In related news, News Corp executive James MacManus (no relation) has accused the BBC of "blatantly commercial ambitions" and of seeking "to create a digital empire". In other words: Hey, we're the digital empire around here - rack off!

We're focusing specifically on Web news, because that is our niche here at R/WW. We think this will be a handy way for you to keep up-to-date with all the latest Web Tech news, as filtered by the Read/WriteWeb authors. We've got permalink pages for each story, because you may want to comment on them - and also we may integrate this into the main blog some more in the near future.

Here is the RSS feed for Web Tech News.

Fifty six percent of the 726 respondents go online for news once or twice per day, 26% visit three sites, and 24% visit four or more sites. The survey also found that men were more likely than women to visit multiple sites.

Ongo reports that 37% spend between 15 and 30 minutes daily reading news online, 26% spend between 31 minutes and one hour, and 21% spend 15 minutes or less. These times were self-reported by survey participants.

According to a spokesperson for Ongo, the survey referred broadly to "sites," "news sites," and "websites" throughout the survey, and it did not ask specifically about native news applications, as opposed to Web content. It did cover content accessed on tablets and mobile devices as well as desktop/laptop computers.

From a design pov:
- They've toned down the blue colour of the links.
- News sources are now highlighted more - AP will be pleased, as they're gung-ho on branding their content.
- Tabs are now used for the section menu, enabling them to go from 3 columns to 2 and so free up white space.

[nb just as I finish that last sentence, Yahoo has flicked the switch and made the new design live on http://news.yahoo.com].

The things I like the best though are the increased focus on RSS and search, and the integration with My Yahoo. From the intro page:

Not only does the new design allow users to subscribe to non-traditional news sources, but the "dive deeper into topics" buttons are a fantastic example of topic search n' subscribe applied to a major media website. Congrats to the Yahoo News team! I know that I have some Yahoo staff subscribed to my blog, so perhaps my RSS and Topic-based Search evangelism is paying off in some small way :-)

p.s. Google, please sit up and take notice - instead of spending your time rejecting fantastic news sources.

The U.S. edition was redesigned in May, introducing a one-column format, highlighted top stories and more multimedia links. These same improvements will now roll out for the U.K. and India editions.

Last weekend, Google News introduced the <standout> tag as a way for publishers to highlight their best content for Google News to aggregate. Now is a good time for British and Indian publishers to optimize their content for Google News. If you're looking for tips on how to do that, check out our post, How To Rank Highly on Google News.

What news aggregators do you use? Let us know in the comments

It appears that Google News has caught on to this (not that Google is slow on the draw) and has begun testing a Twitter integration that shows news from your Twitter "friends" on your Google News page.

The feature allows you to "connect your Twitter account to see when people you follow are talking about the news." After adding your account, you will see "a list of updates containing news articles shared by the people you follow," according to the help document on the experimental feature. Only articles that can be found in Google News already will appear in the Twitter list - so it isn't really augmenting your Google News, but rather highlighting what you would see already with recommendations by friends.

The interesting part here is that you have two preference lists converging. First, you have the list of sources that constitutes Google News, and then you have the list of people you follow on Twitter. The friends feature only shows you where the two meet. This could be especially interesting if Google allows the friends list to show tweets according to what you're looking at on Google News. If I'm looking at local news, for instance, the friends column could help float to the top the most important news, according to what my friends are tweeting.

The pairing of the two seems like a match with much promise.

Part dashboard, part feed reader, and all user-friendly, this service promises to be both popular and useful. Users can create sections based on keywords and then publish their sections to directories for sharing with others.

According to a blog post today by Google News engineers Sharad Jain and Nilesh Agrawal, "One of the great things about online news is the ability to filter by topics. Google News has long recognized this, so we've allowed users to track articles based on keywords of their choice. But it has been a little tricky at times. For example, to follow news about topics related to outer space, you would have to create a pretty complex filter.

"Now, if you're using Google News and can't find the perfect section, just create your own! You can do that by adding the relevant keywords. Then, if you are happy with the resulting section, you can publish it to a directory so others can benefit."

Currently, the directory includes such sections as Space, NFL, Day in Photos and about 270 other sections and counting. And just for you, we've created a section all about the real-time web, one of our favorite topics at RWW:

What do our readers think? Is this new feature nifty, or what?

"The highlighted stories are the ones which have the most likes or the ones which are featured to you," a Facebook spokesperson told ReadWriteWeb. "The most recent stories will be under those top stories. There will be a button where you can sort chronologically."

One thing that won't change in this news feed update is the larger-sized photos.

The update will rollout out tonight and continue over the coming weeks. See screengrabs after the jump.

Here's the second screenshot:

This is big news for Facebook users, who have complained relentlessly since the news feed switched over to hybrid.

Giving users the option to experience a news feed that's closer to the old one seems like a smart move Facebook.

The Facebook hybrid news feed has come under controversy since it launched. It has inspired more interaction than the old news feed, and the "new top story" section might be the reason. But Facebook users have demanded their old news feed - and it looks like they won.

Are you glad that the Facebook news feed is changing? Tell us what you think in the comments.

The news ticker debuted before Facebook launched Timeline. Perhaps that was part of the user pushback on it, another part being the fact that many of the same stories appeared in both the news feed and the news ticker.

