These are my links for April 15th through April 16th:

• Election 2010: what the manifestos promise for media and creatives – Here's one to interrogate your election door-steppers with: what the three main parties will do for the UK's creative industries. There's some reasonable differentiators, particularly in Lib Dem/ Conservative pledge to (perhaps) diminish or cut the Regional Development Agencies. Some hopes still on the horizon for a (too little too late) games industry tax break.
• Is ‘free’ finally falling out of favor? – Sad news today that Ning, the social network tool that lets anyone set up a niche social network in a few minutes, is adopting a pay or leave model. It's sad: I'm sure a lot of the networks I'm in will go (even a small cost is not always easy to achieve) and the critical mass Ning had with setting up one account to access multiple online communities, particularly in the non-profit space, will whither away. But it's also more symptomatic that this 'poster child' for web 2.0 free communities cannot survive endless free lunches: with Meetup.com steeling a march on real world communities by charging annual fees, we may now start to see the gradual 'pay or die' monetisation of many online services.
• 5 Ways to Reduce Social Media Distractions and Be More Productive – Some help we all need right now! Productivity tools to avoid getting carried away with 'real time' data (from bank accounts to social networks) just because it's there.