Jim Colgan

Restaurant owners are bracing themselves for a new food safety grading system starting later this month. Diners will soon see an 8 x 12 inch blue "A," green "B," or yellow "C" letter posted at the entrance of every restaurant and bar in all five boroughs of New York City--nearly 24,000 locations in total.

The news today that comic author Harvey Pekar had passed away this morning had a particular resonance here at The Takeaway. Before we were even a proper show, John Hockenberry interviewed the Cleveland native for an early special we did about the 2008 election and Ohio. The man memorialized by Paul Giamatti in "American Splendor" was predictably dour about our plan to use his home state as a bellwether for the nation: He told us, "Most people in Ohio are just like the are in the rest of the country — average."

Here is the audio of John's interview with Harvey back in December 2007. And here's the comic strip he authored about the experience (in which I'm honored to have a cameo role!). Click on the image to see it properly.

We here at The Takeaway are always looking to connect with local communities. So this week we're hosting a summit with our friends at WLRN in Miami that's made possible by the Knight Foundation. We're experimenting to see how we can use text messaging as a tool for uncovering local issues that matter in Little Haiti, Miami. Can it help journalists and the communities they cover tell more compelling stories?

Simply walking around a neighborhood sounds like an easy thing to do. It's an invaluable tool for a journalist covering a local community. But it happens so rarely.

Jim here in Miami for a two-day summit we're holding on developing new sources through texting.

We've been excited about adding texting as one more way people can interact with us at the show. Now we're experimenting with ways to take that further and develop stories directly from a local community using mobile phones.

Our first stop this morning is Little Haiti, where we'll be speaking with community leaders —and anyone we stumble across — to look for stories that we can try out in the real world.

Stay tuned for updates and let us know your thoughts here!

This week, New York techies are going offline and trying to meet up in real life. Takeaway digital editor Jim Colgan attended the third annual Internet Week festival, where companies like Meet Up and FourSquare were showcasing tools that get people talking to each other. Meetup's new tool, "Meetup Everywhere," helps any organization to get its members get to know each other. It's what Meet Up's founder, Scott Heifernan, says is "using the internet to get off the internet." To make his point, he smashed an iPad on stage. Click through for video.

Help find out what we're sharing on social media and why! Jim Colgan, digital editor of The Takeaway, discusses a project he conducted recently to make a connection with strangers solely using social media, and helps set it up for Brian Lehrer Show listeners.

→ Click here to see how to participate!

Facebook today announced major changes to how it manages its users' privacy. The social networking site was responding to growing criticism from users and what CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today was a "need to simplify the controls."

Today, Facebook is announcing a major change to its privacy settings in response to criticism that the site was making personal information too public and the privacy settings to complicated to figure out (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for this on Monday). The new changes are expected to make it much easier for a user to adjust the settings. But despite the backlash against the social networking site, its fan base is still growing rapidly. Facebook had more than 500 million registered users last month — up from 400 million in September.

As part of our ongoing experiment in sharing personal information online amid this debate about privacy, we're asking a question: What benefit have you gotten from sharing information?

New York, NY —

Facebook today announced major changes to how it manages its users' privacy. The social networking site was responding to growing criticism from users and what CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today was a "need to simplify the controls."

The changes include the following:

• A new "simple" ...

Are we sharing too much information on Twitter and Facebook? We're exploring the benefits and the downsides of sharing our personal lives making our private lives public. Help us in an experiment!

Seek out a stranger that you see sharing information on the internet — on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare — anyone who catches your interest. Don't go stalking though, just reach out and ask them one question for us: What benefit does he or she get from sharing personal information publicly? Tell us what happens and we'll talk about it on the air.

Facebook users have become wary of the privacy settings on the social networking site, and now lawmakers may also be taking a closer look at the company and whether the public has enough protections on the website. Takeaway digital editor, Jim Colgan, explains how users' privacy has become less of a priority on the site since its inception, and what lawmakers can do.

Our conversation about surveillance cameras touched a nerve among our listeners, as many wrote and called in. Takeaway digital editor Jim Colgan took to the New York streets to ask people whether they knew they were being observed...

New York, NY —

Sometimes it takes seeing something to really know something. Even though most New Yorkers have an idea that there are surveillance cameras on the busy street corners of Manhattan, most people don't know where they are or what they are recording.

"That's kind of creepy," said ...

Updated 5:30pm EST

Arwa Gunja here, on the night shift.

Tomorrow we will continue our coverage on Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomb suspect. Shahzad was born in Pakistan and became a US citizen last year.  Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn) is proposing a law that could strip Americans of their citizenship if they are involved with foreign terrorist organizations. We’ll speak with a professor of citizenship law to ask what the current law states about revocation and to assess the constitutionality of Lieberman’s proposal. This segment was motivated, in part, by an impassioned listener who sent sent an email to co-host Celeste Headlee this morning. He expressed his personal frustrations with Shahzad’s actions. The listener was recently naturalized himself and worries that the Times Square plot will only make the path to citizenship harder for those who are loyal to this country.  If you have recently became an American citizen or are waiting to take your Oath of Allegiance, what does citizenship mean to you? Do you worry the process will become more difficult now and those applying will be under more scrutiny now? Leave us your comments here on our website or call our comment line at 1-877-8-MYTAKE.

And totaling up the prices —

Even for the editor of a gadget blog, it's a list of devices worth drooling over. The search warrant for Jason Chen, the editor of the blog that posted pictures of the next generation iPhone that was left in a bar last week, made public his personal inventory of gadgets. Here's what the police hauled away, according to the warrant:

Two Macbook Pros, one MacBook, a Dell Desktop, an IBM ThinkPad, a 32 GB iPad, a 16 GB iPhone, a Motorola Droid, two digital cameras, two external hard drives, a media server, and two flash drives. A quick price search shows the total value to be about $7,600 (conservatively).

Poor Jason Chen must be having withdrawal.

Here's the full list with links to prices:

California police seized the computers of the Gizmodo editor who outed the new iPhone last week. The blogger, Jason Chen, says he's a journalist and that he should be able to protect his sources under a California shield law. Takeaway digital editor, Jim Colgan reports on the charges against the blogger and whether shield laws apply to the case.

To the Apple employee who left it, the missing phone likely started out as a familiar inconvenience for cell phone owners who enjoy libation. This was no ordinary phone to leave behind though — it was Apple's new, unreleased iPhone. Proof? Apple sent a letter to the finder, asking for it back. Takeaway digital editor Jim Colgan tells us more about how tech site Gizmodo outed the top-secret phone; an unusual occurance for a company like Apple, which is famous for keeping its unreleased new products under wraps.

Apple's new iPad device garnered so much interest ahead of its launch last weekend that it's almost impossible to display it in public and not get asked a million questions. Takeaway web editor Jim Colgan has been dealing with this iPad effect since he got the device last weekend. He took the new gadget to the streets of New York to see why strangers are moved to approach a complete stranger, just because he has an iPad.