Now information continually bursts through our Google Readers, our cell phones, our tablets, display screens in elevators and grocery stores. Do we really need to read all 88,731 articles on the Bernie Madoff trial? Probably not. And that's the dilemma for news organizations.

In the old metaphor, column-inches was the constraint. In the new metaphor, reader attention span becomes the constraint.

The dilemma is that relevant is in the mind of the beholder. Emerging application - news readers such as Flipboard, Pulse and Feedly - are struggling to deliver relevancy. One proxy is to use a reader's social graph to curate stories. Another is user profiles and preferences.

These current approaches are doomed. With respect to social graph curation, people have different roles at during different times. On the weekend, a reader might be interested in arts, entertainment and sports news based on a friends and family. During the week, this same person may be interested in business news based on recommendations from trading partners in the capital markets. How do readers seamlessly reconcile this?

I am not able to predict when viable applications will emerge, but I do believe the industry will struggle for several years. The fate of these first generation news readers may be similar to first generation social networks. Remember Friendster and Orkut?

However, there is some clarity on key underlying technologies that will provide the scaffolding for next generation news consumption. Here are some of them.

Tagging and Semantic Extraction

Tagging or semantic extraction engines, process news articles and return structured metadata, to provide insight into the underlying text. A trivial application that uses tags is the tag cloud, where users click tags displayed on a web page to uncover underlying content. Tag clouds miss the point.

Disambiguation

Disambiguation is a technique to uniquely identify named entities: people, cities, and subjects. Disambiguation can identify that one article is about George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the US, and another article is about George Walker Bush, number 43. Similarly, the technology can distinguish between Lincoln Continental, the car, and Lincoln, Nebraska, the town. As part of the metadata, many tagging engines that disambiguate return unique identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). A URI is a pointer into a database.

If tagging creates machine readable assets, disambiguation is the connective tissue between these assets. Leveraging tagging and disambiguation technologies, applications can now connect content with very disparate origins. Today's article on George W. Bush can be automatically linked to an article he wrote when he owned the Texas Ranger's baseball team. Similarly the online bio of Bill Gates can be automatically tied to his online New Mexico arrest record in April 1975.

Linked Data Structures

Typically, a URI entry holds some content related to the entity. URIs are linked to form a database called a Linked Data Structure. For instance, a URI on Barack Obama may contain a reference to his current position, former jobs, marital status, spouse's name, children, education and schools.

The URI Michelle Obama may similarly contain information on her spouse, children, college, graduate school, etc. The URI on Michele Obama's law school will contain information about the school, such as current and past deans.

For instance, one could build an application to retrieve articles on the Supreme Court and determine if the article mentions any justices who previously headed a law school attended by the wife of any U.S. President. This application would identify all articles mentioning Justice Elena Kagan, previously Dean of Harvard Law School, from which Michelle Obama graduated.

That example, per se, may be nonsensical, but the power of the technology is immense. For instance are there any CEOs of government contractors who spouses happen to sit on philanthropic boards along with lawmakers on the House Ways and Means committee?

Linked Data Cloud

The metaphor becomes even more powerful with the federation of Linked Data Structures into the Linked Data Cloud. This level of abstraction allows different owners (such as dbPedia, IMDb, the New York Times) to link their data to create a powerful ecosystem. The power here is the power of the network effect.

Utilizing these underlying technologies emerging applications will drive a completely news-reading metaphor.

Conclusion

Semantic infrastructure technologies will propel next generation news consumption. The fluidity and deluge of online news overwhelms us, but smart readers will tame this flow and enable new consumption models and insights.

Newspaper box photo by George Kelly

If you believe the F8 conference hype, on Sept. 29 when Timeline opens to the public, Facebook is the place where every single inch of your life can be displayed, from the time you were born, to the time you die. It's also going to be the place where every single piece of media you share and consume will be distributed to everyone you know.

First, timeline will be like your live-streaming baby album, stretched from your birth until whenever you kick it. It will basically allow you to reach back in time, before Facebook, and post those pictures and information. Dust off that scanner.

Media will be the main engine of developer growth. Basically, app distribution will run on the backbone of the meaningful and colorful media you typically enjoy on TV, at the movies, or on other sites like Hulu or Netflix.

