Little is known about Preston's personal use of social media, she's either using aliases or is remarkably quiet around the web, and details are still forthcoming about the new position she'll fill. The Times has done a remarkable job of engaging with social media so far, though, and we have high hopes for this new post.

She doesn't seem particularly active in the social media world so far. She has a private Twitter account that she's just begun to open up this morning - but apparently she hasn't published any tweets there yet, ever. She is following almost 160 people so far, though, far more than are following her to date. So she could be using it for listening.

She's also got a private FriendFeed account, a private Yahoo account and an unused Tumblr account. The BackType comment search engine can't find any comments she's left on blogs around the web.

Gawker suspects she's been brought into the position to silence the prolific tweeting of other people at the Times, but that's hard to imagine. It would be a terrible tragedy if the Times became as tight lipped in social media as many of their competitors have lately. Bloomberg staff has been explicitly prohibited from Twittering about competitors or sharing links to their sites! No one at the Times has responded yet to our requests for comment on the new position.

The New York Times has done an incredible job leveraging Twitter informally, it's a virtual case study of how journalists can effectively use the medium. The company's other social media moves include a long list of powerful APIs, great infographics (some leveraging user generated content), lots of video and a real-time stream of updates from the organization. The business side of the Times is in as much trouble as the rest of the newspaper industry, but many in the organization seem prepared to stake its future on innovation. It's a lot of fun to watch. (The Times also syndicates ReadWriteWeb, something we appreciate a lot.)

For now we'll have to wait for more details on the new position. Word came out via a Tweet from Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor at The New York Times.

We would love to see Preston fill a role similar to what Mathew Ingram does at the Toronto Globe and Mail, Canada's largest daily paper. Ingram's position is "Communities Editor" but he interfaces with social media activities both on and off of the paper's site. In a recent interview we did with Ingram he explained that "The transition from one-way to two-way media is not something that newspapers are used to doing. It's a big change."

Social media at newspapers doesn't have to be about promotion or damage control, it's also a real resource. "One thing I want to encourage more is writers responding to comments and using comments as a resource," Ingram says. "That's commenting 2.0, I think...One of the biggest things we need to do is identify and encourage members of the community who are thoughtful, intelligent, and produce comments of value -- encouraging them to contribute more, elevating what they do and suppressing some of the noise."

(For more Ingram goodness, see his article last week at the Nieman Journalism Lab titled The Golden Age of Computer Assisted Reporting is at Hand.)

That kind of hands-on approach, plus the NYT's brilliant tech innovation, sounds like a powerful recipe for Jennifer Preston to do some exciting new things at the intersection of old and new media.

Tameka Kee noticed the numbers via traffic analysts Compete.com and posted about them briefly on PaidContent today. Traffic numbers are fickle but Compete competitor Quantcast puts Twitter even further in the lead.

Kee attributes the surge to last month's Oprah, Ashton, CNN lovefest for Twitter. We suspect that is just one of a number of factors. Twitter is also really useful, fun and captivating.

Of course Facebook is much, much bigger - but for some reason non-users tend to take Facebook more seriously than Twitter. It's probably the Harvard connection and the similarity with MySpace. Twitter is a different animal. It's more interesting.

And now it's more visited online than the New York Times and Wall St. Journal sites. That's pretty incredible. Of course Twitter doesn't create original content. Does it?

We found the PaidContent post via NY Times designer Jeremy Zilar (on Twitter) who was passing it along from the Twitter account of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab. The Lab posted a video tour of the New York Times R&D lab this morning, where the very forward-looking newspaper giant is exploring ways to deliver its content to new devices, to satisfy advertisers in a changed media world, and to aim (presumably) not lose to Twitter as the news outlet of the future.

The Times is watching Twitter closely. The Twitter API (Application Programming Interface) has been key to Twitter's success. The NYT has released a bevy of great APIs of its own. Tomorrow the company will announce a new up-to-the-minute view of all its stories called Timeswire, linked to from the front page of the site. PR for that product said "Think Twitter & Facebook redesign." That product is built on top of the company's newswire API. At a news room strategy meeting yesterday the company said it "believes [it] can create significant revenue streams from APIs." That could well be the future of news.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times. We also use Twitter a lot to do our jobs. Twitter-reporter picture by Scott Macdonald, originally for our post How We Use Twitter For Journalism.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Jolie Odell.

Another nice feature of the Reader application is the ability to 'browse' the paper by zooming out and seeing previews of the surrounding pages, which nicely recreates the feeling of browsing the 'real' paper.

Oddly, though, during our tests, the scroll wheel on our mouse didn't work in the application, and we had to resort to using the keyboard to flip pages.

For Free: Crossword, Front Page, Business, Magazine, and Most Emailed

If you don't subscribe to the Times or Times Reader, you can still access articles from the New York Times front page, the business section, and the most emailed articles from the Times. If you love the New York Times crossword puzzle, you will be happy to hear that an interactive version of the day's puzzle is also available for free.

