Just as Johannes Gutenberg's printing press brought books to the mainstream public in the 15th century, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web brought commercial publishing to the people.

Blogging

Blogging not only allowed anybody to publish easily to the Web, it ended up shaking up the print media world.

Blogging began in the 90s as a form of online diary - Rebecca Blood wrote a good pre-history in 2000. One of the early popular blogging services was Blogger.com, launched by Evan Williams (who subsequently became a co-founder of Twitter) and Meg Hourihan in August 1999. The service was acquired by Google in February 2003, a couple of months before ReadWriteWeb began. At that point, 2003, blogging was still seen as an informal diary-type of publishing.

Around 2004-05, blogging started to become accepted as a legitimate news source. This was around the time that ReadWriteWeb began to publish tech news, as well as analysis.

By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers - proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years.

RSS

Blogging software was one part of the democratization of media. RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") was another. There were and still are different versions of RSS, created by Dave Winer and others. But whatever the flavor, syndication has had a major impact on media.

Basically RSS allowed people to subscribe to updates from blogs and other publications. Using RSS Aggregators, people could read news from a selection of niche and general news publications.

Blogs were the first to utilize RSS, but mainstream media followed during the 2005-06 period. Today it is very rare for a major news website - whether it be the New York Times or a leading blog - not to use RSS.

Twitter & The Real-Time Web

The next major development in news media occurred towards the end of this decade. It was of course Twitter and the Real-Time Web.

To be fair, this has challenged not only traditional media - but blogs as well. Now anyone, whether they're a writer or not, can publish 140 characters to the Web. And it might end up as breaking news, as the Hudsen River plane crash proved earlier this year.

Media in the Next Decade

There is much talk of the mainstream media "dying" and blogs usurping traditional media companies like the New York Times. While it's true that blogs sometimes report breaking news stories or analyze them better than newspaper websites, I'm a big believer in the power of brand. Washington Post, Wall St Journal, New York Times - these are all powerful brands and they reach a much wider audience than the vast majority of blogs.

The challenge of course for mainstream media is to (drastically) reduce their costs, because few people want to pay for content these days - news or otherwise.

However, in my view the traditional news media industry is in much less danger of extinction than the music industry. Musicians can bypass record labels completely nowadays, but there will always be a need for news to be questioned, put in context and analyzed. The best media publications of the next 10 years will do that and be successful, the ones that don't will fade away.

See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music

What makes this an ingenious member engagement tool for Digg, is that sub-par articles with a high number of comments are likely to incite action. In the past, many of us simply ignored the sensationalist stories that plagued the lower echelons of Diggdom. Nevertheless, with trolls being a driving force in the determination of trends, users will find themselves clicking through simply to right the wrongs in the Digg universe. While real-time shopping notifications like Woot's Twitter account incentivize users with deals, Digg knows that its members will keep coming back to maintain a sense of justice. The company will be rolling out the trends feature in the near future.

Although the "literature on a deadline" aesthetic of journalism is not hard-wired for nostalgia and hasn't often the leisure for back-patting, several individuals, stories, and websites stand out for their achievements in the field and their contributions to our collective knowledge and engagement this year. Read on for the list of honorees and our assessment of their contributions.

Journo/reader collaboration site Publish 2, which focuses on news curation, received $5,000 as the first Gannett Foundation Award winner for technical innovation in the service of digital journalism. The Gannett Company, an undisputed titan of news media, aims to use foundation funds to ensure the future of journalism and contribute to other charitable causes.

The Gotham Gazette, an NYC-focused civic resource, was recognized with a Creative Use Award in 2004. This year, the outlet was given an award for its contributions to the microsite category. Well known for its hyperlocal focus, it's essentially the Batman of the Internet, an arm of the Citizens Union Foundation of the City of New York, which itself is an NYC-focused government watchdog group.

In a coup of navel-gazing, the organization awarded a project entirely devoted to investigating the death of a journalist. The Chauncey Bailey Project was an investigation by more than 24 journalists into the murder of an Oakland Post reporter. The project took home two awards, receiving $5,000 for the Knight Award for Public Service and OJA's award for investigative journalism in the small site category.

