NJ Court Rules Bloggers Not Protected By Shield Law — Let’s call this a small win for newspapers and a big loss for the public. It turns out there are curmudgeon judges too:

The judge ruled that Hale shouldn’t be considered a journalist because she hadn’t shown she was affiliated with a “legitimate” media outlet, according to Law.com. While Hale said she had written articles that had been published in trade journals and at least one newspaper, the judge found that she hadn’t proven that. Therefore, the judge ruled, Hale can be forced to tell a company suing her for libel the names of people who served as sources for a post she made on the message boards at Oprano — a site that covers the porn industry.

10 Stunning (And Useful) Stats About Twitter — There are some great nuggets of information on here. My favorites:

• 5 percent of Twitter users account for 75 percent of activity on Twitter.
• 21 percent of Twitter accounts have never even sent a tweet in. Many of these are most likely placeholders. Some might just be for people reading tweets but not sending tweets.
• Tuesday is the most active day of the week on Twitter, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.

The Trouble with Twitter trends — Twitter has to figure out a way to curate its Twitter trends. Right now the top trends that show up under Twitter trends are automated, which leaves them open to being gamed, especially by spammers or, worse, malicious links.

Twitter is growing rapidly, which is leading to some of these issues. The best way to solve this problem is to employ a combination of automatic trending topics based on popularity with human curation. Before that though, Twitter needs to find a way to block spammy links and accounts better.

Social Media marketing spending to hit $3.1 billion by 2014 — A good way to gauge the value of something is to see what people are willing to spend money on. If marketers are willing to spend a lot of money on social media, it makes sense for content producers to be on social media too. There is value in social media.

Amazon’s Kindle 2 gets a $60 price cut, now at $299 — Many in traditional publishing fields view the Kindle as a potential savior. I’m not so sure about that, but I do think the Kindle has a chance to get more people reading again. Now that the price is finally under $300, it might start seeing more mainstream adoption.

If the Kindle drops to $249 for Christmas, look out. Not only do Kindle readers read more books than the average person, but they also subscribe to newspapers on the Kindle, which run up to $14 a month. The Kindle won’t save newspapers, but it can certainly help to bring in more revenue.