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Since my last blog, I've been busy putting together a highly skilled multiplatform team in place with a diverse range of skills for the new look Panorama website, from news and feature writing, editing and shooting video, encoding content for the web, to research and film archive.

The site hasn't re-launched yet, but we're already trying different things on the current website and on You Tube where Panorama's Primark: On The Rack special had a strong presence. This week's programme How The Economy Got Personal used information from an online "Feeling the Pinch" questionnaire which was suggested by Sandy Smith who edits Panorama. We promoted it on different platforms; our website, via the Panorama email newsletter and other parts of BBC News online, local radio and Jeremy Vine's show on Radio 2. More than 8,000 of you thought it was a good idea. A big thank you to all of you who took part.

The full results of the questionnaire are up on the website. Although it's not scientific as the figures were taken from a self-selecting sample rather than an official poll which has a representative sample, it did provide us with an interesting snapshot of what 8,770 people in the UK are concerned about.

So, in that sense it was invaluable to get such a big response to a story that has been dominating the headlines all year. That's why we're keeping the questionnaire online for a bit longer so if you haven't had a chance to to fill it in, you can.

And judging by the emails we've already received it's a story that will continue to develop as people struggle to cope with increasing fuel, energy and food bills as well as a fragile property market. We're always interested in how the big stories are affecting you, so if you've got a story you think we should investigate or know about please email panorama@bbc.co.uk.

The latest global assessment of cetaceans shows that the marine mammals throughout the world's oceans have experienced mixed fortunes.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species reveals that some large species, like humpbacks, have seen numbers increase.

However, it warns that smaller species, including river dolphins, have declined as a result of human actions.

The IUCN added that it was unable to assess more than half of the world's cetaceans because of a lack of data. 

"It shows that if you protect these animals then they can recover," said Randall Reeves, chairman of Cetacean Specialist Group for the IUCN, the global conservation body.

The comforting words of Indian politicians and financial officials - offering reassurance about the stability of the country's economy - are now ringing a little hollow.

The truth of the matter is India has been affected by the liquidity crunch - though arguably not as badly as other parts of the world have been.

The downturn in the West now appears to have reached India's shores. The Indian stock market is the most obvious and evident victim of the global credit crunch - having lost over half of its value since the crisis began - billions of dollars of foreign funds were pulled out of Indian shares, as foreign fund managers scrambled to get their books in order.

Concerns are growing here about a global recession and what that might mean for the 300 million strong Indian middle classes.

Many Indian professionals have put their savings into the stock market and into mutual funds over the last few years, tempted by the spectacular returns they saw.

This must be the week for the BBC to paint its logo on very large objects and send them off on ambitious journeys. You've already heard from Jeremy Hillman about 'The BBC Box,' a shipping container that will be used as a very creative way of illustrating global commerce over the next twelve months. The box was loaded onto a container ship in Southampton on Monday. It has now left the port of Greenock near Glasgow and is heading for China with Scotch whisky as its first payload.

The 'BBC Elections Bus' has also been sent on a 38 day journey across America, beginning in Los Angeles and ending in New York's Times Square. The bus is a project spearheaded by the BBC World Service, and includes journalists from every corner of the organisation: radio, language service, TV, and online.

I'm personally most looking forward to following what happens on the bus on the BBC News website. Two online journalists will be full-time bus riders; Jon Kelly will be blogging continuously throughout the journey, while Jennifer Copestake, a member of my World News America team, will be keeping a video diary of the trip.

What's the point of the BBC Bus? It is NOT to follow the presidential candidates or chronicle the 'who's up, who's down" horserace aspects of the contest for the White House. It IS to find out what's on the minds of Americans in all parts of this huge country during a historic election season; to see what issues matter most to citizens of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico...to gauge the real impact of the economic slump and housing crisis on families in Oxford, Mississippi...to find out how people in the 'oil patch' of Texas are coping with - or profiting from - higher oil prices.

The US presidential rivals have begun campaigning in earnest, as a new opinion poll put Republican John McCain ahead of Democrat Barack Obama.

Fresh from being nominated at their party conventions, the two men are now gearing up for the 4 November poll.

A USA Today-Gallup poll put Mr McCain ahead for the first time in months.

The US presidential rivals have begun campaigning in earnest, as a new opinion poll put Republican John McCain ahead of Democrat Barack Obama.

Fresh from being nominated at their party conventions, the two men are now gearing up for the 4 November poll.

A USA Today-Gallup poll put Mr McCain ahead for the first time in months.

Hurricane Gustav, raging ashore on the Gulf Coast, has cast a thousand-mile shadow all the way to St Paul, Minnesota, where the Republican convention opens/opened in curtailed and subdued session. Organisers are anxious not to be seen having a party while fellow Americans are losing their homes in a deluge. Convention proceedings are being kept to a constitutional minimum until the full extent of Gustav's wrath is known.

The US news networks, which provided round-the-clock coverage of last week's Democratic Party events, have a headache. To ensure a measure of balance they want to give similar prominence to the Republican event, but key correspondents and senior anchors have been redeployed south. Vast swathes of air time are going to catalogue Gustav's progress in minute, and sometimes morbid, detail, squeezing the time available for the events in St Paul. Politicians vie with meteorologists for the best slots.

The government needs to step up efforts to reduce waste from business, according to a parliamentary committee.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee recommends using variable VAT rates to cut unsustainable consumption of raw materials.

Its report says pressure has so far concentrated on householders, who account for only 9% of the UK's waste.

Over the past week, two battles have been fought on the borders of Georgia and South Ossetia; a military campaign, and a fight for the airwaves. In both, the BBC has found itself in the middle. 

Last week, a BBC team was filming near the Georgian town of Gori when a Russian fighter jet opened fire on them. My colleagues were lucky - others have been less so. Five news staff - four journalists and a driver - have been killed since the fighting erupted. Others have been threatened and robbed at gunpoint by paramilitaries. War is a dangerous business.

The battle for public opinion has been just as intense. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, viewers to BBC World News - including those up late in the UK - were treated to the extraordinary sight of my colleague Nik Gowing conducting a live interview with Georgian President Saakashvili in his war room during World News America.

The President, "Dad's-Army" style, used a pen to point to a map detailing the latest Russian advance - and this at 3am in the morning in Tbilisi! It's one of around half a dozen interviews President Saakashvili has done with the BBC in the past seven days. For the BBC to have access to someone so influential, as a key moment, is of course vital to our storytelling. But that level of access also carries with it an inherent danger. We need to ensure balanced coverage. Fortunately, during the past week, the BBC has had interviews with the Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, the deputy Prime Minister, Mr Ivanov and yesterday, viewers to BBC One were treated to a live interview with a Russian General speaking fluent English, sitting in our studio in Moscow. Another first.

We started a trial this week on the website of a different way of linking from within the body of news stories to related background material - our own and other people's.

The trial will last for about four weeks, for technical reasons is confined for now to the UK edition of the site (which you can select from the left hand side navigation) and is designed to gather your feedback and help us work out the editorial and practical implications of linking in this way from stories.

Linking to relevant background obviously isn't anything new on the site - we've always done it, mostly from the right-hand side of story pages, where we put our own related links, external ones and often a "Newstracker" box listing other news sources. We also do it regularly from textboxes within the main story.

As a rule though we haven't embedded links throughout the text, except for example when listing web sources or in diary-type pages, and of course we do it in our blogs. One of the reasons is we don't want to interrupt a news story by sending the reader off the page in the middle of a sentence.