Also of interest is the Guantanamo: Beyond the Law endeavor. Spearheaded by McClatchy journalists Tom Lasseter and Matt Schofield, the project was honored by ONA for investigative journalism for a large site.

As large sites of general excellence, ProPublica, the Las Vegas Sun, and The New York Times were also honored.

Of course, we can't wait to hear your personal picks. We were disappointed that journo-source matchmaker site HARO was left out. What was your favorite news site this year, and why?

How it Works

When you first visit Fwix, the site auto-detects your location by looking at your IP address. If you're in one of the supported cities, you'll immediately be shown the local homepage for that area. The presentation of the headlines is simple, displaying only headlines and brief one-sentence summaries - perfect for this modern day-and-age where people don't read entire articles as much as they scan the headlines.

Current news items take up the main part of the page while active (aka "popular") stories, weather, and site activity panels fill the sidebar. Another interesting feature is the "break" button which appears under each story. By clicking this, you have the opportunity to "break" the story by posting it to Twitter or Facebook. That's a bit of twist on what people usually mean when they say a news story was "broken by Twitter" - i.e., Twitter was the first place it appeared. In this case, though, you're just tweeting something that someone already reported. However, in the case of user-generated submissions, you still may be the first to bring the news to the microblogging network.

The iPhone App

According to Fwix's 22-year-old founder and former Facebook employee, Darian Shirazi, the company's new iPhone application will make its appearance in the iTunes App Store sometime this week. With the free app, which will let you use your Facebook or Twitter account for sign in purposes, you'll be able to submit stories, and take pictures and videos (the latter if you use the newer iPhone 3GS which includes video-recording functionality). Your items will then appear on the Fwix web site. You can also use the app to read the news stories from your city.

Although there are plenty of iPhone applications for local news (just do an iTunes search), none really offer what Fwix does. Even CNN's popular iReport only takes emailed-in submissions for when you're mobile, there's no dedicated application. The closest iPhone app competitor is probably outside.in's Radar (iTunes link), a complement to the company's own local news service. Radar pulls in relevant news, blog posts, and Twitter updates based on your current location. However, neither it nor any of the others allow you to use their app to actually do reporting like this. And once you've submitted your eye-witness report, the news story will make it to the Fwix homepage almost instantly.

With all the talk of the failing newspaper industry and declining revenues, Fwix has come up with an innovative new concept for gathering news. This is precisely the sort of iPhone application your hometown local paper should have thought of first. Unfortunately, they didn't - which is probably one of the many reasons they're struggling today. Good thing Fwix is open to syndication. Says Shirazi, the company has some deals "in the pipeline" to offer Fwix content to local media outlets but isn't announcing anything just yet.

The Fwix website itself gets 400,000 unique visitors per month but their content network receives nearly 8 million, reports Shirazi. (Quantcast reports 7.3 million people globally). If citizen journalists adopt the new app when it arrives, those numbers may soon increase.

We love to debunk myths and prick bubbles as much as the next set of pundits, but we think the real-time Web is for real. Financial traders have lived in a real-time world for a while, but only within the confines of the trading floor. When they left work, they entered a batch world. Most other people work in a batch world. That is changing. We are all entering the real-time world of the trader. Some of us are getting there faster, but we are all heading there. And relax, there is an "Off" button!

One reason you see so much news about Twitter is that it is a news business, and journalists love to write about their own business!

Calling Twitter a news business may be a bit limiting. It is more than that. But it certainly is affecting the news business dramatically:

• As a source of stories. One of the millions of just-in-time stringers twittering away may witness a revolution at any second;
• As a backchannel for other media, replacing the dial-in line used for TV and radio;
• As a traffic source;
• As a source to check stories. Traditional journalists can tap into their Twitter network faster than using their Rolodex or speed dial.

Twitter makes it much easier for journalists to tap into real-time news sources. Mastering Twitter is part of new journalism school.

Traders have always worked in a real-time news business. Information services such as Bloomberg and Reuters compete to deliver news a few seconds faster, and that time difference is important to traders.

