Technology

The Digital News Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder and I are hosting this month’s Carnival of Journalism, a monthly blogfest in which anyone can participate by answering the Question of the Month.

I’d been wanting to play host to a Carnival, and got my wish for February, thanks to Carnival overseer David Cohn. Here’s the question:

“What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead? And how do you see it playing out in terms of application by journalists, and impact?”

Got an opinion? A good answer? A contrarian point of view? Please consider participating! Here’s my original post introducing this month’s Carnival, which has all the details about how to take part.

I missed the last couple Carnivals of Journalism, but it’s time for me to get back into the groove. This month there is a question each for journalists and for technologists. My question is:

If you are a journalist, what would be the best present from programmers and developers that Santa Claus could leave under your Christmas tree?

I’ll overlook the pro-Christian slant (hey, what about under the FSM tree?!) and play the game.

What I’d like to receive is a written contract from some developers and technologist friends committing to spending a year of their time working on projects that are purely related to the betterment (or perhaps resurrection is a better word) of journalism and informing communities, utilizing the latest in technology developments and know-how.

Not to be too restrictive, they can work with me, my colleagues and students in the Journalism program at CU-Boulder, and/or journalists of all kinds in a variety of areas: New crowd-funding systems for news. … New forms of and platforms for crowd-sourcing. … New forms of storytelling that better engage news consumers, and that support making money from readers or users. … New algorithms to identify quality and credibility in news content, and filter out the best stuff (not just the most popular). … New systems to not only entice online and mobile users to pay for news and/or news-related services, but also make it easy and frictionless to make payments. (Could you build a Spotify for news, please?) … New algorithms to better mine the social-media stream (or more accurately, raging torrent of a river) for news which can be personalized to individual readers’ locations and/or interests. … Well, I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you.

The point is, developers, programmers, and technologists are in high demand. On my campus, our Computer Science Department is hammered with requests for partnerships and collaborations not just from Journalism, but from all manner of disciplines. If I could get a half dozen CS students to work with the Digital News Test Kitchen for a year, I’d be in heaven.

Out in the “real world,” technologists seem to have better things to do than concentrate on altruistic technology projects that serve to better inform communities or help clueless news executives adapt to the digital age. Where’s the potential big payout in that, after all? The promise of big money is everywhere except in the news industry, it would seem. Venture capitalists don’t want to invest in news ventures, for the most part, so why should individuals with in-high-demand technology skills work within a field where money is more likely to come from philanthropists and foundations than VCs?

Yet I know that there are some technologists who “get it” — who understand that journalism is in crisis; that the deterioration in quality journalism is immensely corrosive of our democracy; and that solutions for improving the sorry state of today’s journalism will require the expertise and effort of technologists working with journalists. I meet some such people at our local Hack/Hackers Colorado meetings. I read about them being part of the Knight Mozilla News Technology Partnership.

There just aren’t enough of them to go around. Certainly there aren’t enough technologists willing to pitch in their expertise to help journalists figure out how to get out of the mess we’re in.

So I’d like Santa, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whoever puts stuff under my holiday tree to find a bunch of talented technologists looking for a challenge like leveraging emerging technology to reinvent a floundering industry which just happens to be vital to the future functioning of our democracy. Maybe they can consider it akin to serving in the Peace Corps for a year; they’ll do something important and good for society, before returning to the work where the money is.

I recently participated (well, sort of — via a remote Skype presentation) in the University of South Carolina’s “Journalism, Sustainability, and Media Regeneration Conference.” Its organizer, Professor Augie Grant, sent a survey to everyone who attended that opened with a couple questions that I should not answer but cannot resist:

“Think about all of the possible forms of delivering news and information online. In general, what ‘top of the mind’ ideas do you think ‘online news’ will look like in 20 years?”

and

“Now think about the type of device and where people will be accessing news. How do you think these factors will affect the format(s) of online news in terms of what the user wants?”

Twenty years?! Now there’s an opportunity to make a fool of myself with predictions that have a slim-to-none chance of turning out to be correct. But what the hell, it’s fun to try. And when I’m 74, I can chuckle at my prognostications while relaxing in my solar-powered rocking chair as my digital assistant finds this old blog item, reads each prediction, and explains where I went wrong (or was right).

[Note to future self's information assistant: Find this and bring it to my attention 20 years from today.]

1. We won’t call it “online news,” but simply news. Even today, I think “online news” is an outdated term; I prefer “digital news” in order to encompass news consumption whether online on a laptop or untethered on smartphone, tablet, or other wireless device.

