It’s Friday, and this week I’m going to lead with the cats. If you’re less than enthusiastic about this, just skip down to the **** down below.

If you have cats, you probably have scenes like this. That’s Toby down below after chasing Harriet from the kitchen and across the dining room until she took refuge at a higher level. But he’s still doing his best to intimidate and annoy her, while Harry takes advantage of the high ground to try to send a little fur flying as well.

It’s usually not clear what triggers these little episodes between cats who spend hours every day in friendly interactions, at best, or more often, casual inattention. They’ll ignore each other for hours, then suddenly decide “that cat” has to be chased away right now!

Toby, the aggressor here, often finds himself running for cover when Romeo decides to assert himself. And Romeo turns into a cowering wimp when Mr. Silverman struts his stuff. And when she decides to assume the mantle of the matriarch, all those boys run for cover.

Cat society is very complicated.

This week’s Friday Felines are brought to you courtesy of the beta version of Picasa for Mac, Google’s software for managing, editing, and sharing images. It’s part of Google’s growing set of online applications, although in this case it resides as an application on your computer but uses Google’s online services to host and share your photo albums.

One advantage is that you can leave comments on individual photos, something that I haven’t implemented on my regular photo galleries. Now I’ll have to think about that option.

I stumbled my way through setting up this Friday’s photos without benefit of reading the instructions. That was probably a mistake, so I’ll refrain from publicly rating the experience.

**** I didn’t have to look very far for another great example of why I’m worried about the demise of newspapers. Here’s a great story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal reporting on fraud committed by mortgage brokers with criminal histories, part of a series titled “Easy Money”.

It’s the kind of story, and series, that has only been done by newspapers, of course with some exceptions. Without newspapers, will this work get done?

One answer is, well, maybe.

This week’s stories about a new federal report on endangered birds provides an example. The report got widespread coverage nationally and locally.

Less commented on is the fact that the report was a product of citizen science organized and aided by the federal government.

he first federal State of the Birds report was released Thursday, marking the beginning of an unprecedented collaboration between government researchers and conservation groups — and the underlying data comes from you.
“The data that goes into this report is by and large not collected by a few tin-head scientists or conservation organizations, but by millions of individuals,” said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. “We can begin to put together spectacularly massive databases that show us, in great detail with fine-grained scope, what the trends are.”

Like SETI, the use of millions of personal computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, it’s a way to combine individual efforts into an otherwise unlikely project. Can less ambitious but similarly structured data gathering be used to collect everyday news? Place your bets.

Meanwhile, fallout continues from the demise of the Seattle P-I. Like this cry to save what can be salvaged of the P-I’s archives. Crosscut.com muses on the death of the P-I taking off, in part, from findings of the latest PEW report on the state of the news media.

And San Francisco columnist Mark Morford comes up with his own defense against those who say they aren’t worried about the passing of the newspaper era.