Okay, so traders and journalists live in a real-time world. What about the rest of us?

Advertising Exchanges

A friend who runs a financial trading systems business told me that Google was constantly trying to poach his best engineers. Why? Because those employees were very good at real-time engineering, and advertising is also a real-time market.

Advertising markets are just like financial markets: available space is matched by available demand. Today, we have two totally different worlds:

1. Very personal: the "Let's do lunch" style of selling, with long-term commitment. This is a batch world.
2. Totally automated: no messy humans. Machines negotiate with machines in real time. This is the world of automated ad networks and exchanges, typically for sales of either remnant or long-tail inventory.

These worlds get more interesting as they move closer together and we see the gray areas in between where humans make quick judgment calls, inserting themselves into the real-time flow to, for example, approve creative or simply optimize (choosing one advertiser or publisher over another).

Buying and Selling Digital Goods

Anything that can be sold in digital form is becoming part of this trend towards real time. We are simply matching supply and demand. Information (or code or images or songs) that was not worth very much yesterday is suddenly very valuable. Or the opposite: its value suddenly drops. No matter what the digital artifact -- writing, spreadsheet numbers, code, design, images, music -- matching supply and demand is critical to realizing value.

You may be selling a digital artifact that costs money to create, but the marginal cost is zero, so you are quite happy to optimize supply and demand in real time and take whatever price the market offers at the time.

Or you may want real-time markets to help manage your spare work capacity. This is what ventures such as Turn Here focus on.

Real-Time Supply Networks for Physical Products

Dell revolutionized the PC industry by using a real-time supply chain to eliminate costs. Inventory risk is the biggest pain point for most businesses that trade physical goods. The real-time Web can have a similarly revolutionary impact on Main Street for businesses that no longer need multi-million dollar supply-chain systems. We are already seeing straws in the wind of this massive change with very simple uses of Titter, such as:

• The bakery that tells its patrons/followers that "The bread is hot and fresh."
• The Korean BBQ truck in LA that has 39,000 followers who want to know when it is going to roll into their neighborhood.

One can imagine this for anything that is either fresh or scarce: when your local farmer has freshly laid eggs, for example. These tools can be used to sell inventory, matching actual customer demand with bargain offers in real time.

Relaxed Concentration

Human beings naturally operate in real time. Anyone who has children knows about the "real-time interruption machine."

We also need our batch time, our quiet time for reflection and creation. We need to know when to switch off... literally switch off the devices that constantly ping us. Filtering tools and techniques have become critical. As Clay Shirky famously remarked: "It's not information overload. It's filter failure." But we also need to master the ability to deal with a lot of real-time information in a mode of relaxed concentration. In other words, we need to study how great traders work.

Photo credit: artemuestra.

In the U.S., Livestation also began offering Al Jazeera English Live (iTunes link) last month, a live TV application built using the same technology. As with BBC News, the live TV channel is available over both Wi-Fi and 3G. Around the corner, NASA may also be launching a live TV streaming application using Livestation's technology. Already a content partner, NASA's iPhone app has a description that reads: "Update Coming that adds Live NASA Public TV streaming to your device."

While both of these news applications offer TV streams from stations that Livestation is already partners with by way of their live TV desktop application, the company's iPhone streaming solution represents "just the tip of the iceberg," claims Livestation CEO Matteo Berlucchi. "Once other broadcasters see the immediate business benefits of the revenue model we are offering... we expect usage to increase."

The revenue model he is referring to is the one where iPhone and iPod Touch users purchase the mobile applications built using the Livestation iPhone technology platform in the iTunes App Store. They can then also serve ads within the app itself, if the broadcaster so chooses. Those ads don't have to be simple text or image links, either - they can be video ads, too, much like what you would see on TV. In addition, Berlucchi says that paid-for content that goes beyond that of the app's initial purchase price is also a possibility in the future.

According to Livestation's website, the iPhone solution uses the company's own streaming protocol to deliver the TV streams. However, they note that they plan to support the native Apple Streaming protocol as soon as it becomes available. That seems to confirm our suspicions from earlier this year about live streaming on the iPhone, which came about when we uncovered Apple's IETF submission for a live streaming protocol.

