I've been tooling around on Vita.mn, the new youth-focused entertainment website from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. It's good to see the Star Tribune back in the groove, breaking new ground.

There's a lot to like in this effort -- wiki-like collaborative "guides" authored by the community, a solid foundation of basic listings, calendaring, free tagging and social networking. And it's refreshingly fast. My only immediate complaint is that it doesn't do enough to celebrate its "people" functionality -- some of the cool stuff is quite buried.

Journalism.co.uk has an interview with Bob Cauthorn, who's been traveling and speaking in Europe recently, about the upcoming launch of what it calls a "'social network' for newspapers." And Cauthorn's company, CityTools LLC, has an informational page about the "Rosetta Project." I don't get the social network reference; it sounds like a content and advertising syndication system.

Last year Tom Grubisch examined a number of local "citizen journalism" projects and declared that what he found, "apart from a couple of honorable exceptions, is the Internet equivalent of Potemkin villages -- an elaborate façade with little substance behind it."

A year later he reexamines these projects for OJR.org. He finds some signs of progress, but also has some harsh criticisms.

If interactivity is one of the four keys to a successful news website, don't we need community management skills?

In most newsrooms, if you chat long enough, someone will bring up the moldy old question: What about the digital divide?

Let's bury that.

Some 60 million U.S. households have Internet access. Daily newspapers reach only about 50 million households. Should we be talking about the print partition? The crushed-tree chasm?

Jakob Nielsen tackles the subject in his column this week, noting that falling prices for computer technology have demolished the "economic divide" argument.

Back in the last century I participated in a New Directions for News workshop. We had one of those future-scenario breakout sessions, and my group sat down to design a new media product for 2010. Chris Mahai was our group leader, and she took us down an interesting, "jobs to be done" path (long before Innosight started throwing the phrase around). What would our lives be like in 2010?

Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design has boiled down 96 pages of Harvard Business School prose into bullet points. His bottom line for the N2 Blueprint for Transformation? "This thing is great. ... Go read it for yourself. All 96 pages."