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Technology makes things easier for journalists but it's also made it riskier for sources, Sherry Ricchiardi writes in an American Journalism Review story about new ways for governments and others to keep tabs on reporters: "Government spying and journalists being stalked are nothing new. It's the methods that have changed. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein didn't have to worry about Trojans stealing the identities of their Watergate sources."

Two views on a favorite meme of the Internet age. Robert Niles writes on Online Journalism Review that news publishers are struggling "because the market's telling them just how worthless" their product — a commodity called information — actually is. But on Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson writes that data is never free: "Unless we fully realize the costs and obligations of being digital, we’re likely to mistakenly believe it can be free."

Print still dominates but e-books grew from 17% of sales in December to 21% just two months later in February, according to this new study from the Pew Research Center. Authors will be pleased to learn that e-book device users read more: "Those who read e-books read more books than those who don't have the devices: The average reader of e-books has read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months, compared with an average of 15 books by a non-e-book consumer."

Denise Graveline surveys alternatives to the fabled Flip, which met its end after Cisco Systems acquired its original maker. "The good news: The rest of the field didn't grind to a halt. The bad news: You have more choices than ever to make when choosing an ultralight camcorder." The options range from a $100 Sony with bare-bones capability, to more expensive models with built-in wifi sharing, geotagging, beefed-up memory and storage, and live-streaming for videos.

Does it matter whether a news story includes links to outside sources? Does it distract readers or enhance the experience? Does anyone even click on those links? These and other questions were discussed in a pair of posts by Jonathan Stray at Nieman Journalism Lab and Felix Salmon on Wired. Stray: "I can’t see any reason why readers shouldn’t demand, and journalists shouldn’t supply, links to all online resources used in writing a story."

Nine months after launch, "Google+ is a virtual ghost town compared with the site of rival Facebook," Amir Efrati writes in the Wall Street Journal. "Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore," Efrati continues. Google+ users reacted to the news, as in this thread.

Now we know why the holiday shopping season was so strong. Everybody was buying tablets and e-readers. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that ownership of one or both devices rose from 18% of U.S. adults in December to 29% in January as competition picked up and prices dropped: "These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers."

Saving your favorite tweets, creating a photo gallery, posting photos to Twitter from 16 external sites — those and other tips are discussed by Paul Boutin on the New York Times Personal Tech blog: "Twitter has been augmented, by the company and by other Internet toolmakers, with a virtual appliance store of simple, utilitarian features, widgets and services that let users find interesting posts, create photo albums or search Twitter more efficiently."

If a computer can win at Jeopardy, can it answer questions in the newsroom? That's a question posed by Jonathan Stray on a Mediashift Idea Lab post. Stray also includes a top-ten list of best data mining ideas for 2011, including Graphical Inference for Infovis, which can help journalists answer the question, "How do we know when a data visualization shows us something that is 'actually there,' as opposed to an artifact of the numbers?