2. News — my own personal version of “the news” — will be everywhere I go, and available on any device that I may encounter. Laptop (will they still be around then?), personal tablet, phone/communicator/personal assistant: They’ll all know what I’ve read or viewed (including how far into a story or a video); what important news and events I don’t yet know about but should; and know my preferences from having tracked my every bit of info consumption for years and offering choices that are for the most part spot on. This same personal data profile will be available on any media device that I come across. My (electric) rental car’s media device will identify me (and know me intimately) by communicating with my phone, and its screen will show my relevant news: the map to my hotel and driving time; photograph of the sunset at home from my wife; the soccer score of this afternoon’s game that my grandson played in; the top news stories in the city I’ve arrived in; local weather forecast; the top news headlines from my home city, national and international headlines. When I start driving the car, the media system will switch to audio, and respond to my commands.

3. What we call “news” today will have a different meaning in 20 years. As alluded to above, it means everything from what my wife and I are having for dinner, to the next-door neighbor’s cat was killed by a coyote, to today’s movement of my investment portfolio, to the more traditional news items (i.e., what’s happening in the world, near and far). Yes, it will be a lot of information, but I will be able to choose layers to focus on (say, family “news” or “just sports”); or have my stream filtered to show some of everything but at a high interest score based on my info profile. It might tailor what I see based on my mood: “I’m tired; don’t give me anything too depressing or complex.” … Note that 20 years from now this “news” will not be tied to a single news brand, but rather some “news+information system” or “agent” (with a brand) will find and deliver all that’s relevant to me, from many media brands. (Perhaps I’ll pay a monthly fee for this service, which will divvy up my money to pay bits to the various content sources included in my news stream. For “premium” content within my stream, I’ll pay this entity to include it in my stream rather than deal directly with lots of content or information purveyors.) Some “news” will be from friends, neighbors, strangers who are not journalists, and will not partake in the money-splitting; but I’ll be able to “tip” or donate money if I wish to. Their news will flow seamlessly into my news stream alongside professional sources, but I’ll always know at a glance what kind of source I’m viewing.

4. In 20 years, I think we will have figured out how to identify quality and credibility among the thousands and thousands of news sources vying for some of my attention. If my friend recommends an article from an author or news source that I’ve never heard of, I’ll see quality and credibility scores for the article and the source, and measures of bias that this source might exhibit. It won’t be enough, as it is today, to read a hot story because dozens of my friends have; I’ll have some better indicators of who and what’s worth my media time, and how good (or bad) they are, to add to my friends’ recommendations.

5. Along those same lines, my news tools will fact-check every news story I read, highlighting mistruths, mistakes, bias, etc., and providing citation links to back up highlighted problem areas in the content. If a news story is analyzed as getting too low of a credibility score, my news assistant will recommend that I skip it. (Perhaps this will develop into an industry of its own, as an important piece of the 2034 media environment.)

6. If you think that there aren’t enough hours in the day, today, just wait 20 years! With exponentially more news and information, I’ll need a killer filtering system that identifies the best media content with little to no effort on my part. I’ll also have at my disposal information tools that will condense the news and information I need or want to consume. “Information assistant: Give me Boulder, national, and technology news headlines of the last 12 hours in 15 minutes, audio format” (the time I have on my drive to the office). “I have 30 minutes to read on this train trip. Condense my book to be read in 30 minutes, text format.” Algorithms will be sophisticated enough that an e-book that normally would be read in 4 hours will in 30 minutes give me a pretty good summary, and likewise select the most important pieces of news stories to fit into my desired, limited time. Much if not most content will be available in multiple formats, to suit my desire to read, listen, watch, or interact with a news story or other information.

7. What about platforms? This one is so difficult to predict, but even 20 years hence I can’t imagine a pocket-size device (today’s smartphone, evolved ) being able to do everything. My future handheld assistant can be my window to the news of the world and the neighborhood; it can be my ultimate communicate-with-anyone-in-any-format device; it can replace my expensive dedicated camera and video-cam; it can replace my wallet (ID, credit cards, cash, membership cards, medical history); and much, much more. But I think we’ll always want a larger screen, both for more pleasant and enjoyable media consumption (especially video and movies) and for getting work accomplished, as well as for reading books, catalogs, and documents. If there’s a popular device today that’s probably toast in 20 years, it’s the laptop computer. I think we’ll see such tremendous gains in tablets that they will replace laptops as most people’s primary work device. This MacBook Pro that I’m typing on today, in 20 years will probably be looked on like we woud a manual typewriter today. … So, two primary personal media devices. That’s my prediction, but seriously, who knows what other grand devices will emerge that we can’t live without.

