@MentionMachine was developed exclusively for the newspaper and was launched in conjunction with Tuesday's Iowa Caucus, the official start of primary season for the 2012 Presidential Election. The app uses Twitter's streaming API while also tracking mentions in the traditional media.

The launch of @MentionMachine is telling, in that it formally adds "social media success" to polling data, fundraising totals, ad spending and endorsements as ways to measure how well, or how poorly, a campaign is doing. For those keeping score, Ron Paul had the most mentions in the 24 hours preceding this writing, with 44,900 tweets.

Highlights from @MentionMachine's tracking are posted on a dedicated Twitter account, and the app keeps tabs on which candidate had the most mentions in the previous 24 hours and the previous week. But the feature is more dynamic than just simply tabulating the number of times a candidate gets tweeted.

In addition to the Twitter account, @MentionMachine includes a toolbar that overlays on the portions of the Post's Web site that deal with the campaign and updates as spikes or shifts are detected on Twitter. The feature also includes an analysis of individual candidates so readers can track their mentions over time. The app was also developed to give greater weight to top tweets as opposed to retweets.

The newspaper said it plans to tweak and add new features to @MentionMachine throughout the month.

A new trend, however, seems to have taken hold - charging for a mobile app. The Washington Post has joined The Guardian in charging for its iPhone app, according to an article this morning in Paid Content.

The interesting distinction to note here is that the Washington Post's app is more like a newspaper subscription of old. You aren't paying a one-time fee for the app, you're paying for a year's use, meaning if you like the content and want continued access, it's going to see another $1.99 from you in a year.

When you compare these sorts of numbers to the 35 subscribers to Newsday, the future might look brighter for newspapers. We're thinking that mobile users are used to paying small fees for quality applications and, while they could use their mobile browser to visit the free website, they'll likely pay the two bucks to see content tailored to the mobile platform instead.

CNN, as Paid Content points out, takes a similar approach, charging for its iPhone application, but its charge is a one-time fee. Offering an app as a timed subscription is a bit of a twist, but mobile may be just the environment to try out this sort of payment model.

The Washington Post iPhone app will be available for purchase today, but was not up by the time of this article.

Living Stories is the name of a new experimental collaboration between Google Labs, the New York Times and the Washington Post that seeks to transcend that 500 year-old metaphor with a parsable flow of news content around big stories. It's very cool. We offer a 5 minute video tour of the project below.

And now our tour of the service, twice as long and more detailed.

What do you think? It looks inspired by blogging and by databases. I'd like to see more opportunity to comment and a clear method to surface the most high-quality reader comments. I'd like to see a mobile interface. I can imagine other publications employing this kind of system of organization, though, and it's great to see some web-centric innovation. We really are just beginning with this powerful medium.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication parter of the NYTimes.

WhoRunsGov.com is the Post's new site where readers can learn background information about the new Obama administration, members of congress, prominent military officials and others who now "run government."

Old Media, New Guts?

WhoRunsGov is built on a Mindtouch Dekiwiki, the same sophisticated platform used by many other organizations to assemble data-centric application sites built largely on mashups. We've seen some awesome work done by IBM with a Dekiwiki for example, pulling in data using Dapper and mashing it up with maps APIs.

WhoRunsGov, on the other hand, looks mostly like a content site right now. A mix of political news and a would-be search engine magnet in the form of 240 pages about high profile political figures. The site is a moderated wiki, it includes blogs and it aggregates relevant news coverage from the Post and around the web. That's cool, but it sure could be cooler.

Earlier this month the Post hired political blogging star Greg Sargent away from Talking Points Memo to write the lead blog on WhoRunsGov. Sargent's posts should be good and popular, but we'd love to see them augmented with content based in a paradigm fresher than the old broadcast media. There's a lot of third party data that could be pulled in to WhoRunsGov and there's outbound APIs that could make it a much more valuable site, ultimately increasing its draw and traffic.

Five Projects Doing It Better

What would that look like? For some inspiring examples, check out Little Sis, described as "an involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited & maintained by people like you." If you remember the Flash visualization theyrule.net, Little Sis is of the same vein, but a living site.

Little Sis is getting a lot of love from the Sunlight Foundation and its grand slam site OpenCongress.

The UK Guardian is doing a lot of things in this direction, most notably their initiative Free Our Data, where they are agitating for release of public data for the purpose of mashups. That's pretty hot.

The New York Times has released multiple APIs and just announced a conference called Times Open, "for developers interested in working with NYTimes.com as a news and information platform." (Disclosure: the NYTimes is a syndication partner of this site.)

The coolest political tech initiative we've seen in a long time is Memeorandum Colors, a Greasemonkey script on top of some really innovative data mining to determine the political leanings of blogs participating in the hottest online discussions each day.

Compared to those kinds of initiatives, WhoRunsGov looks a bit boring so far. There's a lot of potential though, and we hope to see the Washington Post's new initiative develop with more impact than it had when it came out of the gate.