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The Washington Post launched a new app Tuesday aimed at tracking mentions of presidential candidates on Twitter.

@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.

In the continuing effort to stop the bleeding, newspapers continue to try new ways to recover some losses and stop giving away all of their content for free. As online advertising has not proven sufficient to fully cover costs, some publishers, such as the Wall Street Journal, have turned to pay walls.

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 lock- in that we've had around pages has held us back in terms of innovation and how to use this medium. When we got here [to the Web] there was nothing, and we flopped a 500-year-old metaphor of pages on top of it, a browser that by its name says you will browse, not touch, this content. But it was not meant to be a one-way experience. We're only a fragment of the way into this journey."
-John Borthwick, The Real-Time Web and Its Future

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.

The Washington Post launched a new political database site today, lead by a top political blogger it snapped up this month from a leading new media site. Are these the types of steps that can help struggling newspapers thrive in the future? The Post could join the trailblazing efforts of organizations like the New York Times and the UK Guardian in making the newspaper of the future a database of public information, layered with analytic, visual and programmatic added value. That's what we have hopes for, but it's not clear yet that the Post knows what to do with its new site.

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."