8. Location, location, location. In 20 years, I expect that just about every physical object in our world will have data attached to it, in multiple layers of information type. Walk past a building: Your phone/personal assistant will know who’s in it (companies as well as people in your friends networks), what recent news and historical events are associated with it; etc. Walk down the street in a high-crime urban neighborhood and you’ll be able to view to physical locations of past murders, assaults, drug arrests. Come upon a statue while strolling a new city and view its story, including a short video documentary; leave a digital “I was here” message to add to the statue’s location data. Walk down the street, unsuspectingly, toward a crime scene, and you’ll be alerted to reroute, and receive what information is available about the incident, including photos and accounts from eyewitnesses.

9. I do still think that we will have, two decades from now, some major, important, well-respected, credible serious-news organizations. They will do the hard stuff — the costly investigative reporting; the constant monitoring of governments and corporations, exposing misdeeds and mistakes. I think that they will be public media entities, mostly, not commercial, because we will have gotten fed up with the mediocrity that news organizations supported by corporate interests gave us for so many years. From today’s vantage point, I see continued decline of “traditional” news media, which will force public media to step up their game. Wealthy technology companies, not with malice but simply by the nature of their businesses having disrupted news business models and not leaving alternative or new models sufficient to fund quality journalism, will steer their foundations to support public news organizations. At the local level, community foundations will have come to understand that low-quality local journalism has a negative impact on many facets of their communities, and they will fund local public media to a degree sufficient to have a strong local media watchdog. Of course, foundations won’t fund all this, and in 20 years public news organizations will have figured out how to sustain themselves with the help of foundations, but not be dependent on them.

10. Finally, I think that in 20 years many of the functions done by human journalists will be accomplished with automation. That’s a trend that’s been happening in most industries for many decades, so it’s a pretty safe prediction. Today, social-media content (e.g., the Twitter stream) often surfaces news events, which get noticed by humans and eventually spread to reach mainstream media. It’s not difficult to imagine an algorithm that automatically identifies significant news events that surface within the Twitter “firehose” (if Twitter is still around and/or relevant in 20 years) and publishes early “breaking-news” reports automatically. It probably will have enough built-in smarts to spot hoaxes. And to hark back to earlier mentions of personalization, this auto-spotted news from the social stream will be delivered to you the news consumer when it matches your interests or is happening in your neck of the woods. A “news algorithm” might monitor the huge network of live video cameras likely to be ubiquitous in cities 20 years hence, identifying and live-streaming news events that it spots (accidents, fires, crimes in progress, etc.). … And the human journalists? This prediction in no way presupposes that there will be fewer employed journalists. Rather, they will be freed from mundane tasks and be able to concentrate more of their time on producing “enterprise,” investigative, and feature reporting. And certainly there will be more journalists making a living covering niche topics that today go uncovered.

OK, enough fun — or is it enough making a fool of myself for even attempting to look 20 years ahead. Actually, looking back over my words above, I think some of this is possible in another five years.

Whatever. The future of media will be what it will be. I just hope to continue playing a small role in shaping it for the next 20 years.

This month’s “Carnival of Journalism” asked the question: “What does Google+ mean for journalists, today and tomorrow?” Of course, I don’t have all the answers; I’m not sure yet that I have one really good answer. Google+, Google’s first serious threat to Facebook in the social-media space, is so new that we’re all grappling with how to best leverage it.

(I have to laugh when I visit the Google+ Welcome page, which still mentions that the service is in “Field Trial” mode. With 25 million users for Google+, and still growing quickly, few companies would continue to call this a field trial — but Google is no ordinary company.)

Since plenty has been written about how journalists are discovering uses for Google+, I’ll pass on retrodding that ground. Here’s my alternate message:

• If you’re a journalist, you SHOULD be using Google+.
• If you’re a journalism professor or instructor, you MUST be using Google+.

Yeah, that’s easy for me to say. My career in large part is about identifying and leveraging emerging technologies that are relevant to journalism, testing them, experimenting, and conducting research. I enjoy checking out all the new digital stuff that our technology friends unleash on the world, and figuring out what’s useful and relevant to our profession — what will advance storytelling, reporting techniques, community, and news business models — and what’s not.

Many a journalist and many a journalism professor will recoil at the thought of trying out yet another social-media service. They want to do or teach journalism, not add on to what already may seem like social-media overload. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, Flickr, Digg… — and now Google+! Can’t we just stop already and stick to the basics of producing and teaching good journalism?!