We're talking apps that stream music, movies, tv shows and any kind of media known to man, which will spur people to share and connect with people. That's 800 million people streaming media to, potentially, each of their friends.

But wait, there's more! There will be no app store for Facebook, according to Bret Taylor, the network's CTO.

The apps will basically run on people's profiles, as if they are channel, only sourced from non-proprietary third party platforms.

Taylor also said the Open Graph API is strongly leaning towards mobile.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker announced the grants on his Facebook page this morning, signaling what the city hopes is beginning of a long-running process to build a Web tech presence, and improve teaching into the city's school system.

Newark is one of many urban centers plagued by high dropout rates, but peppered with promising charter school networks and education upstarts that are trying to fix the problem.

Companies that make mobile apps, social networks dedicated just to teachers and students, as well as live video teaching platforms are just a few of the thousands of startup ideas being incubated by venture capitalists or fueled by angel investors.

Facebook image comes from Douglas Crets' news feed

Ad revenue for the site, which has over 750 million registered users, will miss the expected $4.05 billion mark, according to analysts, but the slowdown in growth is explained as a diversification into other revenue streams like Facebook Credits.

The numbers suggest that attempts to drive consumption and spending across games, credits and other Facebook add-ons is fleshing out the bigger ad revenue picture.

When all streams are taken into consideration, total revenues at Facebook should reach $4.27 billion this year, eMarketer estimates. That more than doubles the $2 billion Facebook is estimated to have earned in 2010. Ad revenues will make up 89% of the total this year, down from 95% in 2009, says the site.

The $4.27 billion should beat FB's internal estimates, which were about $4 billion. Based on earlier reports, Facebook has been moving at a fast clip, doubling its first half revenues. An earlier report showed that it had doubled its half-yearly revenues.

Revenues in US territory will do just as well. Ad revenues here are expected to pass $2 billion in 2011, making for over half of the company's total revenue. Overseas ad revenue will continue to eat away at the US chunk of the market as mobile penetration and broadband to the home increases across developing nations, especially in Asia.

Overseas ad dollars is predicted to represent 50% of the pie next year and a slight majority by 2013.

It's all very well moaning about the state of things, but we at ReadWriteWeb aspire to be a part of the solution too. So I'm going to ask an open question and I'd really appreciate any and all responses to it. Ideally by leaving a comment here on RWW. Alternatively: reply on Twitter (to @RWW), comment on the RWW Facebook Page, or leave a comment on my Google Plus profile. The question is simply this: what technology topics or ideas would you like to read about?

• Tim O'Reilly recently wrote a post detailing how online mapping products let him down when he needed them most. Tim's thinking about just about anything is worth reading, but in recent times location technology has been one of his most interesting topics.
• John Battelle wrote a couple of posts this month outlining his thoughts on this question: can Twitter solve its signal to noise problem? That's a topic I find compelling: filtering the noise of social media.
• danah boyd wrote a blog post earlier this month entitled Designing for Social Norms (or How Not to Create Angry Mobs). UX design has been an interest of mine this year, particularly given the raft of new devices we have now - smartphones, iPad, Internet TV, etc.
• Kevin Kelly, whose book What Technology Wants I thoroughly enjoyed earlier this year, wrote a blog post based on the following question: in ten years from now, how many gadgets will people carry? The evolution of gadgets, fascinating topic!
• Fred Wilson is a VC whose blog I consistently enjoy. His recent post about HTML5 showed that an article doesn't need to be lengthy and text-heavy to be thought-provoking. Native apps vs. browser-based apps, a big issue that many technology and media companies are grappling with these days.

Those are just 5 of many people whose ideas inspire me, along with a recent post each wrote on a big tech idea.

Now I'd love to hear your thoughts on this question: what technology topics or ideas would you like to read about?

Image credit: Foxtongue

While this could be seen as just another variation of the "Internet makes you dumb" argument, a favorite of academics and contrarian technology writers, Gabler's article touched a nerve for me. As I look around at my own industry, tech news, there is certainly no shortage of content. But ideas... those we're bereft of. Tech media today is driven by deals and speculation. There are plenty of ideas-driven people, too, but you generally won't find them at the top of Techmeme anymore.

"There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young - a form in which ideas are more difficult to express."

