FreeRice.comis a simple website that you'll enjoy spending a few minutes on. It's a word game, monetized by Cost Per Action affiliate ad links, with a social justice twist. Those are just the boring details, though, and it's probably a scam.The site asks you to define a series of words, with multiple choice answers, and ranks your vocabulary profficiency over time. The gimick is that for every word you define correctly, FreeRice.com says it will donate the cost of 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. Is This For Real?How does this happen? The big brand advertiser logos at the bottom of the page are paying for the rice, the site says. Those ads appear to be Cost Per Action ads from LinkShare. In other words, the ads only pay when the FreeRice visitor clicks through the ads and make a purchase. They pay quite well in those circumstances, though. In order to track purchases, which aren't made through the kinds of affiliate URLs you see from Amazon affiliates, for example, LinkShare puts a cookie from linysyergy.com on your browser. I have no problem with cookies myself, I like them, in fact - but a quick look around the web indicates that many people find Linksynergy cookies distressing.No Really, Is This For Real?The site doesn't appear to be officially affiliated with the UN at all, it appears to have been started by a man named John Breen. Breen launched the website Poverty.com early this year; it's a bare bones shell of a website with a snazzy looking domain name. It could well lend legitimacy to any number of affiliate campaigns like FreeRice. What's the cost of a few grains of rice? Nearly nothing. Is it a worthwhile investment in exchange for pushing CPA ads at do-gooder word-nerds? It might be a great investment - it might be a scam. Let's say there's 29000 grains of rice per pound (long grain white, per Producers Rice Mill) and let's say a pound of rice costs 70 cents (that's good rice, probably not what the UN is distributing). What's the math? At ten grains per click, FreeRice.com is donating 20 cents per 1000 clicks. Are they making more than that from these brand name CPA ads? I'm willing to guess that they are. If I'm getting the numbers wrong here, please someone let me know. At the very least, the site has an obligation to show us how much they are bringing in - not just how much rice they've donated.One way or the other, it's a fun site to spend time on. It's probably also a money maker for the man behind it.

  Both Facebook and Google gave 5 minute pitches last night at the New York Tech MeetUpevent. Over 400 people came to IAC’s stunning Frank Gehry designedbuilding, overlooking the river. It had a massive 100 foot long video wall for the demos. New York can be a tough crowd for an “out of towner”, with an unsual mix of hardboiled Wall Street and Mad Ave biz types, plus wild (almost anarchic) creativity. The Google presenter was from the New York office. She knew she wasn't giving out any new information that everybody had not already seen in the Blogosphere. The Facebook presenter seemed more ill at ease. A fairly well-informed question got the response: “oh, it sounds like you have been reading Valleywag or Techcrunch”. Maybe the muttering of the crowd put her off.Is Facebook's Ad Network Like Amway?Many people have pointed out that Facebook’s monetization could alienate its audience, unless handled extremely delicately. When you need to justify a $15 billion valuation, delicacy may not be a top priority. Silicon Alleyasked the reasonable "show me the money" question - will you get paid to make a referral for a brand? If so, how fast does this become like an Amway scheme? If it is not about cash, what is the value? Facebook gave an example of Blockbuster as an advertising partner. If I am a Facebook user and I rent a movie from Blockbuster, I can opt to have this movie choice sent to all my friends. Why would I do that and why would my friends be interested?Coca Cola wants to be my friend?Surely the Internet can be used for something more meaningful than this? About a week ago I wrotethat we were about to witness a loud noise and mess, caused by the irresistable force of personalization hitting the immovable force of privacy. There is a saying: "a week is a long time in politics". Well maybe now it is a long time on the Internet! Since my last post there have been calls from the FTC for a “Do Not Track” list (stop cookies, following on from stop telemarketers and spam) and now the final unveiling of the Facebook monetization strategy.Google Played Hand BrilliantlyMeanwhile Google played their hand brilliantly. They unveiled OpenSocial, taking the “open” high ground and a lot of wind out of Facebook’s sails (to mix some metaphors!). And with Facebook aligned with the old Evil Empire Microsoft, Google has a chance to recover their “Do not be evil” aura.If they also take the high road on privacy, they will blow the competition out of the water. They can do this because they can afford to; and their competition cannot afford to. They don’t need to amass lots of information about me to serve relevant ads to me. As long as I keep on searching, Google knows my intentions. Sure they could offer something even more powerful if they track and synthesize all my searches in the last 3 months, but at what cost in terms of spooking and alienating me? For what marginal extra value to an advertiser?So Google could back the “Do Not Track” legislation and comitt to more rigorous restrictions on search history.That would be hard for Facebook to trump. They could take a really bold move and launch something like Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Yes that is a totally “out there” idea, but it could resonate with Facebook's audience and deliver real value. Say 25 of my friends want an iPhone, well then can we get a discount? That moves from one friend spamming and making money off other friends, to all the friends benefiting equally.Other Highlights from NY Tech MeetupMicrosoft gave a great demo of some new “ultra rich media” stuff coming out of their R&D labs. The message was good for the audience; we are geeks like you, who like building hard core technology.The real star of the show for me was Vimeo. This is real high definition video for the professional or aspiring professional video crowd, no copyright issues or offensive material. It looked like the Mac to YouTube’s PC.But back to the Google vs Facebook issue. What do you think -- will Google take the high road on privacy?