Seeing interesting music selections from friends pop up on the news tick make it easier to discover new music. That is a very different experience than seeing annoying updates about which links friends have "liked" or commented on. Publishing activity from open graph apps - such as "watch," "run," shop," "cook" - to the news ticker makes a lot more sense than seeing the mundane moves of your friends. In the meantime, if you're one of the lucky users, you can now hide your ticker.

BNO News' founder Michael van Poppel also announced that the company will focus on doing more original reporting. According to today's press release, BNO News is also "in talks with other publishers." Given that the company is now closely aligned with MSNBC, however, it remains to be seen if other publishers will be willing to work with BNO News.

iPhone App

Daniel E. Shipton, CEO of BitMethod, the developers of the push-enabled BNO News iPhone app, was less than pleased with today's news. In a press release, Shipton states that he is "disappointed that BNO is choosing to leave behind their 1.4 million Twitter followers." Indeed, it will be interesting to see how the @BreakingNews feed will change under the new management. The iPhone app will stay under BNO News' control. It is not clear with it will continue to feature all the content from the MSNBC-managed @BreakingNews feed or just content from the new BNO news wire service.

Is This a Good Thing?

It was exciting to see the rise of BNO News over the last few months and today's announcement comes as quite a surprise. BNO News was founded by Michael van Poppel, a 19-year old student in the Netherlands. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick profiled the company in great detail earlier this year.

We are not sure why BNO News didn't just make a deal with MSNBC to syndicate its feed. Given that BNO is a small business, chances are that the company just didn't have the resources to run the news feed and build a wire service at the same time. With a stable income stream from syndication and its iPhone app however, we have to wonder why BNO News would leave its 1.4 million Twitter followers in the hands of MSNBC.

How do you read ReadWriteWeb? Are you subscribing to our RSS Feed? Do you receive our Daily or Weekly Email newsletter? Are you following us on Twitter, Facebook or Google+? Is the way you read ReadWriteWeb your preferred way to gather news?

What's your favored method of news consumption?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Dropping sponsored stories into the news ticker was the next logical move for Facebook. But users weren't happy about the news ticker launch in the first place. It received a ton of complaints; teens, for one, called it a stalker tool. Now the news ticker is more akin to a spammer tool.

Before the official news ticker rollout, sponsored stories were only showing up on the canvas pages of apps, or the pages that appear when users are playing a game or using an app.

Are you peeved about sponsored stories in your news ticker? Tell us how you feel in the comments below.

Now in its 4th year, the Knight News Challenge has funded 35 news projects so far. The rules of the contest have changed this year in response to one of the biggest complaints of the past: projects can now be submitted privately to Knight judges and not be exposed to the public at large.

Google News has always been sparse but powerful. Its beauty is in the algorithm as it finds top story you are looking for along with every other story that has been written on that subject. But, like a lot of things Google, the interface was a little mundane. The new Google News is still not the most vibrant location for news discovery, but it is a nice step forward.

Within the sections, Google now only gives the top link as a primary headline for each story. Instead of a couple sub-links below the main headline it now as a "click-to-expand" feature, which is a button that pops up on the right of the story if you hover on the headline. It takes a second to figure it out but is a nice add-on when you do. Within those expanded stories, each is now labeled by topic section. For instance, if you are looking up the RIM PlayBook recall, it has two stories in the queue as "highly cited" and "in depth."

Last week Google expanded the "New Near You" feature to iOS and Android. It is good to see the company rolling out new features that keeps Google News relevant as applications like Flipboard and Zite track in users with interesting interfaces on the iPad and Bing moves to provide richer content and context on the Web and with mobile devices.

While 38% of Americans still rely solely on offline sources for their daily news, only 2% of adults in the U.S. get their news exclusively from online sources.

News Portals Are the Most Popular Sources - Younger Internet Users also Rely on Social Networks

When online, American Internet users generally rely on 2 to 5 different sites to get their news. Interestingly, 65% of online news users say that they don't have a favorite online news source.

The majority of Internet users (56%) rely on news portals like Google News, AOL or Topix. Younger Internet users under 29 also tend to use social networks to look for interesting stories that their peers share with them (44%) and 13% specifically follow news organizations or individual journalists on social networking sites.

Only 4% of all Internet users follow Twitter updates from journalists and news organizations to stay on top of the news. News podcasts are far more popular than Twitter for getting news updates. About 15% of online news users over 18 listen to news podcasts from organizations like NPR or the New York Times.

What About RSS?

Sadly, the Pew study did not ask users if they used RSS feeds and feed readers to consume news ("RSS" doesn't even appear in the report). While a lot of Internet users probably use RSS to consume news on portal sites and news aggregators without knowing it, it would be interesting to see how many people use services like Google Reader to consume news.

Sharing News

Three-quarters of all adult Internet users in the U.S. say that they get news forwarded to them by email or through posts on social networking sites. A quarter of these Internet users, however, also says that they barely ever read these stories.

Demographics

Marketers and the advertising departments for online news sources will be happy to hear that news users tend to be younger than the average population (68% are under 50 and 29% are under 30) and are likely to be employed full-time (50%) and have at least some college education (67%). Their household income also tends to be higher than the U.S. average. These users are also have faster broadband connections (84%) than the average Internet user.

The heaviest consumers of online news are between 30 and 49 years old and likely to live in a household with an annual income of over $50,000.

What do they look for?

The vast majority of Internet users goes online to find out information about the weather (81%). News about national events (73%), health (66%), business and finance (64%) and news about international events (62%) are also among the top 5 most popular categories among online news consumers . Tech news is the sixth-most popular category.

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