Information & Thinking

So: less intellectuals, more pundits; less essays, more posts; less text, more visuals. But Gabler is careful not to blame any of those factors for the lack of ideas. Rather, he notes that the huge increase in the availability of information has caused the post-idea era:

"The real cause may be information itself. It may seem counterintuitive that at a time when we know more than we have ever known, we think about it less."
(emphasis mine)

It's a valid argument, although one that futurist and author Bruce Sterling disagrees with. What Gabler is really lamenting, according to Sterling, "is how annoying it is to have the former-audience tweeting at each other instead of reading the New York Times."

There's some truth in that observation, in that the world of ideas is no longer limited to intellectual figureheads talking down to the rest of us.

However, I mostly think Gabler is right: we know a lot, but before we can think about it deeply we've moved onto the next thing. Certainly in the tech blogosphere, which has been my intellectual playground for the past decade, I've noticed a distinct downward spiral in ideas.

Deals & Rumors

Look at the story that is, as I write this, at the top of Techmeme:

The story, about renewed rumors of an LTE-enabled iPhone, is pretty interesting. It's about how the next version of the iPhone might support 4G cellphone technology. Engadget is an excellent tech blog and this was a nice scoop by them, so there is absolutely nothing wrong with this story.

Except that it's fairly useless knowledge for the vast majority of us. We'll tweet about it, discuss it on Google Plus, blog about it. Then we'll move onto the next such story, probably within a day, without having really learned anything.

The previous story on top of Techmeme was a much bigger one: Google acquiring Motorola. That led to hundreds of articles being written about the deal. A couple of them made it to the top of Techmeme: speculation on who else wanted to buy Motorola and discussion about the effect on Motorola rival RIM.

But again, what did we really learn from all of that discussion?

Ideas & Opinions

It would be easy to dismiss Gabler as an intellectual ivory tower type figure bemoaning the rise of tools that enable anyone (provided they live in countries that allow freedom of speech) to have a voice.

Likewise, perhaps I am just an old-school blogger wistfully wanting the 'good old days' of the tech blogosphere back. However, I'd argue that it was more about ideas back then: experimenting with RSS and pondering the ramifications, analyzing how the media industry was being disrupted, exploring the way YouTube was changing the way we interacted with video, and so on.

Nowadays, it's all about deals and rumors; and endless opinionating and speculation around that. While there are interesting blogs around that write thoughtful commentary about new ideas - Bruce Sterling's Wired blog is a great example - they don't tend to feature on Techmeme. That's not the fault of Techmeme, because it simply aggregates what tech media is writing about. Although I think Techmeme could do a better job of reducing the incentive for media sites and blogs to opinionate and bloviate around a particular deal or tech rumor.

Do you think there are enough big ideas in the blogosphere and social media these days? Or is your mind being stimulated enough by stories such as the Motorola acquisition and LTE rumors?

Photo credit: Will Hastings

"We're asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight. Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we'll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate."

The release, which begins at 9:00 a.m. Alaska time (one hour earlier than Pacific Time) tomorrow, will consist of "e-mails Ms. Palin sent as governor, mostly using private accounts" and "are to be released in response to public records requests first made in 2008," according to the Times. The release is only being made in hard copy, which will fill "six standard paper boxes, a total of about 250 pounds at a printing cost of $725 per set."

Palin is currently on a bus trip across the country which reads as a thinly-disguised public relations event and temperature-taking for a possible run at the presidency. Even if she decides against running, her influence with the right-wing Tea Party movement makes her newsworthy. So what she my have thought and how she may have acted while in office as Alaska's governor will be of interest to many.

Other news organizations are also preparing processes to leverage the participation of their audience, including MSNBC, Mother Jones and ProPublica, who are working with Crivella West to create a publicly searchable database.

Palin photo by asecondhandconjecture

But why wait for local newspapers to roll out their own anonymous tips pipeline when a project from CUNY Graduate School's Entrepreneurial Journalism program has designed just that thing.

Using Localeaks, you can send an anonymous tip, including a file, to over 1400 newspapers in the U.S. through one online form. Choose your state. Choose the newspaper. Enter your information and submit your anonymous tip.