I’m sympathetic to that sentiment, but only to a degree. For many upstart online, mobile, and social-media services that appear to be useful journalistic tools but have not yet caught much traction, fine, leave it to people like me to figure out if they’re of use to the profession.

Take VYou.com, a social-based video Q&A and audience interaction service that I’m very fond of. I think VYou has tremendous potential to be useful to journalists, and I encourage people to use it. At the University of Colorado Boulder, where I’m the program director for the Digital News Test Kitchen, I’ve convinced some of our faculty, researchers, and student journalists to experiment with VYou.com.

But I will not go so far as to suggest that you are a bad journalist or an incompetent journalism professor because you’re not willing to give VYou a chance and try it out. As much as I like VYou and the online and mobile interaction model it represents, the service has yet to prove itself.

Google+ is different. Google has tried before to get it right with a social-media service. Buzz, it is pretty well acknowledged, was a flop. Okrut, Google’s first foray into social media, got popular outside the U.S., but never caught on in Google’s home country. The company seems to have learned some important lessons and has incorporated them into Google+. The reviews for Google+ have been mostly positive — actually, very positive. (Count me as enthusiastic about Google+; I’m likely to be a loyal user, just as with Facebook.) Rapid growth to 25 million users in a matter of weeks since launch of the “field trial” should tell you that Google+ is a compelling social-media experience which poses the most serious threat to Facebook of anything else out there.

For that reason, I can take the view — certain to be unpopular among many journalists who are weary of keeping up with the latest digital-media developments — that journalists have got to become familiar with Google+, just as they must be familiar with and use Facebook and Twitter.

I mean, c’mon, tens and hundreds of million people are using those services, and they’re getting news from them! If you expect to remain a working journalist, you really have no choice but to understand the impact that Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+ are having on the news environment. And you can’t understand them unless you use those services.

For those who teach journalism, I will be even more emphatic. If you are teaching tomorrow’s journalists, and you are not up to speed on and using the services with hundreds of millions of users — social-media services that are profoundly changing the way people get news that’s relevant to them — then you’re doing your students a grave disservice.

Does everyone have to try out and/or use Google+, or Facebook and Twitter? Of course not, and huge parts of the population in the U.S. and other countries will continue to sit out the social-media revolution.

But if you are a journalist working today, or a journalism educator, you have an obligation to use and understand these services. I would hope that few reading these words are not already regular users of Facebook and Twitter. If you’re still holding out on Google+, waiting to see if it’s something worth spending some of your time learning and using, you’re late for the train.

Google+: Just use it, journalists!

I’ve had an iPad for a couple weeks now (sharing with my wife and two daughters; it’s a popular gadget around our house). And I’m starting to notice some patterns in buying apps for the new tablet. I’d love to know if any of you share my behavior. (Comment below, please.)

1. I don’t think much before purchasing a low-priced iPad app that is “permanent.” For instance, the Weather HD app looked cool, and even with its limited functionality (compared to the free Weather Channel Max for iPad app), I enjoy the quick look at the current weather and brief forecasts for the next few days and the app’s slick animated photo graphics. 99 cents? Sure, why not.
2. Family members and I have purchased a few more expensive iPad apps: Scrabble ($9.99); Crosswords ($9.99); Pages ($9.99); Starwalk ($4.99, and highly recommended!); and some more low-priced ones: Magic Piano (99 cents); Glee ($2.99); Set ($2.99). Again, each of those apps is “permanent,” as in they will stay on the iPad until we tire of them.

Buy a digital edition of Time magazine on your iPad! … For $4.99?

I’ve also downloaded a bunch of news apps, all of them free. Frankly, the news publishers that are giving away these apps are leaving money on the table. Of the apps that I downloaded for free to my iPad, I wouldn’t have blinked at paying 99 cents or $1.99 for those from: New York Times, NPR, USA Today, BBC News. I would pay for these because they are permanent.

Indeed, to not charge for the apps seems, well, crazy. If an iPad reader of any of those news brands doesn’t want to pay a couple bucks for their apps, then all he/she has to do is launch the iPad’s Safari browser and go to their websites, paying nothing. You can even bookmark, say, the NYTimes.com homepage and put an icon on the iPad screen permanently. The reason that someone like me would pay for an iPad news app from a specific news provider is if the experience is superior to viewing the news website on the iPad’s browser.

(At this early stage of iPad news apps, the websites as viewed on the iPad browser sometimes are as good of a or a better viewing experience than viewing the iPad app versions. NYTimes.com viewed on the iPad’s browser is quite nice, for example; in fact, it’s better than the only iPad app available from the New York Times currently, NYT Editors’ Choice.)

