Quick hit links

Some useful links from recent finds:

• In "Do We Realise What We're Doing," the Guardian explains why it will keep its British style even as it pushes a new online American edition (not just all those "ou" combinations, "c" instead of "s" and "s" instead of "z," but why an official will be from the "state department" and not the State Department). A good reminder for all editors and editing classes out there that style is relative and not absolute.
• Through a link to one of my posts from Liz Donovan's Infomaniac blog, I discovered the Depth Reporting blog of Mark Schaver, the computer-assisted reporting point person at the Louisville Courier-Journal, and through that, a link to a new project, the Reporters' Cookbook wiki, which has various tutorials and plans for more, as well as selected handouts from the recent National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting conference. Both now occupy a proud space in my blogroll. (To rework a Humphrey Bogart line from one of the great newspaper movies, Deadline U.S.A, "It's the Web, baby.")
• A Deutsche Bank analyst predicts newspapers bounce back -- in 2012. Hmmmm. (That's an Editor & Publisher link, so get it while it's hot. E&P still puts stuff out of reach after a while.)
• Larry Timbs, a colleague up the road at Winthrop, is blogging. And check him out in a tux (going to have to fight the women away).
• Jay Rosen's checklist of the attributes of a good online news site.
• Steve Yelvington has a useful contrarian view of Microsoft's investment in Facebook.
• ZipSkinny allows you to quickly compare various statistics by ZIP code. However, there's no contact info I see on this site, and the owner is cloaked in a "whois" search, so use with caution.