ReadWriteWeb

One of the biggest dilemmas for print and mainstream media today is how to transition from a free-for-all model to one where users actually pay for the content they consume. Should each site enact its own paywall, forcing users to purchase a subscription to just that site? How about a pay-per-article solution, which would still require a separate login for each publication?

A report in Italian publication La Repubblica last week tells us that Google might launch its own solution to this problem later this year, and we have to admit, there might be few companies better positioned to take on this role than the one thought to be the reason for the industry's decline in the first place.

Have you ever watched those movies with the crazy genius who has newspaper and magazine clippings pasted all over their walls with circles and lines and highlighted paragraphs to find the hidden common threads and secretly wished that you were crazy and smart enough to be that guy? Well, wish no more.

No, we don't mean go buy a glue stick and get to clipping - a company out of New Hampshire called News Patterns has taken care of all that for you.

Social media is going to rule the Web until at least 2012 - according to a post by Justin Kistner, a Social Evangelist at web analytics company Webtrends. Kistner also claims that Facebook has become the king of social media. In a panel at a Portland event today called Lunch 2.0, Kistner said that the current era of the Web "is Facebook's game to lose."

Data from Google Trends suggests that the term 'web 2.0' became popular in 2005 and peaked in mid-2007 (as measured by how many times the term was entered as a search term in Google). Towards the end of 2008 'social media' started to get popular and then rose steeply in 2009.

Wednesday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the winners of its annual Knight News Challenge, a contest funding innovative ideas for disseminating news and information to local communities with digital technologies. 12 entrants were awarded a grand total of $2.74 million, the largest share, $400k, going to Eric Rodenbeck and his data visualization project CityTracking.

Is the Real-Time Web making news consumption better or worse? In a Wired magazine article, book author Nicholas Carr argues that the Internet is reducing our ability to comprehend content on the Web. In a separate blog post, Carr even suggests that websites and blogs should move hyperlinks from the body of an article to the bottom - apparently, links distract readers and cause them to understand an article less. I don't buy that particular argument, but it's clear that we need better strategies to cope with news overload. Particularly as these days we're not only getting more content, but getting it much faster.

In this post we offer you some advice on how to manage your consumption of news in this real-time era.

A new mashup lets you track the BP oil spill news using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more, all from one interface. Called "Oilaholic," the site serves as a one-stop shop for everything oil spill-related, including the latest tweets, the live video cam feed from uStream, the latest Facebook news and Flickr photos, the hottest headlines from Google News and elsewhere on the Web, a real-time "leak meter" feed (which is incredibly disturbing), and a live chatroom for venting your frustrations after you look at the leak meter, plus links to useful resources including government agencies, volunteer efforts, phone numbers to call and more.

Despite the fact that social media is hardly still the exclusive purview of the early adopter, it still surprises, grates or inspires laughter sometime to see it crop up outside its native ecosystem. So, when Associated Press, the official arbiter of terminology, text and typography turned to Twitter, it gave us funny feelings. We weren't sure if we were being wooed or abused.

The 2010 AP Stylebook now carries a dark, dirty little section called "Social Media Guidelines." Squeeeeee! Let's look inside, shall we?

The New York Times is currently working on a new metered paywall structure for their online news portal that will limit non-subscribed news readers to a limited amount of stories per day. With the release of some new data from the Pew Research Center yesterday, some wondered if the new paywall would deter bloggers from linking to the Times' content. According to the Times, however, their upcoming paywall technology will exempt readers coming into the site via links from third-party sites.

While in New York earlier this month, I attended New York University's annual ITP Spring Show. ITP is a graduate program for communications studies and the Spring Show is a chance for students to showcase their interactive projects. I saw everything from Matrix-like interactive squiddies, to a woman on stilts powered by an iPhone app, to a paint brush that made music.

Probably the most impressive thing I saw, though, was a media project by a student named Zoe Fraade-Blanar. Current: A News Project is a prototype meme tracker using data visualization.

For mainstream newsweeklies like Time Magazine, Newsweek, the Web must still feel like a wild and wooly place. Now that we expect to get news in real time over the Internet, a weekly publication rhythm seems almost quaint to many news consumers. While all of these weekly magazine now have a Web presence, speed isn't necessarily a strong suit. Time Magazine's website, however, is launching NewsFeed today, a new feature that tries to bring the world of newsweeklies and the real-time web together.