Livestation is not the only company to provide a means of watching TV on your iPhone, but the current crop of iPhone applications like SlingPlayer, Live TV, and Orb require a set-top box, a TV tuner, and/or software installed on your computer. Livestation's apps, on the other hand, simply require an iPhone.

To see the technology in action, you can watch this video on Vimeo, where the BBC News application is demonstrated.

Perhaps the most confusing element of last week's policy change were Apple's new rules which counted any application containing a built-in web browser as needing to be rated 17+ simply because it would allow the user to access the internet. (Ironically, the iPhone's built-in Safari web browser didn't count).

Also, other potentially objectionable applications seemed to be rated inconsistently with regards to their content. For example, the risqué "Wobble iBoobs" is listed as "not rated" while e-book reader Eucalyptus was rated mature because you could use it to view a copy of the "Kama Sutra" if you so desired. As the developer of the bookmarking application Instapaper noted at the time, the current ratings form is too vague since any developer who offered "unfiltered internet access" via a built-in browser could technically check off all the descriptions on the ratings form's list of mature content types.

Although cutting off access to promo codes wouldn't have stopped developers from giving out free copies of their apps - other methods like distributing ad-hoc builds and iTunes gift certificates were still available - it certainly made the process that much more difficult. Plus, it was unclear as to why the policy was ever enacted in the first place. After all, the promo codes aren't typically used to entice children to come test out "mature" applications - they're mostly used to market the apps by providing copies to reviewers or to potential new users by way of contests or other events.

Once Again, App Store Policies Questioned

After some heavy discussion in the blogosphere, it appears that Apple has now quietly reversed their earlier, incomprehensible policy. According to TUAW, several developers are reporting that they are once again able to request codes for the 17+ apps.

While we're glad that this time Apple has decided to listen to their developer community, that isn't always the case. And this is by no means the first glitch to arise in the Apple iTunes App Store's system since it launched. The company has come under fire in the past for approving clearly horrific applications by accident while lagging behind on approval of others without providing clear communication as to why. Developers are also frustrated because Apple doesn't provide them with ways to ask about App Store rejections, in some cases only sending cryptic emails like this one simply stating that the app was not "consistent with the criteria considered in our approval process."

Were Promo Codes Really a Problem to Begin With?

While on the surface, Apple's prior decision to regulate the mature iPhone applications by disabling promo codes seems innocuous enough - protect the children, right? - the way they went about it came across as over-zealous and not very well-thought out. Besides, one has to wonder why they ever decided promo codes were an issue in the first place. Were these codes really being used to corrupt young innocent minds by giving them free copies of adult-themed iPhone apps? We think not.

Where Is Apple Going with "Mature" Apps?

If Apple is truly concerned about children's access to mature content, they'll need to come up with a better system than what they currently offer. They can either play the role of content police (much as they do now) or they can create a new system where ratings are consistent, parental controls are within easy reach, and perhaps iTunes accounts themselves are even categorized as belonging to an adult or a minor.

It's almost certain that Apple is considering the possibilities of this sort of system - only last month they launched their new "mature content" warnings that appear when updating your apps. That system needs tweaking, however, as it doesn't bother to inform you which apps are "mature" out of all those receiving an update.

Still, these incremental changes as to how Apple is treating mature apps point toward an overall goal of creating a system where both mature and non-mature content can safely reside side-by-side. There's no doubt that Apple is interested in expanding their lineup of 17+ apps - those would be sure to be hot sellers capable of bringing in large amounts of additional revenue to the company. Still, Apple needs to be more careful in how they go about implementing these sorts of changes. It would almost be better if they would simply re-launch the entire ratings system and accompanying policies in one go as opposed to messing with these minor - and sometimes haphazard - updates along the way.

Mollom, the spam-filtering startup that eliminates comment and post spam on popular content management systems, just reached two important milestones: it processed 100,000,000 messages and is now actively protecting over 10,000 websites.

