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While the paywall experiment of the New York Times has received a lot of play in various online forums, one place where a working paywall - meaning that it is both making money for publishers and attracting traffic - is less well known, in the eastern European country of Slovakia. There an independent tech vendor called Piano Media has been successfully experimenting with its own paywall-based system of online publishing. Launched in Bratislava last spring, it gives subscribers online access to content from all nine of Slovakia's leading news sites. What's more, it does so for a single flat fee (less than US $4 per month, which is going up in March by 25%) that is paid after visitors have had a chance to sample a certain number of articles for free. Users can pay for their subscriptions by SMS messages.

Earlier this week on his personal blog, one of Google's product management directors, Hunter Walk, posted a very interesting sampling of responses from technology journalists about the broad question of whether they are receiving the level of journalism from our business that they deserve. I found it very interesting that a product manager from any company was able to reveal at least as much, if not more, about the folks who usually interview him than they reveal about his company.

The emerging theme from the journalists' responses was distinct exasperation and frustration with the level of interest that you, their reader, have demonstrated in their product. It's getting "harder... to convince people to read these stories" on broader subjects like piracy, said one. Another remarked, "I wish more people cared about" the very topic on which his publication was founded (you'll know the one I mean), and which you would think his livelihood is based. And a third went so far as to blame readers for being interested in the wrong things, saying, "I am dismayed every day by the crap that people seem to find worthy of page views."

You probably recall the stories and, well, I may have even written one or two of them, including the requisite quotes from Google spokespersons. They were about the spirit of innovation at Google Labs, and whether or not the model of trying a plethora of new projects simultaneously and let Darwin decide the victor, was a smart way to construct a viable service.

The lessons, as Google would teach them, went something like this: There are many different ways to build great products, and there's no way to know in advance which way is the best. Whenever possible, Google leans toward "openness," which involves as many of its target consumers as possible... wait a minute. What am I doing babbling on about it, when I can let Google's own history speak on its own behalf?

Since earlier this year, if you want to read more than 20 articles a month on nytimes.com, you have to either pay for a print subscription, pay for a digital subscription, or figure out another way to gain access. The early results are in, and the Grey Lady is doing well with its paywall, which costs at least $200 a year to.