For the Sunday Edition, content from the Magazine is available for free, though the Sunday Business section is hidden behind the paywall.

It is important to note that the Times already gives readers offline access to its content through its iPhone application, and a lot of the functionality of the Reader application is also duplicated in the Article Skimmer - though without offline access, of course.

The Times Reader excels in the presentation of the content, and while apps like this will surely not be enough to save the newspaper industry, we are glad to see that the Times continues to innovate and try new business models and ways to reach and retain readers.

Disclosure: The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

The app store hasn't updated yet so you'll have to grab it and manually update the app. Any stories you load with a web connection turned on will be saved automatically for offline reading. It's easy to customize the interface to highlight your favorite sections of the publication and we expect to be thankful for this app on our next flight.

If we had any suggestions they would be to put that movie ad in a more appropriate place and perhaps to include links to some of the several very interesting implementations of the new Times APIs, like this awesome elastic list article browser.

Check out the "browse by photos" feature, too. It's an all around good iPhone app, something we expect other publications to learn from. Offline readers will enjoy Instapaper's iPhone app as well, but that requires users to designate articles for reading from a regular web interface. Sometimes you're in a rush and the new Times app looks like it will deliver.

Originally announced in May of last year, The NYTimes API selection continues to grow. The TimesPeople API joins other available APIs including Article Search, Best Sellers, Campaign Finance, Community, Congress, and Movie Reviews.

So What Does This Mean?

For The New York Times, this release marks a continued commitment to opening up data resources to the social Web, allowing developers to leverage NYTimes.com data to enhance their existing offerings - or to serve as the foundation for entirely new offerings.

Granted this news may not seem like much, especially to members of a community who see applications launching every day with open APIs. But for the traditionally sheltered and closed mainstream media, allowing readers access to full-text RSS feeds and publicly available user data tends to be a big deal.

Even if you're not excited about the traditional media becoming more open, it's still worth mentioning - if only for the fact that an entity like the NYT continuing to move in this direction lends additional credence to the vision for an open and social Web, as a whole.

Hopefully, more dead-tree publications will follow the Gray Lady's lead. If they do, we're all sure to win as creative developers find ways to mash data from disparate sources. (It doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to imagine the type of filtering availed by combining data from social bookmarking, social networks, and news APIs.)

This access to real data from real users is sure to give us a better understanding of what news is truly important - and what stories deserve placement on the front pages of the future.

This is a big deal. A strong press organ with open data is to the rest of the web what basic newspaper delivery was to otherwise remote communities in another period of history. It's a transformation moment towards interconnectedness and away from isolation. A quality API could throw the doors wide open to a future where "newspapers" are important again.

What does that mean? It means that sites around the web will be able to add dynamic links to New York Times articles, or excerpts from those articles, to pages on their own sites. The ability to enrich other content with high quality Times supplementary content is a powerful prospect.

The Times has opened a wide variety of APIs over the last year; they are making "the newspaper as platform" (as journalist Mathew Ingram put it today) a major part of the company's bid for the future. We discussed the significance of this strategy when the Times opened its first API in October. As we wrote then,

Reporting is no longer a scarce commodity. It's hard for these huge news organizations to do it faster, cheaper or even as well as a whole web of new media producers around the world. They may be among the top sources for original content still today, but considering the direction technology is moving in - that's not a safe bet for the future.

One thing that big media still does have a particularly good share of, though, is information processing resources and archival content. The Times' campaign contribution API is a good example of this. The newspaper is far better prepared to organize that raw information, and perhaps offer complimentary content, than any individual blogger or small news publisher.

We're excited to see how this API gets put to use and we look forward to seeing it develop all the more.

What could come next? We'd love to see some semantic parsing of all this content. As semantic web aficionado Tom Morris wrote today, "[These] Could be signs of something very good - imagine if the New York Times were to join the web of Linked Data, pointing from articles out to all sorts of distributed resources. The amount of information stored up inside an institution like the New York Times would be really interesting if it were linked together with other data on the Web. A search API isn't tremendously interesting, but it is interesting to see someone like the NYT do this, rather than just Web 2.0 sites and hosts of user-contributed material publishing this kind of data."

Or, as Tim Berners Lee reportedly told attendees of the TED conference today - the time has come for no "database hugging" - don't just make your own website. Especially when it comes to government data, we should all demand raw data now.

Full raw data, marked up semantic or linked data, there are a number of options. This is an informational currency that could mean as much to the world of the future as mere delivery of the paper press used to in an otherwise isolated world. We hope this effort will succeed and be another model for more of the same from other companies.

Disclosure: The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

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.

We're excited about it from a technology perspective, but media industry analyst and RWW Jobwire guest editor Sam Whitmore discusses the move in terms of what it means for the Times as a business as well over in the Jobwire Featured Hire of the Day (sponsored by VisualCV).