Even more impressive is that these statistics are for Mollom's public servers only and don't include message processing on private servers operated for large-volume clients, such as Netlog, an online social portal for European youth.

Mollom set up dedicated servers in Netlog's data center to provide automated around-the-clock monitoring and custom-trained content classifiers. Mollom's servers analyze more than 50 messages per second for Netlog, adding up to an additional 4 million messages per day that are not counted in the latest milestone.

Large sites such as Netlog are turning increasingly to Mollom for its ability to filter spam in near real-time. Another site, popular citizen journalism hub NowPublic, had been receiving almost 25,000 spam posts per day before implementing Mollom's service. After NowPublic installed Mollom, the number of legitimate comments by users jumped 180%, while spam comments fell to nearly zero.

Taking into account the traffic from the 10,000 websites that Mollom protects, Mollom currently processes up to 150 million messages a month, making it one of the largest website spam filtering services available today.

But Mollom is not content to rest on its past achievements. The company is currently changing the architecture of its back-end, which will make the software learn faster and make its actions easier to debug, analyze, and oversee.

Mollom offers its services in tiers, with products targeted at small blogs, mid-sized sites, and large enterprise-level Web properties. Mollom Free, designed for small blogs and sites with small posting volumes, is provided free of charge to the Web community, while Mollom Plus and Mollom Premium are commercial services designed for sites with higher volumes and reliability requirements. More information about its service plans is available on Mollom's website.

In September 2007, when seventeen years old and living in the Netherlands, van Poppel decided to launch a news aggregation business called Breaking News Online. Months later, somehow, he came into possession of a full video of an Osama Bin Laden statement before any of the major news outlets had it, and sold it to Reuters.

Why BNO is Exciting

Three days after van Poppel sold the Bin Laden tape to Reuters, he said in an interview with Inside Cable News that he'd originally reached out to CNN's iReport with the tape. They were unresponsive. He then tried to contact a number of other news outlets before connecting with and making a deal with Reuters. Breaking News Online had already launched months earlier, but the experience must have underlined van Poppel's belief that he could find, select and push out news faster and better than other larger media outlets. The experience probably provided some funds for that vision as well.

Since then, BNO has added editors in the United States, Ireland and Mexico to its team. The team watches news wires closely for important updates, exercises their own brand of editorial judgment in deciding what to push out through their various distribution channels and then they push it out fast.

BNO has made the most of a number of different media technologies. The team is best known for its presence on Twitter - at 800k, BNO has four times more followers than ABC News and twice as many as Newsweek. BNO also makes extensive use of RSS, email, FriendFeed and now promises an iPhone app leveraging the phone's brand new push messaging sometime next month.

In a media landscape that some argue has transcended the old models of scarcity and physical distribution - it could be efficient research infrastructure, high-quality editorial judgment and building online channels of distribution that make the difference. Or, as blogger Mike Bracco put it on The Next Web today, "Unlike their mainstream counterparts the service does a great job of only reporting news worthy of the 'breaking' label. I can attest to this as well as their ability to deliver breaking news before anyone else. I have found them to consistently report news 10-15 minutes before it hits mainstream websites or blogs and well before it is ever reported on TV." In the news game today, being best and first by minutes means it's your link that gets passed along. Breaking News Online is excelling at that game with its short, quick updates.

On the Other Hand...

Now BNO says it will enter the world of the iPhone in August. Every major media outlet is building its own iPhone app but few if any others are charging money for them. The BNO app will cost $1.99 to download. Even crazier, BNO says it will charge an ongoing subscription fee of 99 cents per month for breaking news updates.

All of this is fascinating, but isn't BNO still just an aggregator? In traditional media outlets "aggregator" is a dirty word (unless they are the ones doing the aggregation). In fact, Breaking News Online does very little original reporting. The company is going to monetize its research flow, editorial judgment, distribution channels...and links to other peoples' content. If BNO is successful, there is a real risk of original content publishers objecting to the fact that someone else has found a way to make money off of (links sending traffic to) their content.