  The New York Times reportsthat a study by security firm Barracuda Networks, which polled 2,400 of its customers, has found that more than half block access to social networking sites from employees on their work networks. Interestingly, though, MySpace was blocked far more often than Facebook.43.9% of companies block access to MySpace, while just 25.6% of companies block access to Facebook. Just 6.3% of companies blocked only Facebook while allowing access to MySpace. Why is that? A snap analysis might lead one to think that companies are just more comfortable with the more orderly nature of Facebook -- and the fact that it is being used for legitimate business networking by some folks (myself included) -- whereas, the vanity-focused MySpace has no work value. But that's not what's going on here, according to Barracuda."Anecdotally, it just appears MySpace is better known," Barracuda’s chief executive officer Dean Drako told the Times. "Some of our customers didn’t know what Facebook was." Even though we recently reported that MySpace as a trend is cooling off, search volume for the site still crushes all other social networks, and news mentions, according to Google Trends, are still in line with Facebook. It's certainly not inconceivable that a lot of corporate IT types just haven't yet heard of Facebook (though that can be hard to imagine while operating in a blogosphere that mentions the site 12 billion times per week).Image from Barracuda Networks.In general, though, Barracuda thinks that more companies will begin restricting employee web access in the future, as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are seen as a productivity drain. The good news for me, is that playing around with those sites on a daily basis is something of a job requirement. For most of the rest of the working population, though, I've always thought that lost productivity numbers might be based on slightly fuzzy math. In my personal experience, even when there weren't any fun diversions (like Facebook) at office jobs I have worked, it didn't mean I spent all that extra time working -- it just meant the breaks I took were spent doing things like folding an arsenal of paper table-top footballs. Similar to the way the recording industry can't legitimately claim that every downloaded song is lost revenue because not all of those downloaders would have made that purchase if downloading hadn't been available, companies can't make the claim that every minute spent on a social networking site is lost productivity because not all of those employees would have spent those minutes working.Every March in the US there are stories run in the mainstream media about how many billions of dollars will be lost while employees fill out brackets for NCAA basketball tournament pools at work. But is the twenty minutes it takes most people to fill out a bracket time diverted from actual work or from goofing off that would go on anyway? Is goofing off even such a bad thing? Who is more likely to put out quality work, the employee that spends 8 hours straight working, or the employee that works 6 hours, and keeps sane by having a little fun along the way?

  Continuing this year's major trend of online advertising consolidation, AOL has agreed to acquire content-targeted advertising firm Quigo. Reuters is reportingthe price of the deal at around $340 million. AOL CEO Randy Falco told Reuters that this was likely the last big acquisition for AOL in terms of their advertising strategy."With Quigo, we are putting the final pieces of Platform-A in place. We will be able to offer advertisers and publishers the most advanced set of tools, including contextual and behavioral targeting, superior analytics, and access to the largest display network in the marketplace," said Falco in a press release.Quigo is AOL's third major ad acquisition this year. In July, the company agreed to buybehavioral targeting firm Tacoda, for a reported $275 million in cash. Last May, AOL purchased a controlling stake in AdTech AG. This buying spree compliments Advertising.com, which AOL purchased in 2004. AOL also owns wireless ad company Third Screen Media (which it acquired this year, as well) and Lightningcast, which serves video ads.AOL's online ad growth fell 13% in the second quarter, so the company is hoping that its revamped ad division (the so-called "Platform-A") will help them take on Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! who have each also made major acquisitions in the online advertising market this year. According to AOL, Platform-A will reach 91% of the online audience.Quigo, which has over 500 publisher relationships and about 3,000 advertisers, will operate as a subsidiary of AOL under the Platform-A umbrella. Quigo’s AdSonar technology lets ad buyers can purchase keyword-targeted ads on web pages in much the same way as Google's AdSense.

