Anyone who has a smartphone is capable of whipping out a high-resolution camera and filming injustice in progress. That technology is how we've become exposed to police abuses nationwide and helped inspire a new wave of police reform activism.

Makego is another great example of the boundaries blurring between digital and physical play. The app was released in February 2012 by British artist and designer Chris O'Shea, who has worked on a number of installation artworks in recent years.

The Makego app runs on an iPhone or iPod touch, and takes the form of a series of cartoon vehicles, seen from a top-down perspective – a racing car, ice cream truck and a river boat. That means engine noises and speedometers, ice creams and a till, and leaks and bread for ducks respectively.

One of the first things I did with my palm-sized glossy black pebble of the future was to download loads of free books using the app Stanza. I read The Island of Dr Moreau on a flight to Japan. I started reading War And Peace. Again. Then I downloaded an app which was a book by a writer who hadn’t been published conventionally. On his website, he revealed he’d had 14,000 downloads in three months. My eyes nearly fell out. It was the final prod I needed. I was going to make an app. It’s what Arthur would have wanted. My idea was to expand on a photography exhibition I’d put together in 2009 called Stills From The Unmade Film of a Half-Written Novel. The title says it all. I’d taken 20 short extracts of the novel I was writing, and still am writing, which is about time-travelling air conditioning salesmen trying to save the world in the 1960s, and made 20 images based on them as if they were production stills from a film. It was installed in Norwich Arts Centre for a month.

A young boy plays with his toy copter and runs between family and strangers at a flea market.

Shot with Camera+ and edited with Xprocess & Best Camera on an iPhone 4.

The London Underground. Every Londoner has used it, but has everyone really seen it? The old map is looking a bit dusty. Perhaps its time for Geographic precision or maybe 3D projection. If we add bicycles to the map, is it still an underground?

Earlier this week, the New York Times company forced the iPad Pulse News Reader app to be pulled from the App Store. The reason? It took the Times’ RSS feed and put it inside its own app.

To be clear, the RSS feed in question was a headline, a one-sentence introduction and a link to the full story on the NYT site. That’s it. Worse? Steve Jobs highlighted the app earlier during his WWDC keynote – and the NYT itself wrote a glowing review of the app just a few days before.

As mystifying as the move seems from the outside, it’s yet another sign that established old media entities are still really struggling to understand the web. Time and time again, it feels as if old media companies, rather than embracing the massive potential of the web, seem to shoot themselves in the foot.

So consider this a public service. For all those people out there working in established media, here are five things you still don’t seem to get about the web:

Mr. Daniel

Mr. Daniel

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast