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News360, a personalized news reader on the major mobile and tablet platforms, has added Google Plus integration using the newly released Google Plus API. News360 started off as a simple aggregator, but its 2.0 version launched in August added machine learning smarts to crawl users' feeds and learn what topics interest them.

News360 now personalizes the news using Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Evernote and Google Plus, providing a comprehensive picture of a user's interests. The developers found that the long, in-depth updates users post on Google Plus are rich in semantic data that can improve personalization. The personalization syncs between the tablet and the desktop Web version, but the mobile versions don't have it yet.

Yahoo and ABC News have joined their online news efforts to leverage Yahoo's large audience and ABC's worldwide news production. The two media giants estimate they will serve over 100 million U.S. users per month.

ABC's morning show Good Morning America has relaunched as a Yahoo site, and George Stephanopoulos will webcast an interview with President Obama on Yahoo and ABCNews.com today at 2:35 p.m. ET.

For East Coast fans of Radiohead, the news could hardly have been more exciting. The band, multiple news outlets confirmed, would be playing a surprise show in downtown Manhattan on Friday afternoon. The show would coincide with the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests that had been organized online and with which the band would likely be sympathetic.

Once a few prominent blogs began reporting on it, the news spread like wildfire across Twitter and Facebook, where eager fans posted updates about the show and began making plans to attend.

Everybody freaked out this morning over The Onion's decision to "live"-tweet a story about members of Congress holding children hostage in the Capitol building. Without a doubt, the first tweet of the barrage was troubling. "BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside the Capitol building," the tweet rang out. It has since been retweeted 141 times.

But just because this message flew by on Twitter, does that mean we should go into panic mode? The Onion is a satirical source. It produces works of fiction, and it tries to be funny. That's all it does. It can publish whatever it wants. One tweet is not an isolated incident. It's part of a stream of messages, and the rest of the messages here tell an obviously satirical story.

Big data and sentiment analysis can do amazing things, whether it's in the enterprise or in the quest to create compelling applications and experiences for consumers. But can technology trends such as these actually predict major real-world events?

As sci-fi as it may sound, that's exactly what researcher Kalev Leetaru was able to accomplish with a little help from SGI's Altix UV supercomputer packing 8.2 teraflops of processing power. Leetaru, a digital media analytics expert at the University of Illinois, wrote software that can scan over 100 million news articles and uses sentiment analysis, text geocoding and predictive analytics to determine when political upheaval will go from rowdy to revolutionary.

Google News is building new ways to highlight great content, such as the <standout> tag announced this weekend, so now is a good time to rethink how to optimize content for the popular news aggregator, which also powers the news features in Google Plus.

A new study produced by Local SEO Guide, PerfectMarket and newsknife has shed some light on the factors that determine rankings on Google News. Among the top 10 factors under publishers' control are keywords in headlines and page titles, strong domain authority, social sharing of articles, and being first to publish. Citation by other sources is also a key factor, as is the uniqueness of the text.

Facebook made significant changes to how it delivers your friends' news and updates today by releasing a ticker feature and a news feed format that arranges missed updates in a newspaper-style format.

The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.

The Guardian has taken a big step across the pond today with its launch of a U.S. homepage at guardiannews.com. The design is consistent with the U.K. front page, but the stories and sections are tailored to a U.S. audience. In her editorial announcing the launch, Guardian US Editor-In-Chief Janine Gibson calls it "the first tiny step in our bid to improve the Guardian website for US users," marking the beginning of the organization's new digital operations based in New York City.

Gibson goes to great lengths to downplay the importance of this launch, calling it "very, very beta," but there are some big announcements here beyond just this homepage news. The announcement also says that the Guardian is hiring a whole U.S.-based newsroom. Today's U.S. homepage launch appears to be just one step in the Guardian's transformation into a full-fledged international news organization.

Google has a problem on its hands. The pricing change for App Engine is not winning hearts and minds with developers. The first, most visible, victim after one day is Russell Beattie's PlusFeed. There are sure to be more.

Beattie, who'd set up a service to provide feeds for Google Plus has pulled the plug. Beattie, calling the pricing "completely f****** insane", says that his costs would have jumped from $2.63 based on resources used to $68.46 for one day.

Google and the Associated Press have joined forces to offer a scholarship program for student journalists administered by the Online News Association. The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship program will offer six undergraduate or graduate students $20,000 scholarships for the 2012-13 school year.

From the press release:

"The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism. A key goal is to promote geographic, gender and ethnic diversity, with an emphasis on rural and urban areas."

Applications are now open. Only U.S. citizens are eligible (see eligibility requirements). The deadline is January 27, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. ET.