TPM’s Josh Marshall has shared a chart of their mobile (smartphone + tablet, in this case) traffic growth, which is substantial. Highlights:

— Mobile now accounts for 19 percent of TPM traffic.

— It’s iPhone, iPad, and Android, in that order. No other platform matters much. TPM gets around 750,000 visits a month from iPhones, 500,000 from iPads, and 400,000 from Android devices.

— iPhone growth is accelerating.

— Marshall: “My own sense is that iPhone or other handset devices will never be the primary way people will want to read news. It’s just too small — totally functional and extremely useful but not what you’d probably gravitate towards if you were at home and had a desktop or tablet to use. But I can easily imagine tablets becoming the preferred way to reading news.”

As a regular TPM reader, I suspect they’d see even faster mobile growth if they integrated the TPMLiveWire — which seems tailor-made for mobile, being a series of quick bursts of news — into their mobile site. It’s a curious absence.

In the Guardian, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Lucy Chambers compares the for-profit Goliath of mapping, Google Maps, to the open source comer, OpenStreetMap, in how well they map Sarajevo and environs.

The stark difference between these two images of Sarajevo really brought home the impressive coverage of OpenStreetMap and more importantly it really shows the power of open data, open software and communities of people driven to solve problems. Giving people the tools to solve problems is really powerful.

I wasn’t aware there’s a nice tool to compare, side by side, how Google Maps and OpenStreetMap cover a particular area. Here’s my hometown, for instance, and here’s our office. (Google Maps, for reasons unknown, has long argued that Harvard’s president lives on our front lawn. She doesn’t.)

Crosscut’s Hugo Kagiya takes a look at one of the first newspaper casualties of the financial crisis, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which shut down print and went online-only in 2009, albeit with a sharply reduced staff. Three years in, Kagiya says, it’s further diminished.

“The name survived,” Murakami said. “The brand is more than the name. You can put Mountain Dew in Coke cans but it doesn’t take long to realize it’s no longer Coke. The brand died the day we shut down and when the staff that did the work that made the P-I the P-I were shown the door. Today, the P-I’s spirit is alive more in InvestigateWest than in SeattlePI.com.”

The venerable liberal political weekly — cofounded by Walter Lippmann, for whom our office building is named — has Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes as its new owner, and he’s decided to open the gates:

We are pleased to announce that, as of today, all articles on the TNR website are now accessible free of charge to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. This decision is in line with our desire to enable new readers to discover and share the best of what TNR’s writers produce each day. While readers will continue to need to subscribe in order to read our content in print or on tablet devices, access to recent TNR content on the web will be free.

A paywall for new articles always seemed like a strange strategy for a magazine whose purpose is to influence political debates, not to make money. TNR’s lost about half of its paid print circulation since 2000.

Virginia Heffernan — formerly of The New York Times, now of Yahoo News — was at the Berkman Center yesterday to give a talk about digital culture and her upcoming book, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet. Worth a listen — her remarks are about 30 minutes, followed by Q&A.

David Moth at Econsultancy takes a look at The Telegraph’s iPad app and has some interesting data points. Some highlights:

There were more Telegraph for iPad users over 55 than under 35.

This finding let the Telegraph focus on smartphones and the web for campaigns or content aimed at younger readers, since iPad app users tended to be older…

Examining the time of day when users accessed The Telegraph with their iPads revealed a second spike in the evening. With that in mind, the publisher introduced a night-reading mode, turning the iPad into a lean-back device users read in bed…

Half of users shared content with family members. The Telegraph says advertisers need to recognise this as increased circulation.

Peak reading times were earlier and later in the day for iPad readers compared with desktop viewers, and higher on weekends. The Telegraph says this is especially important for some advertisers: coffee makers will want morning readers, while dessert makers will look for evening users.