Imagine if the Huffington Post charged money for an iPhone app that pushed links to its pages aggregating content from elsewhere. Major media companies would blow a gasket. Ariana Huffington told those companies at a Congressional hearing on saving newspapers this Spring that if she sends them millions of readers and they can't figure out how to monetize that traffic - that's their problem. Some companies gasping for air didn't find that convincing and insist that aggregators hand over some of the only money that anyone in the media ecosystem has figured out how to make online. Admittedly, if the professional reporters on the ground aren't getting paid - then there's going to be less content for aggregators to aggregate.

BNO says it doesn't think of itself as primarily an aggregator, van Poppel says it will do even more original reporting as the company expands.

The internet is changing everything and it's changing itself fast enough that it's a challenge to keep track of it all. Recurring, mobile micropayments for near real-time aggregated news content delivered using push delivery? It's hard to think of a sentence that packs more hot-button concepts into such a small space. That's pretty impressive for a 19 year old.

Can Microsoft find the right balance of monetizing music without being over-bearing, enabling multi-platform use without being confusing and satisfying millions of mainstream users without being boring? Those seem to be the looming questions.

Could Seeqpod Be Under The Hood?

It's possible that the new project is being rolled out quickly because it's built on acquired technology. This Spring there was widespread speculation that Microsoft had acquired failed but awesome MP3 search engine Seeqpod. Seeqpod did a great job searching for media around the web and offered an API that developers liked quite a lot - but the company got slammed by repeated lawsuits. Seeqpod argued that it was only indexing media files that other people were posting, not posting them themselves. That kind of argument tends to hold up best when you are big enough for music companies to look the other way. Surely Microsoft wouldn't be so bold, would it?

Bale says the new Microsoft music service will compete based on scale and quality of product. If it can simply deliver more variety than Pandora or Last.fm do, that alone will make it a viable competitor for many users.

The Web is changing. In today's world, user participation can make or break a site. Allowing users to react, participate, and contribute while keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. If poor-quality content or spam hits your website, it can undermine your site's search engine listing, damage your brand and reputation, and degrade your visitors' experience. Good user-contributed content, meanwhile, can add a lot of value to your site, which translates into more activity, improved stickiness, and more and better monetization opportunities. As the Web continues to become more social, more websites will need a strategy to deal with spam and unwanted content.

The addition of these social features has brought the problem of spam. Two major challenges arise from trying to control website spam. First, visitors may lose their motivation to comment or contribute content because they are required so often to prove that they are human and not spam by registering. This erodes participation.

Secondly, whether visitors are asked to register or not, site moderation becomes more time-consuming and expensive. Website moderators have to scan comments and other content to find spam instead of interact with the community. And publishing companies have to pay for more site moderators to deal with all the spam on their sites.

NowPublic is a Vancouver-based news network that mobilizes an army of reporters to cover events around the world. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in affected areas than most news organizations have on their entire staff. NowPublic was up against as many as 25,000 spam attempts a day, so it needed a solution that would allow the site to grow faster and more effectively without being slowed by comment spam.

A year ago, NowPublic implemented Mollom, a Web service that protects blogs, social networks, and communities against spam and other unwanted content. Within 12 months, the company had become one of the fastest-growing news organizations in the world, with thousands of reporters in more than 140 countries. In addition to this growth in reporters, NowPublic saw an 180% increase in the average number of comments posted per month by users since implementing Mollom's spam-filtering service.

"Integrating Mollom in NowPublic's systems was quick and easy," says Michael Meyers, co-founder and CTO of NowPublic. "It took only a few hours, and the API service has been fast and 100% reliable. By the end of the first month, we saved more in-person hours alone than Mollom cost us for the year."

Mollom has prevented more than one million spam attempts since it started protecting NowPublic. But NowPublic uses Mollom for more than just comment spam. It uses it to identify bogus profiles, vet new account sign-ups, and protect forums.

Mollom, in effect, removed a major barrier to visitor participation for NowPublic, allowing readers to comment anonymously. "Mollom has been a critical ingredient in our success," adds Michael Tippett, co-founder and CMO. "It has allowed us to open our comments to anonymous users while limiting the ability of spammers to vandalize our site. This has helped us grow our page views and truly tap into the wisdom of crowds."