The Times quietly announced in May that it would soon be publishing APIs, which are means by which outside developers can access NY Times data for use in other applications, interfaces and mashups. We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future.

The Times describes its initial offering like this:

With the Campaign Finance API, you can retrieve contribution and expenditure data based on United States Federal Election Commission filings. Campaign finance data is public and is therefore available from a variety of sources, but the developers of the Times API have distilled the data into aggregates that answer most campaign finance questions. Instead of poring over monthly filings or searching a disclosure database, you can use the Times Campaign Finance API to quickly retrieve totals for a particular candidate, see aggregates by ZIP code or state, or get details on a particular donor.

The Campaign Finance API is currently limited to presidential campaign data. Future versions will include house and senate campaign data.

The demonstration application built with this API is a simple mashup of the campaign contributions and the Google Charts API, to create a graph of contributions by zip code. You know what we'd like to see? A Greasemonkey script that shows political contributions for a geographic area whenever a user hovers over that area's name on a web page. Would that be cool, or what?

The possibilities are truly endless.

We're very excited to see what kinds of data the Times opens up next.

Why APIs are Important for Newspapers

The UK Guardian is the best example of a newspaper that understands the opportunities in becoming a broker of machine-readable data, instead of just human readable content. Reuters is doing something similar with it's Calais program. (Calais is an RWW sponsor.)

Reporting is no longer a scarce commodity. It's hard for these huge news organizations to do it faster, cheaper or even as well as a whole web of new media producers around the world. They may be among the top sources for original content still today, but considering the direction technology is moving in - that's not a safe bet for the future.

One thing that big media still does have a particularly good share of, though, is information processing resources and archival content. The Times' campaign contribution API is a good example of this. The newspaper is far better prepared to organize that raw information, and perhaps offer complimentary content, than any individual blogger or small news publisher.

They, along with everyone's favorite API management service Mashery (again powering another exciting API), have the skills and the draw to offer this data in a way that a lot of developers will find compelling. When developers create applications that use their data, the Times will once again assert itself as an essential part of our information landscape - both in mind share and in inbound links/Search Engine Optimization for their online content.

Further, the times are changing and if you're not publishing for those readers of yours who happen to be robots - you're missing out on an important constituency.

We're really excited about the New York Times APIs and we look forward to seeing what kinds of innovative things the development community can do with them.

This is great news for us, because it brings our brand of web technology news, reviews and analysis to a much wider audience. It also means that the innovative and often little known startups we write about daily get a chance to be seen in a mainstream publication. The New York Times has a reputation for quality and in-depth journalism, attributes that we strive for on ReadWriteWeb - so we're excited about this partnership.

Along with ReadWriteWeb, The New York Times will also syndicate content from our friends at VentureBeat and GigaOm. The New York Times re-design is now live, although syndicated content won't go live until October.

Andy Plesser from Beet.TV had the scoop on this story, along with a video interview with Vindu Goel, deputy technology editor at The New York Times.

I want to especially thank Bernard Lunn, ReadWriteWeb's Business Development Manager, for getting this deal. We at ReadWriteWeb are proud to have our growing brand associated with the prestigious New York Times - maybe now our families and friends will understand what we do for a living ;-)

NYTimes.com/Tech Editor Saul Hansell told Read/WriteWeb in an email that Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year." Further, Hansell said that "unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren't trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts."

Blogrunner.com is a news aggregator that was acquired by the Times Company in 2005. NY Times has been building on the service since then - at one stage it was called "The Annotated New York Times". In February 2006 we wrote that Blogrunner offered an "interesting way to remix the NY Times and bring in external citations"; although we didn't think it was one of the top news aggregators at that point.

It's taken a long time for NY Times to integrate external news aggregation technology into their website, but kudos to them for doing it now. It provides opportunities for leading tech blogs - such as Techcrunch, PaidContent and of course Read/WriteWeb - to distribute their content to a wider audience. It also exposes NY Times readers to the more social - and arguably much faster - news cycle of leading blogs.

Blogrunner itself still seems behind Techmeme in some areas. For example Techmeme provides an easy-to-scan look at all related stories, on its frontpage. Whereas you only get the top story on Blogrunner's frontpage - you need to click the "related" link to see all the coverage. Also, and admittedly this could be seen as a pro rather than a con by mainstream readers, the publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors (thankfully R/WW seems to be among the chosen ones!).

So there is a strong editorial focus with Blogrunner, which NY Times states in its press release "enables readers to get a thoughtful overview of the day's top print and online coverage, all on one site." I think this is a sensible move, as a key part of the NY Times experience is its reputation for editorial quality - so Blogrunner should leverage that. As noted above, Google News and Techmeme by comparison are automated (although with both, the initial news sources were editorially selected).

All in all a great move by NY Times - tell us what you think in the comments. Will you use the NY Times Tech frontpage more because of this new feature?