Once a file is submitted, the newspaper will receive an email, alerting them to the tip. The newspaper then needs to reply that it's interested. Then a temporary secure file transfer is established. This last step isn't automated yet, according to Matthew Terenzio, Web Development Director at The Hour Publishing Co and one of the members of this project. The best way to do so, he says, would be to have the encryption software - the open source GnuPG in this case - set up on the newspaper's end. "It is unlikely that most would have it yet," says Terenzio, who says he's working on helping some newspapers set up their own drop-boxes to avoid this step.

But an increasing familiarity with encryption might just be in more newsroom's future, particularly if the number of "local leaks" continue. After all, as Terenzio notes, "the people formerly called the audience and the sources, are setting the pace of change, not the news organizations."

Specifically, he Tweeted that he's going to Tweet. At 8 PM EST tonight. Presumably about why he left his show so abruptly. Was it because of the Comcast/NBC merger the day before? Was it not that at all, but rather longer-running tensions between the star and management? We'll be able to hear it directly from the horse's mouth in just over 5 hours. In 140 character chunks.

None of these are huge news in and of themselves, but together they paint a picture of dramatic change. Change away from a past where huge audiences sat passively and consumed a small quantity of time-restricted, highly-produced streams of content, delivered through a limited number of distribution channels that were secured by conglomerates at great cost. The days in which there was just one media game in town are fading fast, pushed into history one Tweet at a time.

The site announced last night that it now offers granular subscriptions by Facebook. Instead of just "Liking" the entire site and getting all its articles pushed to your Facebook newsfeed, you can now limit your Like to particular authors and some topics on the site. I just subscribed to trailblazing journalist Robert Fisk's Independent articles on Facebook. This might seem like a small change - but it's not. Media sites all over the web are sure to implement this kind of feature soon.

It's clear though that Facebook has come up with a winning formula: emphasis on effective user experience, easy and meaningful social interaction, casual gaming and multi-media reading and writing, not just subscription like Google Reader offers. RSS readers, like Google Reader, arguably offer more powerful features, include subscription portability and allow you to keep your subscriptions private - but that hasn't mattered for Facebook users.

The end result is a great place to read news from your favorite organizations. That's what Facebook wants to be.

Check out how the Independent has implemented Facebook subscriptions. That's likely how everyone will do it in the near future.

The end result will be more and easier subscriptions and knowledge for users, more readership for publishers and more influence over the world we live in for Facebook.

Specifically, the live streaming will be done on the Republicans' page for PledgeToAmerica. When the Obama inauguration was live broadcast in 2009, the video appeared on CNN.com but was powered by Facebook Connect, which allowed viewers to see comments posted exclusively by their Facebook friends, if they so chose. CNN said at the time that 5.3 million video streams of that event were delivered.

Will viewers of the Pledge to America page be required to declare to all their Facebook friends that they Like the Republican Party in order to gain viewing or commenting access to the stream, as was so widely grimaced about when George W. Bush started a Facebook page?

Will any other online media outlets be allowed to live stream the proceedings, or will it just be Facebook? Twitter? Current.tv? UStream? Who will the new Hellen Thomas of live online social politics be - sitting in the front row and asking difficult questions for decades?

Actually, it's unclear whether Facebook itself will be providing the live stream or whether it will simply be Republicans embedding a live stream on their own Facebook page. I've emailed Facebook for clarification and to answer some of the more specific questions. Will Facebook staff be on camera hosting the coverage as they have in other instances? The company recently live-streamed an on-site visit by George W. Bush and it was quite charming (I say that as a non-Republican, too).

Update: Andrew Noyes, Facebook's Manager of Public Policy Communications, got back to us by email and had this to say. "Hundreds of members of Congress use Facebook to communicate and connect with their constituents in an official capacity and we're excited to see Facebook being used prominently as the 112th Congress gavels into session this week." It turns out that Rep. Boehner, the new Republican Speaker of the House, is leading the effort with his new media team. Facebook is, however, one of very few 3rd party services that Congress has approved for official use, something that was a subject of controversy when the US government started using YouTube prominently.

Many questions philosophical and practical about the implementation will be answered tomorrow morning, but no matter how it goes down, it's hard to argue that things haven't changed in the worlds of media and politics.

