It sounds like a mission impossible: set up a progressive publication, one which doesn’t shirk from flicking the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, and don’t worry if the money doesn’t immediately roll in.

Robert Scheer, former columnist at the LA Times, sacked, he says, because of his opposition to the Iraq War, is trying to do exactly this. Truthdig is “an attempt to put out a good solid magazine of substance that has a progressive point of view.” Rather than competing with old media, he aims to produce “evergreen” copy giving readers in-depth analyses on current news stories. How to keep the “webzine” financially afloat? No get rich scheme, Truthdig will eventually depend on ad revenue as well as sponsorship for specific projects.
- Online Journalism Review

Two further suggestions from Joe Mathewson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, banker and corporate lawyer. Newspapers benefit our civic health in ways which far outstrip the profits they bring to their investors. Simple tax legislation could make it easier for newspaper owners to convert ailing businesses into not-for-profit companies, into tax deductible gifts. Or newspapers could follow the US real estate investment trust model: distribute all profits to shareholders and get an exemption from federal taxes.
- Editor and Publisher

Another day, another gee-whiz step forward in how I experience the net. I’ve just upgraded the web service which provides the recent bookmarks feed on iMakeContent’s left-hand column. Yeah, RSS is amazing. It promises to pull the pieces of our digital lives together. And it’s nearly there.

FeedDigest is a free and easy way to tie del.icio.us posts, or any other RSS feeds, to your blog.

The way I use it, FeedDigest takes my Del.icio.us feed and drops it automatically into iMakeContent’s html. Allows me to keep the blog ticking over even when I don’t have time to post properly.

A revamp of RSS Digest, the new FeedDigest has a cleaner, sharper user interface. Better control over feeds - how they get ordered, how they look. It also claims to update faster. I hope so - my only gripe with RSS Digest, the way it sometimes slowed up, sometimes failed to update. A thing of the past, says its developer…

What’s most promising is FeedDigest’s ability to filter and mix rss feeds. I’ll be launching a couple of blogs in the next couple of months. Question is whether I should provide each blog with its own del.icio.us feed or just have one and let FeedDigest filter and mix feeds as required.

Interviewed by Phillip Dodd for BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves last night, novelist William Gibson talked about the difficulties of writing in an age in which history has its finger pressed down firmly on the fast-forward button - not a cliché in 1984 when it appeared in Neuromancer - with no letting up in sight.

Gibson wanted to set Pattern Recognition, his latest novel, in the present. He thought that he’d become ‘a little bit too slick at doing the present-trends-transmogrified-into-an-imaginary-future thing.’

But how to catch it, fix it down on paper, a fictional present in a real present which won’t stay still for a second, which finds itself in a world where everything solid is melting into the ether of a world wide matrix, a world of rapid information flows where future shock never stops?

Writing the novel immediately after September 11 2001, he set its present in the ‘very, very near future’.

By the time the book was published, its present had passed. Now it’s a novel about the very recent past.

- BBC Nightwaves audio on demand until April 30.