Alert Blog Reviews

Here’s an interesting twist on the ‘pay for access to conten’t dilemma that faces the newspaper industry these days. Newspapers who do this may actually lose a writer or two! While it’s not likely that staffers at any newspaper are looking to just walk out the door to another job because there really aren’t any but you may get some that are going to walk n principle. A case in point is what happened at New York Newsday. The New York Times reports Customers of Cablevision, the cable and Internet provider that owns Newsday, and people who subscribe to Newsday in print will still be able to browse Newsday.com unfettered. But Newsday recently announced that everyone else will have to pay $5 a week to see much of the site, making it one of the few newspapers in the country to take such a plunge. As a result of this announcement long time columnist Saul Friedman threw in the pen, so to speak, and walked. In an interview, Mr. Friedman said, “My column has been popular around the country, but now it was really going to be impossible for people outside Long Island to read it.” That includes him; living outside Washington, he is not a subscriber to Newsday or Cablevision. This sounds like a real bold move I know but now the cynic in me (which I love and hate all at once) has to take into account the fact that Mr. Friedman is 80 years old. Not exactly the prime of his career but he could go on writing for many, many, many more years (and I sincerely hope he does). While this is noble it’s not the same as if some newspaper industry giant walked away from a central job at a huge paper to make the point. Once again, I am not trying to minimize what Mr. Friedman is saying but I am trying to see this in context. I’m actually more interested in how many people are willing to spend the $5 a week for the paper online? If they are not sacrificing their current subscribers and most of the New York region is a Cablevision subscriber is Newsday really doing anything here other than trying to make a few bucks? There are quite a few folks who have left the New York area for other areas of the country but most don’t check back on the local media but occasionally (I am one of those). If I had to pay $5 a week for it I would go without it for sure because it is for fun and not a necessity. If you have moved from somewhere would you pay for access to the local media to keep up? All of you transplants from Chicago, LA, Philly etc do you care that much about what happens ‘back home’?

More here:
Newsday Charges and Columnist Walks

Search is changing very rapidly these days and it looks like we are going to need to buckle up to keep up with the changes and, even more likely, the rumored changes. Until I can use something myself (which means the rest of you can as well) then it is all rumor. Experimentation is the order of the day in search and especially as it relates to social search and the holy grail of real time search. Since bing and Google have both announced their deals with Twitter regarding using Twitter’s vaunted stream to allow the world to update us with whatever the world deems important (note: while that sounds valuable on the surface I think that getting through the spam and other crap is going to be a pretty big deal for the end user to stomach but that’s for another day I suppose) the talk is all about how we can harness this new age of on-demand information. Google’s Marissa Mayer informally rolled out a Google Labs experiment which was introduced yesterday and reported by TechCrunch At the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer unexpectedly came on stage to unveil a new product. She first announced that Google has also reached a deal with Twitter, which she wrote a blog post about earlier in the day, following the announcement that Bing and Twitter had done the same thing. But Mayer had more to share. There’s a new Google product called “Social Search” that is launching soon in Google Labs. This is a new feature that allows you to see results for queries from people in your social network. This works by using your Google Profile. If you fill it out with the other social networks you’re a member of, such as FriendFeed, Google will scan who you are connected to and give your results from those people. Nifty, I suppose. First, let’s define the people that are in many of these networks of ours. How many of them do we really know and also how many are reliable sources of any data to begin with. Not that this idea isn’t interesting it just seems that as we put more and more power into the hands of people with no experience there will be a degree of “train wreckiness” in the results. Also, as some people start to feel some power around being a source I suspect the limits of what is newsworthy will be stretched paper-thin pretty quickly. So enough of the negativity, right? This Google Labs thing could be interesting. It will work with your Google profile and be opt-in for now according to Mayer (which implies later on it won’t be? When it’s not, it will likely end up like the personalized search history that not many are aware of which means more data for Google. Yay.). So this should take place in the next few weeks and we’ll keep our eyes peeled for any updates. When it does happen are you interested?

Originally posted here:
Google’s Social Search for You and Yours