Within the news iPad apps I’ve used so far — and I’ll concede that it’s early, and publishers I hope will figure this out soon — the business model seems to be something that the companies will get to later. USA Today’s iPad app, for instance, has a banner ad on the homepage (Marriott Hotels at this writing), but ads don’t show up in much else. The NY Times iPhone app has ads from a single advertiser, at the bottom of the homepage (where banner blindness will make them mostly ineffective due to that positioning), and on the second screens of most news articles.

These apps are mostly “shovelware” from the news websites, and lack even web basics such as allowing user comments.

One nice ad technique used on the NY Times iPad app is an occasional “interstitial” full-page ad, which appears after you click a homepage or section-front headline and appears before you get to view your article. I don’t find this that annoying, but if I did, the Times would be smart to give me an option in the app to turn off such take-over-my-screen ads by clicking a setting and, say, paying a dollar to avoid seeing them for the next month,or maybe $5 to not see them for a year.

There are lots of ideas for “upsells” within an iPad news app to persuade (not demand!) people to pay extra beyond the initial, inexpensive download fee. Let’s say that USA Today’s iPad app had a setting where for $1 a month I could turn on a commenting feature and be allowed to leave comments on stories. This should be the topic of another blog post about how to make money from upsells in news iPad apps, so I’ll leave that for another time.

While major news brands are not taking advantage of obvious revenue opportunities with iPad apps yet, Time magazine, until this week, has been going about it wrong. Initially, an iPad user could purchase a single issue of a Time weekly edition, an enhanced digital edition of the print magazine, for $4.99 per edition. That’s compared to the street price of a printed Time magazine at $4.95.

It’s not just that the iPad single-edition price is a few cents more than the paper edition (which I think is ill-advised, considering the printing and physical distribution costs saved by Time with digital editions), but it’s also absurd that Time was selling each edition as a separate iPad app.

Getting back to my earlier comments, there’s no way that I’m going to pay for individual magazines as individual iPad apps! This approach completely misunderstands the device. First, the single-edition iPad purchase is fleeting; psychologically, I resist buying iPad apps that are read or viewed once and then deleted (since if I don’t and I continue buying iPad Time editions, my iPad screen will fill up with Time icons for various editions).

Time has now fixed this blunder and offers a Time iPad app for free. From within the app, the iPad user can purchase digital versions of the magazine for $4.99. Old issues are stored in the cloud for later reading, and there’s only one Time icon on the iPad screen. But pricing should be more realistic, I believe, and subscriptions offered. While I don’t think that this is the best iPad business model for Time, at least if its executives want to charge per digital issue, they should get a grasp on what’s likely to fly in digital-content pricing when there’s free content (like Time.com!) available on the iPad browser.

Count me as an iPad fan. I love the device, and more specifically I love the form factor of a tablet and can see it becoming an important part of my media life, taking much time away from my laptop. It does concern me that news publishers, out of the gate, appear to be missing the boat in working on an innovative business model for the tablet. Geez, I hope we’re not seeing the big news brands repeat the mistakes of their past when it came to adapting to new digital devices!

If any traditional news publishers are still thinking that the Apple tablet — finally, it has a (strange) name, iPad — points to their salvation by bringing a new business model, they’ll likely be proven wrong.

No doubt, the iPad is an incredible, slick piece of technology. It’s not the “Jesus Tablet” that many of us hoped for (no camera?! no multi-tasking?! no Flash support?! it won’t answer my prayers?!), but maybe by version 2 or 3, it’ll get there. But even if the iPad fairly quickly evolves to be the kind of market pleaser that Apple’s iPhone became, I don’t think that it really changes things profoundly for news companies.

If you watch Apple’s slick video introducing the iPad, much is made that this is “the best experience ever created” for surfing the web. Fair enough. I’d love to have an iPad for when I want to read news on the web (and a lot of other things); my laptop would get much less use.

But does this mean that I’m suddenly going to pay for news viewed on the iPad? Umm, not likely. Because my behavior as a news consumer has changed over the years. Like many Internet users, I view many news sources every day. I’m always surprised when I open my browser history and see how many sites and media brands I’ve hit on any given day.

So if Rupert Murdoch or any other publisher puts up a mandatory paywall to keep me away from their news content on the iPad, I will move on to a similar site that’s free. If NYTimes.com decides to strengthen its proposed porous paywall by the 2011 implementation, then there’s WashingtonPost.com, which will receive my loyalty.

