Interesting Articles: Q4 2009

I'm sorry to offer only a small selection of interesting articles this quarter, and a bit disappointed to notice they all come from the same source.

* Online and Isolated? (WNYC's On The Media via NPR). New research suggests internet use doesn't increase social isolation.
* TV's Unlikely Ally (WNYC's On The Media via NPR). A little-publicized story about how a new technology the television industry once decried--the DVR--has turned out to help it. Makes one think about, say, the newspaper industry and the web.
* News Ex Machina (WNYC's On The Media via NPR). A portrait of a large company that generates content at low cost and tries to get the content to rank highly on search engines in order to run automatically-targeted internet ads against it. This is a side of the search engine / online advertising market that I never previously had seen reported on.