The Times discovered the magnitude of the problem while developing its own online map to display LAPD data. Comparing the LAPD map with the department’s official totals revealed that thousands of crimes through mid-June were missing. The department’s official crime tally recorded more than 52,000 serious crimes this year. But the database on the public mapping site contained fewer than 33,000 for the same period.

‘What’s in it for the UMG labels? A lot, actually. Not only does Universal suddenly get access to a plethora of talented indie artists to add to its catalogues, it can have a preexisting relationship with many of them if both parties want to take a musician’s career to another level. “It’s all about A&R,” Price said. “Universal’s about trying to identify artists that they think will be successful. It allows them to identify what’s famous without a traditional A&R scout team—there’s a preexisting relationship that can be built upon.”‘

“Help us protect our families and communities. Create a video Public Service Announcement with the message of preventing or dealing with the flu, post it on YouTube, and you could win a $2,500 cash prize!”

When she said this, I was actually dumbfounded. Twice, it turned out. Figuring out what to say, however, became my own mini-education in talking about race.

Canadian musician Dave Carroll could have sung the blues after United Airlines workers at O’Hare smashed his guitar and the carrier refused to pick up the $1,200 cost to repair it.

Instead, he turned the experience into a witty ditty, “United Breaks Guitars,” and scored an instant hit on YouTube.com, his first in a 16-year career. The video has been viewed more than 502,000 times since it was posted on Monday.

Revenge for this obscure musician and his band, it appears, was best served with a smile and a country twang.

“Open government is about government as platform. And being a platform means letting people do whatever they like with your tools, letting them build in ways that meet their own agendas, not yours. It’s about coming to see your users’ agendas as your own agenda. If your users win, you win.

“On the other hand, if you force your own agenda on your users, then they don’t build anything, and everyone loses.

“Open gov is a dialogue between governments and constituents, not a monologue. Everyone gets to decide what gets talked about and what gets built, not just the people with the data.”

Crowdsourced application to “out” people abusing parking permits in New York City.

“Roughly half of that philanthropic support has gone to support investigative journalism, and more than $56 million went to three nonprofit organizations: the Center for Investigative Reporting, begun in 1977, the Center for Public Integrity, founded in 1989, and ProPublica, which started in 2008. But more broadly, and in direct response to the commercial news media meltdown, something historically stunning has been occurring – nonprofit investigative reporting centers are proliferating throughout the nation, a new entrepreneurialism brought about largely by the diaspora of working journalists simply searching for a hospitable milieu in which to do their important work.”

“Banner ads were the bastard product of media companies thinking that they could use basically the same sort of big, boring ad on the web that they always relied on in print.”