Am I a cheapskate? Why wouldn’t I want to pay to support journalism? … Simple: Because there’s too much to pay for! News brands cannot expect me, or most online news consumers who are not loyal to only one or two or three brands, to pay monthly or annual fees to each. There’s too much free choice, and I’d prefer to support the news and media brands that I like best.

So, if NYTimes.com had a premium membership that gave me special privileges, but all its web (and thus iPad-viewable) content remained free to those who chose not to pay, then I’d probably pony up in order to show my support for the New York Times, since I admire its quality journalism, read its content regularly, and want it to continue. The key for me is that what brands I will pay to support, when it comes to commodity news, will be a voluntary decision on my part.

There are so many pointers to the diminishment of news brands, though the owners of those brands don’t want to see it. We’ve seen the “atomization of content” as the news story gets tossed around, linked to, and sometimes goes viral via Twitter, social networks, search engines, and news aggregators. Just as iTunes killed the music CD and reintroduced buying single songs, our new digital ecosystem is doing the same for news stories as it emasculates old news brands.

I used Personalization in the headline, and now I’ll finally get to it. For me, news personalization offerings to date have been unsatisfactory. Sure, I can spend some time setting up, say, an iGoogle personalized page and fill it with news (and other stuff) that I want. But it and the other solutions I’ve seen just haven’t grabbed me. I get plenty of serendipity in my news consumption, but it’s not because of any personalized news service, it’s because of pointers to good news content from the people I follow on Twitter and my Facebook friends, and the blogs I read regularly (or stumble upon). Article continues below photo…

My iCurrent personalized news: Many news brands, not just one

However, I recently tried out a private beta of iCurrent, a personalized web news service that I think is pretty darn close to having what could become my home base for news. Just this week the California company opened up a public beta, so you can try it out. iCurrent also has an e-mail component (which I find to be weak in its current state), and an iPhone app is coming soon.

I’ll write another blog item another day about iCurrent with more detail, but here’s the thing that makes it stand out: iCurrent is to news as Pandora is to music. (In fact, they share investors.)

With Pandora, you pick a musician, song, or genre that you like, then the application selects similar music that it thinks you might like. Pandora learns what you like as you click thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a song that’s playing; it lets you tell it to stop playing a particular song or artist. It’s dead-simple to create new channels of music. Most importantly, it makes complicated personalization technology super-easy to use.

ICurrent applies Pandora’s model to news. Initially you choose a few topics of personal interest, but then as you use iCurrent over time, it learns what you want to see. Like Pandora, stories that it selects for you have an up and down arrow to click, if you want; click the up arrow and you get a few choices about what you’d like to see more of — simply “more like this,” or more about specific components of the story that it’s filtered out.

iCurrent’s homepage also devotes 2/3 of the space to your personalized news, and the other 1/3 to important news that everyone should know about (Haiti, Afghanistan, top political stories, etc.).

We’ve been talking about personalized news for a long time; you may remember “The Daily Me” project from MIT in the early 1990s. It’s taken a long time, but I think technologists are close to getting personalized news right.

So, back to the iPad. Assuming I get one (oh, I’ll probably succumb), I doubt that my behavior toward news using it will be much different than it is on my laptop. I’ll bounce around from story to story, not always aware of the news brand that’s hosting a specific story.

From what I’ve seen of iCurrent, it could be a great news home base for my iPad usage.

The iPad, it seems to me, leaves news publishers in much the same predicament as the PC web. Their content will become more and more atomized, especially if — as is my prediction — personalized news advances to the point of real value and Pandora-like simplicity.

The trick to survival for many news organizations in the digital world, then, will be in figuring out how to monetize their content as it flies the coop and first shows up in a consumer’s news stream outside of the news company’s property line. This issue will be as critical to solve on the iPad and like devices as on the PC web.

One last point: The iPad does represent an opportunity for news companies to develop apps that iPad users can buy. Just as selling apps for the iPhone has become a massive business, this will probably repeat for the iPad. I would suggest to (non-niche) news providers that they’ll have an easier time selling specialized applications than selling content. I’ve written this before, but consumer psychology favors spending money on things you can keep (an app, a song) than commodity content that is viewed but once then forgotten.

If I had an iPad, an app I’d pay for: iCurrent. I wouldn’t be paying for the news content, but rather for the convenience and value that a really good personalization app would provide.

Yeah, I know, that’s not what journalists want to hear.

My wife, Suzanne, has long had to put up with a husband who’s a new-gadget hound. I’m an early adopter but not a super-early adopter. We’ve had a TiVo DVR for years, but I wasn’t among the very first to purchase one. I waited for the iPhone 3G to come out before catching iPhone fever. (Suzanne has one, too.) She tends to tag along, patient with me when I enthuse about some new gizmo. (Like the Roku box I bought as a family Christmas present. No one else in the family had a clue what it was supposed to do.) Eventually Suzanne sees the wisdom of (most) of my new-gadget purchases.

