Four in the afternoon

1. Using social media to report on Egypt. Mashable

2. The Burbank Leader has followed through on its pledge to sue the city of Burbank for merit-based bonuses paid to city employees. Burbank Leader

3. The nonprofit California Watch has launched a new partnership with several newspapers across the state. CFIR

4. Facebook is making an aggressive push to get in the comments game on media websites - especially startups. CNET

Twitter to become even more annoying

Twitter is hiring a sales team to sell advertising on the chatter site. CNET (via Nieman Journalism Lab)

In iPhone case, shield law doesn't matter

A court has set aside concerns that police trampled the state's shield law protecting the free-press rights of journalists and appointed a "special master" to search through the computer files of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen in hopes of finding information about a prototype iPhone. Apparently Chen's attorney, Thomas Nolan, brokered a deal to let the search happen.

Chen published several online stories and videos about the prototype, which he obtained after Gizmodo's parent company, Gawker Media, agreed to pay $5000 to a man who said he found the phone in a bar.

The Interntubes are fragile

According to a Facebook executive, a fierce denial-of-service attack aimed at a single Georgian blogger yesterday was what brought down Twitter and disrupted service on Facebook, LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube.

CNET News has the story:

The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News. ...

Political conflicts between Russia and its former republic spilled online last year with DoS attacks and Web site defacements going in both directions.

Are these sites really this vulnerable? Do the Russians (clearly implicated here) have that much technical kung fu? Or is there more to the story than an attack on a Georgian blogger?

*Also, one year ago today Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, marking the start of a 5-day war.