DISQUS

They already are... the NYT doesn't offer the crossword online for free. You have to pay $40 a year or $7 a month. It's the one thing they've been able to get people to pay for. They also have an iPhone app.

Looks great. Would love to attend if it's open to the public.

Thanks for the link. I definitely agree that Twitter search needs to focus on the social filters.

Here's my follow up post on some of the technical challenges of using Twitter data in search.
http://blog.agrawals.org/2009/03/13/realtime-tw...

@markjosephson I don't know that there is a need for an editorial voice in the traditional sense. I turned on CNN the other day and on their prime newscast, the lead stories were AG's comments on race, the chimpanzee cartoon and Octomom. All stuff I couldn't care less about. Instead of the top down "editorial voice" of MSM outlets, my new filter is my friend network.

I find out about most news -- whether it's news with a capital "N" or lowercase "n" from Twitter or Facebook. I've found the hit rate in terms of relevance is much higher than the front page of any news site.

See my blog post:
http://blog.agrawals.org/2008/06/13/more-americ...

Gerry,

Was thinking about a couple of similar examples. Got food poisoning at a restaurant a couple of weeks ago. Reported that on my social networks. With enough such reports, you could much more efficiently identify bad restaurants or public health issues.

Likewise, AT&T could use reports from iPhone users to fix their godawful 3G network. Heck, you could automatically upload packets that say "tried 3G, got EDGE" at this location.

You could then focus network buildout on where people are actually trying to use the service and failing.

What is going to be really interesting is when sites realize the power of these networks to collect data for them and do it in a meaningful way.

Think about all the problems we ran into with local search at AOL. InfoUSA's local business database, despite being the gold standard, leaves much to be desired.

Embedded GPS in more devices is also going to be a huge driver.

Love Boxee. I just wrote a post on why hulu is better than a DVR. And boxee solves the biggest problem with hulu.

http://blog.agrawals.org/2009/01/02/10-ways-hul...

I'm already committed to booth babe duties in another booth, but would love to meet the team and maybe buy you a drink or two.

Right on, Gerry. Been very disappointed at the lack of progress on products. Flickr hasn't gotten significant new features in at least a year. Even basics like scaling a picture to your screen resolution automatically (as Picasa does) don't exist.

AOL (with AIM) could have been Facebook.

Unfortunately too many news organizations (and the journalists that work for them) view a story as the end product. No matter how significantly things change, the story is done and on to the next thing.

A few years ago, I emailed a reporter at a large daily and mentioned that a key premise of his story was wrong. He refused to believe it; he was on to the next story and didn't care.

I went back and took a look at how The New York Times has handled two major disasters in its ethics -- Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. Many of these stories still are presented with either poor disclosure of the issues or none at all.

Most readers of this blog probably know to take with buckets of salt anything by Blair or Miller; but most regular readers would scroll past the byline.

Mathew-

Great write up. While much of the discussion has focused on traffic loss, I think there's something equally (if not more) significant.

Google's story page has the most user-centric design. Instead of throwing obstacles in the way of users like most news sites do -- registration requirements, pop ups, etc. -- the page is clean and loads fast.

I did a screen cast comparing the presentation of the same AP story on three different news sites with Google News's presentation.

For the user, the Google presentation is the clear winner.