Since she’s a school librarian and avid reader, I thought that an e-book reader would be a special holiday gift. So I ordered Suzanne a nook from Barnes & Noble, preferring the virtual screen interface to the Amazon Kindle’s many physical buttons.

In observing her use of the nook in the first couple weeks, I’ve come to predict that the nook (and the Kindle) will not win over huge chunks of the population. While the devices and their E Ink screens make for a wonderful reading experience (my opinion) and are easy on the eyes in a way that reading lengthy prose on a backlit screen is not, they’re still not quite ready for truly mass-market success.

Perhaps Apple will debut the Kindle- and nook-killer later this month. I’m looking forward to seeing what Steve Jobs is hiding from public view.

Anyway, here’s a quick run-down of Suzanne’s first couple weeks with the nook (as observed by me):

• Initial enthusiasm and “that’s so cool” reaction
• Love for some features like tap on a word to get a definition; add notes to sections as you’re reading; highlighting key passages; etc.
• Some disillusionment: “You mean you can’t read it in bed in the dark? You have to have a light on to see the screen?”
• After she played around with it a bit, the nook went in a bedside drawer, not seeing much use

The final point needs some explanation, because it’s not a rejection of the product. Rather, Suzanne has a pile of books on her reading and book-club list, waiting to be picked up. What’s the point of spending an extra $10 for a nook e-version? Books on nook will have to come later, when the paid-for or from-the-library printed versions have been read.

One book on her to-read list is already in hand in digital form, purchased from Amazon for reading on her iPhone. She was disappointed that that purchase couldn’t simply be ported to her nook.

More alarming (to me) was an e-mail receipt showing up in my inbox from Amazon.com, showing that Suzanne had ordered a printed book after receiving the nook. It turns out that it was a cookbook, with color photos, and that didn’t seem like the right kind of book to order in digital form for an e-reader than only displays black, grays, and white.

Magazines and newspapers? Nope, she told me; won’t use the nook for that, especially since the monthly subscription prices per publication are ridiculously high, and she can read most of them on the web for free.

I’ll continue to spy on my wife’s nook usage (or lack thereof), and I suspect that I’ll see her make the transition to digital books read on the nook, in time.

Suzanne was, I guessed, the ideal nook/Kindle convert: librarian, book lover, and not a techno-phobe. Alas, it was not love at first sight.

This makes me think that we’re not quite there yet. What will become a mass-market hit, I believe, will be a thin tablet computer that does everything an iPhone with a big color screen could do (i.e., a full-fledged wirelessly connected computer), and is an outstanding form factor for reading books.

The trick will be getting the price down to a few hundred dollars, and that may take a while.

The ultimate tablet, I think, would be that large, thin iPhone/iTouch device with a stunning color, backlit touch-screen. And it would have a switch to turn the screen into a paper-like E Ink experience with no backlight, for comfortable book and other long-form reading.

Alas, unless Mr. Jobs has some magic up his sleeve, that may be a pipe dream.

Strike those last two paragraphs in my original of this blog item. It seems that a single screen that can be both back-lit color and E-Ink quality reflective display for reading in light is possible; indeed, it exists. Pixel Qi showed off such technology at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Here’s a Gizmodo report on this amazing development.

And then there’s Mirasol displays, which could be the technology that moves media tablets where they need to go. Exciting stuff!

Google Fast Flip launched this week as a public Google Labs beta, and I’ve been surprised at some of the skepticism about it. The main complaint is that it takes a step backward by displaying screen captures of popular articles from a selection of media websites and makes them the entry point to finding the best content on media sites. The idea and design seem a bit old-school to some critics.

I like Fast Flip a lot, for several reasons:

1. It’s an “alternative Google News” for those not wanting to be overwhelmed with selecting from thousands of media sources.
2. It’s a more comfortable interface for some people, especially, I would guess, older online users who are still most at ease with print-like design than with lists of headline links to choose from.
3. It’s not a replacement for Google News, but an alternative for those looking for a different way to find and read the best content from a selected group of quality sources.
4. It’s Google’s first time in sharing with publishers some of the money earned on its own pages. The search giant doesn’t share revenue from links to news websites’ content on Google News, so this is a significant change in policy, even if only experimental — a way for Google to directly support media publishers, including those who complain that Google is eating their lunch by profiting from links to their news.

