A story I neglected to note last week was Google's attempt to make websites more sociable with its Friend Connect feature.

Fortunately, over at The Media Manager, Kirk LaPointe has had his eye on the bouncing Google ball.

He noted the battle this could trigger over who owns personal data (users or the the social network service) and Facebook's attempt to lower the temperature, saying that while Google is a good company, it didn't consult Facebook first -- which is why Facebook blocked access to the feature.

Kirk also noted that Google Earth now has a local news aggregation feature and that a Business Week article quotes an analyst as saying that Google is killing the revenue streams for journalism, capturing the lion's share while not paying one nickel towards content creation.

Gawker has a pointer to this chilling new U.S. blog:

From Gawker:

We've stopped reporting most buyouts and layoffs at America's troubled newspapers because the story is repetitive—and morbid, even for an internet outlet that stands to gain from the flight of readers and advertisers from print. That's why the new Paper Cuts is such a boon. The blog summarizes the latest staff reductions, and displays the data as points on a Google Map.

I don't know if print is "dead," but it's certainly going through a nasty restructuring. And the longer-term prognosis is anything but optimistic.

A reporter for an Urdu-language newspaper has been shot dead in Pakistan after interviewing a spokesman for Tehreek-e-Taleban Pakistan, the Pakistan Taliban Movment.

The shooting of Muhammad Ibrahim took place in the Bajaur tribal region, near the Afghanistan border in the north of Pakistan.

Three men reportedly gathered up Ibrahim's cellphone, camera and notes. (thanks, Mungo).

In Sri Lanka, journalists are protesting after one of their colleagues was kidnapped and then released, but not before suffering a terrible beating.

Keith Noyahr, deputy editor with the English weekly The Nation, had been critical of the Sri Lankan army's conduct in its conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, said the Free Media Movement.

Emily Gould lives in Brooklyn. She's a blogger, which led to relationship problems (the boyfriend didn't much like being part of her posts), but she also landed a gig at Gawker. In a New York Times Magazine article, she writes the following about how that job may have been her destiny:

In the fall of 2006, I got a call from the managing editor of Gawker Media, a network of highly trafficked blogs, asking me to come by the office in SoHo to talk about a job. Since its birth four years earlier, the company’s flagship blog, Gawker, had purported to be in the business of reporting “Manhattan media gossip,” which it did, sometimes — catty little details about writers and editors and executives, mostly. But it was also a clearinghouse for any random tidbit of information about being young and ambitious in New York. Though Gawker was a must-read for many of the people working at the magazines and newspapers whose editorial decisions the site mocked and dissected, it held an irresistible appeal for desk-bound drones in all fields — tens of thousands of whom visited the site each day.

I had been one of those visitors for as long as I’d had a desk job. Sometimes Gawker felt like a source of essential, exclusive information, tailored to the needs of people just like me. Other times, reading Gawker left me feeling hollow and moody, as if I’d just absentmindedly polished off an entire bag of sickly sweet candy. But when the call came, I brushed this thought aside. For a young blogger in New York in 2006, becoming an editor at Gawker was an achievement so lofty that I had never even imagined it could happen to me. The interview and audition process felt a little surreal, like a dream. But when I got the job, I had the strange and sudden feeling that it had been somehow inevitable. Maybe my whole life — all the trivia I’d collected, the knack for funny meanness I’d been honing since middle school — had been leading up to this moment.

According to Wikipedia, Gould left Gawker on Nov. 30, 2007.

A previous Gawker-related post:

Jan. 13 - Has media gossip site Gawker passed its 'best before' date?

Gawker noted Gould's piece here: Emily Gould introduces oversharing to New York Times Magazine

Gould acknowledged the "elephant in the room" at her own blog, Emily Magazine.