  

  Google Maps are already winging their way across the skiescourtesy of a partnership with jetBlue. Now Google and gas pump maker Gilbarco Veeder-Root have announced a partnershipthat will bring Google Maps down to earth and provide driving directions, local search, and coupons to 3,500 Internet-enabled gas pumps across the US."Getting directions at the pump is safer than using internet-enabled devices from the driver’s seat and far more reliable than just asking a stranger," said Kirsten Paust, vice president of global retail systems at Gilbarco Veeder-Root in a press release. "We believe consumers will prefer convenience stores that deliver useful information and ultimate convenience. Retailers who use these tools will make themselves more valuable to consumers and gain the competitive edge."Google's service supposedly won't include ads, but retailers can offer coupons through gas pumps, which will make money for participating filling stations -- you know, kind of like ads. For now, the pumps can only print directions to locations available through Google's local search results, but Gilbarco Veeder-Root eventually hopes to allow motorists to type in destinations at the pump.The Google-powered gas pumps should begin to be rolled out across the US early next month.Image credit: engadget.

  Veeris not your average stock photo site. With a mixture of licensed and original content under its control, Veer offers not just photos, but also illustrations, and fonts, as well as a collection of merchandise (clothing, decor, art supplies, etc.) geared toward creative professionals. The world's second largest stock photography company, Corbis, announced yesterdaythat it would acquire Veer for an undisclosed sum. Corbis intends to keep the companies operating separately.Veer, which has offices in Calgary, Alberta; New York; Berlin and Düsseldorf, Germany; is the fourth largest stock photo company on the planet, according to Corbis. Veer actually sells some collections from the largest stock photography distributor, Getty Images, the main rival of Corbis (JupiterImages sits in third place). That seems unlikely to change, however.Corbis' purchase makes sense for the company, which needs to bolster its online strategy to compete with Getty, which is about three times the size (in terms of revenue) and operates gettyimages.com, punchstock.com, and the very popular istockphoto.com. Veer operates in a different space than Corbis, targeting graphic designers as opposed to editorial customers like magazines and newspapers. According to Photo District News, Corbis is concentrating on four business divisions: Corbis, Corbis Rights Services, SnapVillage (micropayment stock photos similar to Getty's iStockPhoto), and Veer.