Frankly, I’m feeling a bit vindicated by Google’s introduction of Fast Flip. Last April, I wrote several blog posts suggesting that it would be in Google’s self-interest to turn Google News into a news search service that shared ad revenue with publishers that are included in Google News:
Google could come to the rescue, but won’t?
How can newspapers help Google?
To Eric Schmidt: What happened to ‘Don’t Be Evil’?

I also sent e-mails in April to Krishna Bharat, Google Distinguished Researcher and creator and leader of Google News, suggesting that revenue-sharing with news publishers would be a good thing for both the news industry and Google (and, thus, society in general as citizens remained well informed by a healthier news sector). I never heard back from Bharat, even though I’d met him in person a few weeks earlier at Stanford University during a fellowship interview.

If you read through the comment threads on the blog items above, you’ll agree that this was not among the most popular ideas I’ve ever floated in my writing over the years. I got lots of pushback, much of it to the tune of: Google is just smarter than media publishers; Google owes the news industry nothing because it’s already giving news sites millions and millions of user visits, but the publishers aren’t smart enough to figure out how to make money from that.

You can read the links above if you care about my original (unpopular) argument, but the crux is that by sharing revenues, Google would prevent angry and scared news publishers from locking down their content online, AND it would make it politically possible to turn on the ad spigot for Google News because it would share some of its new revenues with the creators/publishers of the content it links to.

While Google didn’t follow my suggestion for opening up Google News for revenue sharing with news publishers, it has done so with a few dozen selected media companies that are taking part in Fast Flip. It’s a variation of what I suggested last April to a generally vigorous assault on the idea.

It’d be nice to think that my humble blog had something to do with the Fast Flip revenue-sharing model, but that’s likely wishful thinking. (If it did, perhaps some nice Google executive will share some of that big pile of G-cash with me. Ah, but life doesn’t work that way.)

Anyway, I’m happy to see Google executives decide that it might be in their interests to share some ad revenues with media publishers. Fast Flip will be an experiment we’ll all be watching closely. Perhaps it will lead to a news-industry revenue source that starts to chip away at the News Crisis we find ourselves in.

I think the iPhone 3G is gonna be big. … D’uh! That’s a pretty safe statement. After today’s announcement, and after drooling over its new features on the Apple website, I tried to check my AT&T account to see when my 2-year contract is up, so I can upgrade to the new iPhone without paying an exorbitant price to do so, and check on data plan pricing. wireless.att.com was so overloaded I couldn’t log in even with repeated attempts.

Assuming Apple can produce enough of these things to satisfy demand, I’ve got to believe that there will be enough iPhones out there (1st-gen and 3G) to support development by news and media companies of services specifically for the iPhone platform. In fact, I’d say any publisher not getting ready to serve an onslaught of iPhone users should have his/her head examined.

I also think that the state of the new iPhone is such that it will cause a lot of its users to abandon reading print newspapers, if they haven’t stopped that already. Traditionalists can pooh-pooh the idea of a tiny phone replacing a print newspaper, but I have no doubt that for many people, it will.

(Hmmm, I seem to have neglected this blog for quite a few days. Back to it…)

This afternoon I listened in on a webinar by Widgetbox.com, which develops free tools for anyone to use in creating web widgets. The company and its offerings are impressive. The widget-making tools are super-useful for publishers large and small — but especially the latter.

Something I find interesting is the company’s business model. It offers its widget-making tools and services entirely free. You might expect a company like this to offer some basic free functionality, but charge for upper-tier services. But as the webinar presenters explained when asked about Widgetbox’s business model, there’s a one-price-for-all plan: Free.

The company plans to make money with programs where developers who use Widgetbox to create their own widgets can optionally participate in programs where Widgetbox sells ads to accompany widgets, and shares the revenue 50/50 with the widget creator. If you don’t want to participate in those programs but plan to sell ads around your widget, as I understand it, that’s fine with Widgetbox and they’ll let you use their technology for free.

It’s a great deal for users, that’s for sure. I’ve included a screen shot of a little widget I created using Widgetbox for a comic-strip project I’m working on. It took literally a couple minutes to create it. (It’s just a screengrab because that site isn’t live yet.)

Earlier today I listened to NPR’s Talk of the Nation, where the topic was online business models, with an emphasis on how to make a business from free content and/or services. A more typical model, according to the panelists, is giving away 90-99% free, with paid premium content or services. That’s sometimes called a “fremium” model.

Widgetbox seems to have eschewed even that. I hope its model works, because it’s a win-win for everyone involved. Let’s just hope the company can make it work financially.