Software projects. It
thus eliminates an unnecessary and unproductive hinderance to the
spread and growth of Free Culture."

–Basheera Khan