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.

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.

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?

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.

In addition to the video feeds, there's also a live feed from FOX News Talk Radio. Another nice feature is the breaking news alerts. When the app is minimized, a small window will pop up from time to time when there's breaking news. The pop-up window will show the headline and the video. If you want to tune in, just click on it. If you ignore it, it will disappear in a moment or two. If that feature annoys you or you just need a break from distractions, you can easily turn it off from the Alert Settings in the app.

The last notable feature of the AIR app is the sharing feature. If you catch a video that you want to share with your friends, you can simply click the "Share" button to send them the video via email. Your friend receives a link to the video stream. The link delivers them to a page on the FOX News web site where they can watch the stream live.

If you want to check out this app yourself, you can download it from here. You will need to have Adobe AIR installed in order to install it.

After searching for a name, if Google News has a recent, relevant quote from that person it will display it in a box above the news results. Below is a screenshot of results when searching for "Tiger Woods."

Clicking on the name brings you to a page of quotations by that person. The Tiger Woods page is dominated by quotes about his performance at the Masters golf tournament last weekend and his unexpected knee surgery. Quotes can be ordered by date or relevance, and sorted by time (month, week, day, or hour), in much the same way as news results.

Users can then search in quotes to drill down to specific topics. For example, here is a page of quotes from US President George W. Bush about Iraq. Google News Quotes is smart enough to assign titles and nicknames to the correct people. A search for "George W. Bush" yields the same page of quotes as a search for "President Bush," for example.

That's something we've been seeing more and more of recently. During the California wildfires last fall, we saw Twitter and other citizen journalism tools being used by people who were on the ground in those areas scooping the mainstream press. As we noted in January, Twitter breaks the news cycle down to seconds, allowing instantaneous distribution of breaking news as it breaks -- faster even than blogs or television.

We predicted that Twitter would "become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs." This evening's earthquake in England, which was first broken over the microblogging service, is proof positive of Twitter's value as a vehicle for news distribution.

Note: Just to drive home the point, the BBC had the story up a full 35-40 minutes after we first heard about it via Twitter. Not bad by any means, but that just further illustrates how much Twitter breaks down the news cycle.

Inbal Drukker, a senior associate at Google News, said on the first and sixth of July that there are "engineering changes" underway to "improve Google News." So what seems like a loss today could end up for the better in the long run, but for now there seems to be a problem.

Update: Marjolein Hoekstra points out that there is a link to create a Google Alert now at the very bottom of the search results page, as well as one to create an iGoogle gadget for a search, but still no RSS link displayed like there used to be.

Thanks to Russ Castronovo for bringing this to our attention.

Blogs and personal websites are only responsible for a very small 1.5% of all traffic.

There is also a lot of traffic that is directly shared between news sites. Outbound traffic from other news sites accounts for just as many visits as traffic from search engines (21.6%).

According to Hitwise, the Drudge Report is the largest single source of visitors to news and media sites. Google News (1.5%), CNN.com (1.4%) and Yahoo! News (0.8%) also drive relatively large amounts of traffic, but it is interesting that no single site really holds anything close to a monopoly here.

The Associated Press and the traditional newspaper business are obviously under a lot of stress right now (and in many ways, Craigslist is the real culprit here - not Google News and portals), but a large part of traffic to news sites is driven by portal sites. We can't blame the AP for trying to protect its intellectual property rights, but, as Google's Eric Schmidt described it, "these are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more."

Image credit: Flickr user Matt Callow

McCarthy's new job is really interesting in a number of ways. Rivera says with her addition "it really feels like the age of the news cyborg has arrived." It's also very interesting because of who McCarthy is. Most of all it's interesting because it's an absolute dream job for any tech news junky. We discuss the hire in depth over on Jobwire, our site dedicated to covering new hires in tech and new media.

The latest news stories display on your profile page, and by opening the app you can browse all your news feeds. You can post any news story and your comments to your profile, or send to a friend. Video and audio podcasts play inside NewsFriends.

One note: the press release has the best use of the trendy new phrase "social graph" that I've yet seen - it says that NewsFriends will allow bloggers to "expand their readership by tapping into the social graph of their current readers". Right on! Here are some screenshots:

Homepage of NewsFriends app

Adding friends

Adding news

It's not bad at all, though I still believe the real gold in Facebook is in the user's home page and minifeed - where never an outside app is seen. Profile pages just aren't where you interact with your apps and a dedicated canvas page seems likely to receive even less attention.

Near.ly uses the new API to deliver a headline and a link to the news item using a bit.ly-powered URL, which just so happens to be our favorite URL shortening program. To use near.ly, you must first register then provide your Twitter username and password to the service. The service verifies your identity and automatically follows the "nearlybot" so you can begin receiving the messages. You can choose to unfollow the nearlybot at anytime if you want to stop receiving the news.

There are a number of ways to get local news information from the web, but none are quite as personal and direct as having links to news twittered to you. But as much as we love the idea of getting local news via Twitter, we're even more excited to see what other apps will built with the new Outside.in API.

Outside.in API Intro from outside.in on Vimeo.

The site, however, seems to cross the lines of good taste at times. For example, one of yesterday's lede's was a story about the death of actor Heath Ledger which uses a couple of paragraphs about the actor's memorial service as a jumping off point for estate planning advice. It also includes a pair of sidebars -- "Facing Your Own Death," and "Get Organized" -- aimed at helping people plan for their death with checklists and quizzes.

Some might think of the site as using news as a teaching tool -- which sounds like a positive. But as the site's about page says, every story they run "will have a secondary focus on improving your personal finances." Or in other words: it's all about the money. Thus, the whole site feels a bit too opportunistic to me, and rather than using news as a learning opportunity, MainStreet.com seems more like a site exploiting the tragically public lives of celebrities in a novel way.

Though the idea is sound -- using the news as a teaching tool is a good idea in theory -- MainStreet.com's laser focus on money causes it to miss the mark.

What do you think? Is MainStreet.com doing a service for readers or is it further perverting celebrity gossip and news? Let us know in the comments.