Mollom also allows NowPublic's website maintainers and editors to focus on providing content instead of removing spam. "Since NowPublic began using Mollom," says Jordan Yerman, NowPublic's Contributor Support Manager, "I've saved at least an hour per day dealing with spam in stories, profiles, comments, etc. Thanks to Mollom, I can be more pro-active than reactive. I have more time to engage and interact with our users."

Other major publishers using Mollom to protect their websites from spam are Sony Music, Warner Bros Records, Netlog, The Economist, Fox Interactive, and the New York Observer.

Visit mollom.com to download Mollom's spam filtering service for your website.

From parody sites being taken too seriously to fake news items somehow ending up on major news websites, the two tackle a wide spectrum of new media and industrial media issues. They also get to chat about the legitimacy and credentials of new media journalists and how many social media users have ended up being the first to report or broadcast important news in recent months.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

The pair had just wrapped up a panel discussion on social media and the news. Although each provides coverage of overlapping spaces, they both had unique insights on gathering and reporting the news, as well as using social media to reach the public.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

While such reminiscences undoubtedly wrench a wistful sigh from the breast of those who lived and worked in those heady days (like, before 2002), educating young would-be journalists about how early adopters and the tech-minded are consuming and helping distribute news is a necessary step to ensure the evolution rather than the extinction of American news services. Northwestern University has taken productive steps in that direction this spring and is set to present five interesting, student-created news apps this week.

The students have focused on easing creation and consumption of news while reducing costs of news production and enabling journalistic standards of research and factuality.

The body of work from this experiment includes sports story generator (Machine Generated Sports Stories, or MGSS) that writes sports coverage all by itself from box scores and play-by-play; a Microsoft Word plug-in (Easy Writer) that allows journos to research and fact-check stories as they write them without having to use a separate search engine; an iPhone app (News Feed) that provides the daily news in five- 10- and 20-minute chunks for news-hungry readers with limited time to read; and two Twitter apps.

Twitter News Service sends pertinent news links to users based on their posts. Either the tool will run in the background of Twitter or from a designated Twitter account that users choose to follow (or un-follow) as they desire.

Tweedia will combine news stories with relevant personal opinion and information on a given topic. By integrating Tweedia into a news site, readers get instant access to relevant Twitter posts. News outlets can place a Tweedia link at the end of stories that will either open a widget on the page or redirect readers to the Tweedia site.

Last year, Medill students built News Mixer, a site that mashed up local news with Facebook, allowing users to comment as they read even though many old-school news organizations still don't allow for comments.

Now all Northwestern needs to do is throw in the business school kids and a couple hundred thousand dollars; Startup Semester, anyone?

It should be noted that while 'czar' might sound like an impressive title, in terms of the White House hierarchy, this new position will only be that of a "special assistant to the President," and whoever will fill this position will not have direct access to the President and have very little authority and even less authority over budgets.

According to Obama, not only do we depend on 'cyberspace' every single day ("cyberspace is real," he said), but, paradoxically, while the web empowers us to create great things, it also opens up a door to criminals. Cyber crime, according to Obama, costed about $8 billion in the last two years.

The focus of the announcement was squarely on ensuring privacy, preventing identity theft, and stopping hackers, but another emphasis of this new position would be to mediate between government and private industry initiatives, as well as ensuring communication about this topic between different government agencies. Protecting the "nation's information infrastructure" will be a priority for the White House.

As a side note, Obama also mentioned that hackers were able to hack the Obama campaign's systems last year.

What can Government Really Do?

There is something odd about hearing the government talk about this topic, though. While the Pentagon is obviously interested in this, not only to take out the networks of other countries, but also to prevent others from taking down its own networks, it just seems somewhat naive that a government initiative could do anything to prevent hackers from creating a botnet or breaking into government computers. While it is definitely a great idea to make sure that government agencies use the best possible methods to protect themselves, in the end, at least in the private space, what (besides more education) could a government do about users who don't run anti-virus software and don't patch their operating systems?