Google has been a consistent supporter of new media efforts. This new announcement means that for every $40,000 in the company's market cap, it is donating $1 for the future of media. That doesn't seem like the most aggressive initiative, given the gravity of the situation - but it is Google's money.

The company says it will announce specific grant programs for international media early next year.

Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen published an Op-Ed in The New York Times yesterday (registration required) arguing that the company's own commercial products, like YouTube, are an effective force in global human rights movements.

Postrank co-founder Ilya Grigorik added another metric to Sherk's analysis: engagement per unique visitor. Can you guess which major media outlet scored the highest? It was the Guardian, in the UK. Next in line for most engagement per unique visitor were Slate, The New York Times, the BBC and The Economist. See below for a chart displaying the top 30.

You can see the raw data on this Google Spreadsheet. What do you think helps these leading sites rise to the top and transition so effectively to a social media world?

Note: A question has been raised in comments about MSNBC's numbers, because of the way its traffic resolves to an MSN.com domain. Short of recalculating, we'll suggest readers take into account that the organization's unique visitors per month may be substantially undercounted.

Is experimentation with social media by a media organization itself a factor in how much its content gets shared? The Guardian has what's arguably the media world's best iPhone app. Or is it most important to simply produce great content? Clearly social media traction per visitor doesn't lead directly to business success - Newsweek is beating out MSNBC and Forbes in this chart, but it was recently bought for $1! Does social media traction matter, from a business perspective?

This kind of an analysis is interesting to see run on big, general interest publications - but it can also be applied on very niche topics. See our new series The Top 10 Buzziest Blogs in Geolocation This Week, for example. I don't know how many of those could sell for more than the price of Newsweek - but they make great reading and knowing the top sites in that field offers all kinds of other types of business and technical value.

While the partnership may not be "official", it is yet another vote of confidence in the Twitter-alternative and the open Web.

As the web continues to change traditional media, we see two different and equally strong paradigms emerging. The emergence of sites like Twitter, Tumblr and the social web has been mirrored and tempered by the growing prominence of closed systems like the App Store and Facebook. Now, we like and use all of these platforms.

But we think it's equally important for brands and individuals to control their content and interactive experience with the social graph (Fail Whale, anyone?). To that end StatusNet provides a glimpse at the future of a distributed internet.

StatusNet also allows us to do some fun things with our content and experiment in ways that provide flexibility for errors (read: bugs!) and experimentation.

For now, Patterson says the site will be used for news distribution and audience engagement - the typical use of systems like Twitter and StatusNet - and will be available at abcnewsradio.fm. Earlier this summer, StatusNet received a push in the form of $2.3 million and just recently the company introduced an iPhone app. The decision of a major media outlet to use their service is, in our eyes, a major vote of confidence in something other than the norm.

Who needs an Apple TV now?

So, why would a Netflix user need to stream from a mobile device to the TV? Why wouldn't they just watch a DVD instead? For one thing, DVDs-by-mail takes time - the mobile option provides instant gratification.

And although Netflix streaming is supported through a number of game consoles like the Xbox, the Wii and the PlayStation 3 as well as on some connected TVs, Blu-ray players and other devices, not everyone has these devices in their home or even wants them. Mobile-to-TV streaming provides another option without another expense - besides, of course, the $50 cable or iPhone/iPod dock, if you don't already have one. That's still a lot less expensive than a brand-new Xbox.

Kill Your Cable - And Ditch Your Media Center Boxes - with Netflix

This update now positions Netflix as somewhat of a competitor to Apple's newly refreshed Apple TV platform, Google's upcoming Google TV service, media center boxes like Boxee and Roku and even some cable company DVRs like those provided to Verizon FiOS customers, for example, which already offer an assortment of popular TV shows and movies for free streaming.

With Netflix, you could cancel your cable subscription and even ditch your media center boxes or DVR and just stream movies and TV shows straight from your phone to your TV instead. Of course, you won't have access to new releases or current TV shows this way, but for many casual viewers, that's no longer a necessity.

And perhaps more importantly, this update brings your Netflix subscription with you anywhere you go - a friend's house, your parents, the hotel room, etc. All you need is a phone and a cable.

Since the update just launched today, we have not yet tested it nor reviewed its performance. If you do so, please share your experiences in the comments.