There’s a lot of talk about “paywalls”. It’s usually about newspapers, and it’s almost always just about news. It shouldn’t be.

Nor should Rupert Murdoch’s introduction of a pay-to-view model be regarded as an act of desperation. This could be the moment newspapers finally begin to get it right.

Am I willing to pay for a trusted digital offering that helps make my life better, more prosperous, and better informed? Definitely.

WITHIN minutes of speaking to the Queen, the Prime Minister had sent me a quick email. I wasn’t surprised. It was the fourth time he had been in touch in recent weeks. 

Now that I've got your attention, it's time for a rundown of musings from the corridors of Cogapp in our latest and greatest Internal Digest. Aside from the surfing dog above from Tristan, here's what else has been captivating the collective Cogapp mind of late:

Joe dug deep into the back-end of Google Maps, scouring miles of code and a nigh on infinite amount of pictures to find the deeply hidden algorithm that reveals how Google Street View works according to Google Japan:

Some of us here at Cogapp were lucky enough to get tickets to Friday’s sold out dConstruct conference, just down the road from us in Brighton. It was an extremely inspiring day…

Adam Greenfield kick-started the morning with a detailed and compelling study of the role that ubiquitous computing is/can/will play(ing) in large cities (there’s no avoiding a capricious use of tenses when discussing the near-future). His talk was fuelled by the fact that, as of last year, most human beings on planet Earth live in cities. This comes at a time when we’re in the process of shifting from a state of having hundreds of people per computer to hundreds of computers per person, so it stands to reason that the laws and trends that have governed cities of the analogue past will not be relevant for modern/future times.

Information, argues Greenfield, is becoming ‘persistent’ - offered to us at every waking moment, whether it is desired or not. When surrounded by statistics on every object and person in our vicinity, people begin to cluster into groups of common identity, avoiding encounters that do not seem desirable in advance. Ubiquitous computing is likely to usher in mind-boggling efficiency and agency over our environment, but we are at risk of losing a textural, unplanned, helpless quality that has previously made cities such ‘centres for human vitality and creativity’.

Greenfield’s thorough account of possible urban conditions of the near future felt neither pessimistic nor naively utopian, but underlined our need to be fiercely conscientious and adaptable.

A couple of chaps from Stamen Design talked us through the creative process for some of their celebrated data visualisations, ranging from busy, data-rich apps like Historical Hurricane Maps and Oakland Crimespotting...

I attended the BBC Knowledge Multiplatform briefing day yesterday. The strategy outlined by Simon Nelson and others thankfully counteracted the soporific effects of being located in an airless room in the bowels of Broadcasting House, as the sun beat down on the London streets (it ain’t called the ‘big smoke’ for nothing).

Here are the highlights:

On ‘Permanence’ – Signalling a radical shift from the ephemerality of the linear broadcast slot, the BBC now has a system to automatically generate a permanent web page for every programme episode which, over time, can be further enriched with ratings, recommendations, synopses, AV, track listings and so on. As well as prolonging the life of the content beyond transmission and making it findable and linkable, the system has released time and budget previously spent on often rapidly pulled together and under-performing programme-related sites.  It’s currently in its beta version - visit it here.

So far so good; I can find out more about that track I liked in last week’s Mad Men for example. But what is so much more exciting is the prospect of applying the same system to the BBC archive – tens of decades of radio and television content opened up and made findable, shareable and mashable. Of course, as with most BBC projects of this scale and ambition – from the launch of BBC Two through expansion from terrestrial to digital in the late 90s to the launch of the iPlayer in late 2007 - the usual debates around public service and commercialism will no doubt rage.

Will the content be free at the point of use? Will it be limited to British people as licence-fee payers or made globally available but at a fee to non-UK residents? How might the release of such content impact upon the broader commercial market? These are just some of the potential areas of contention. I assume the findings from the Creative Archive pilot will feed significantly into the BBC’s thinking from here.

On Wednesday I attended a one-day seminar at the excellent Dana Centre. Organised by Museum ID, it focused on the cultural sector's use of social media, broadcasting and the web, with lots of concrete examples from UK museums and heritage organisations.

The day started with a presentation from John Stack, Head of Tate Online. In it, he emphasised the need for a two-way dialogue between museums and their audiences, and provided several concrete examples of when the Tate has done exactly that with regard to tying in with physical exhibitions. These projects included: How We Are Now, where visitors were asked to contribute photos to a Flickr pool, the best of which were exhibited in the gallery; Tate Tracks, with visitors contributing their own artwork-inspired audio; Street or Studio, where the best contributed photos were made into a limited edition book; and finally a short-story competition to tie in with the TH.2058 exhibition in the Turbine Hall, with the best entries made into an audio podcast narrated by ex-Dr. Who Christopher Eccleston.

Next up was a presentation by Adrian Arthur, the Head of Web Services of the British Library. He outlined some of the BL's experiments with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and podcasts, as well as their experience in opening up their sound recording archives to user generated content such as tags and annotations. Then he emphasised the need for cross-departmental cooperation in achieving the goal of disseminating the two key strengths of the library: its enormous amount of content, and the expertise of its curators. His colleague Clive Izard, Head of Creative Services, then took over to discuss the changes in both technology and user expectation which will be instrumental in shaping services in the future. As part of this he demonstrated some innovative and exciting ideas for researcher tools, including a rich multi-tiered interface that can provide for both lay and specialist audiences, and which could incorporate cutting-edge visualisation techniques alongside original source material (e.g. a 3D terrain view, synchronised with historical maps).

Picture the scene: you’re in a restaurant with mates having a good meal with a glass of wine. Your friend rallies attention round for a possibly fantastic anecdote. Everyone leans in, ears open, listening in anticipation for a killer tale. Forty five seconds later the anecdote ends and the table erupts with laughter. A great story, delivered impeccably with a fantastic punch-line. Everyone sits back as the chuckles die down. And then you give your acquaintance a pound for his efforts.

Sound odd? Well, if the folks at Facebook have their way, this sort of behaviour could become commonplace on the social networking site in the not too distant future. The Facebook gurus are currently testing a ‘credit’ system whereby users purchase a set number of credits for a small price (100 for $1 at the moment) and then allocate these credits to items in their news feed. So if you particularly enjoy the fact that ‘Matt Bevan wants to go for a beer in the sunshine’ or ‘Ben Butcher is the best toast chucker ever’, you can show them this by giving them credits. The theory behind it is that the credits mean a little more than just the current ‘liking’ it because they cost money - the only way people can obtain credits to share out is by purchasing them or receiving them from other people. However, how many credits the user has will not be on display on the user’s profile page as Facebook are keen to emphasize it is not a competitive venture.

It’s a fascinating idea that’s for sure – will people be willing to pay money to show their friends they care? The scheme is currently being tested in fifteen college networks in the USA and shows that whilst money can’t buy you love, it might be able to help others see you love them. But is the idea purely a way of showing that you are a fan of your friend’s updates, or is there another intention? By being able to track which updates people are willing to pay to show their appreciation for, Facebook will be able to see exactly which updates are really meaningful to people, and adapt Highlights and advertising accordingly.

This weekend saw Brighton's third barcamp, held at the Students' Union building at the University of Sussex. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, barcamp is an 'ad-hoc unconference': a whole weekend of talks provided by the participants themselves.