  Big computing company HP was promoting a strange concept at the Web 2.0 Summit in October: Print 2.0. At first I couldn't figure out what this meant. Web-based printers? Some new form of inkless paper? Curious to know more, while I was at the Summit I met up with HP's Antonio Rodriguez- formerly of startup Tabblo, now Director of Research and Development for HP’s embedded web-to-print group.Some background: Tabblo is a custom printing site that HP acquired in March 2007. In our meeting, Antonio described Tabblo to me as "Flickr meets blogger on steroids". Using Tabblo, you can mashup photos and add text, to create a kind of collage - which you then have the option to print out as a poster, book, card, etc. The collage is also available online, where other Tabblo users can comment on it. There are a lot of other features too, such as advertising options and widget-like tools. At the heart of Tabblo is its template engine, which allows users to output their creative photo collages both online and as printed materials. Here's a good exampleof a Tabblo collage, from someone's birthday party. Here's another example, via Flickr:Image from AJ FranklinThe tale of how Tabblo got acquired is interesting in itself - and a great example of the process a startup might take before being acquired by a big company. Tabblo got its funding in June 2005, went into alpha March 2006, then beta at the end of May 2006, finally hitting 1.0 in July 2006. It was acquired less than a year later. So from funding to acquisition, less than 2 years. But importantly it was a useful web app with a healthy user base. Om Malik summed it up wellat the time of acquisition, noting that Tabblo had "made a tool that incorporated the best of social web and built a layer of usefulness on top of that. And focused their product on mainstream users."So in summary, Tabblo was a great web 2.0 product that made the step up to big company app. In doing so, it seems to have inspired Print 2.0 inside of HP. Well, there is probably much more to the Print 2.0 conception, but Tabblo is what makes the concept make sense and come alive. Sometimes big companies come up with lots of PR bluster and crazy concepts (and nowadays there's usually a "2.0" in the PR), but at the heart of it there has to be something that connects with consumers. Tabblo is that thing, with HP's Print 2.0 story.Printing Becomes a Service TooHP acquired Tabblo with the aim of making printing from the Web easier. For example, webpages are sometimes difficult to print (R/WW is guilty on that count!). In terms of the big picture, Antonio explained to me that the print business is huge, but that HP is starting to think in terms of digital devices now - rather than the old model of [paper] pages. So in terms of products, HP's Print 2.0 strategy is about delivering products and services such as the Tabblo Print Toolkit - which enables publishers to provide template-based PDFs of their webpages for easy printing. HP also wants to get into the on-demand printing business, where it will face competition from the likes of Amazon.com and Lulu.com. Antonio told me that the vision is for a self-serving site to create books. However he said that there are practical issues holding this up, such as DRM.There are also partnership deals. At Web 2.0 Summit HP announce that its Print 2.0 technology has been integrated into Flickr, allowing Flickr users to easily print their photos. HP did a deal too with Disney, allowing users to combine professional Disney content with their own personal content - and print it out. The Graffiti Application for Facebook, where users can draw on their friends profiles, was also print-enabled by Tabblo.Ultimately HP wants to make printing a service- I suppose much like Microsoft wants to make its software into services. HP wants to make printing more personal and social; which brings us back to Tabblo's legacy. It did precisely that, make printing personal and social. But HP wants to do it on a much larger scale. This is why big companies build startups of course!What do you think of HP's Print 2.0? Does it make more sense now that you know the Tabblo story?

  At long last, Facebook today finally unveiled its much hyped advertising strategy at an invite-only event in New York. Their three pronged attack has already been reported on ad nauseum, so beyond a quick overview, I won't get into the reporting side much.The company's approach to advertising boils down to an attempt at conversational marketing, where users become product promoters and are encouraged to spread the word about things they buy and use among their group of friends and contacts. "Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a small crowd of a few hundred ad execs and press, with his usual Jobsian hyperbole in full effect. "For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do."Facebook's ad strategy has three main components:Business pages- Businesses can build profile pages on Facebook that users can interact with. I'm not sure what the benefit is here over the Facebook sponsored groups that businesses have been paying large feesto have for months. 100,000 business pages supposedly launched today, though.Social Adsand Beacon- Ads targeted by user profile data -- everything from favorite music to relationship status, and the ability for people to publish product interactions from third-party sites to their news feed (Beacon works more or less as rumored).Insight- Marketing and usage metrics for advertisers about who is clicking on their ads and how to better target them.Obviously the most compelling part of what Facebook announced is Social Ads and Beacon, both of which operate in basically the ways we have been expecting. The reactions across the blogosophere have ranged from lauditory, to fearful, to bored.There are those who agree with Zuckerberg that Facebook's new strategy is a winner -- highly targeted ads and consumers acting as marketers. There are those who think the whole idea reeks of privacy violations -- ads based on the personal information about yourself you intended only to share with friends? There are those who were hoping for something bigger -- the next AdSense. There are those who wonder if the whole thing will work -- who wants to promote products anyway?On that last point, the answer is probably a whole lot of people. While people are unlikely to trumpet prewritten marketing messages to their friends, we already do a lot of marketing in our lives. We wear t-shirts with logos on them, we talk to our friends about things we've purchased, and directly on Facebook we provide numerous lists of our favorite things (music, TV shows, movies, books, sports teams -- we're acting as marketers for all of those things). It's not quite a big leap to suspect that people might want to interact with their favorite brands on a more personal level and share those interactions with their friends. In some respects, that's already been happening on Facebook for a long time -- the Apple Students group, for example, has over 420,000 users participating in one giant commerical.There are certainly some legitimate privacy concerns, but I'm not sure ad targeting based on explicit data is much different than targeting based on implicit data (i.e., data you knowingly enter vs. data gathered based on the things you look at or interact with). Further, I'm not sure how Facebook ads based on your list of favorite bands are much different than ads targeted by the Google search you made for a medical condition. Both could theoretically be tied to you (though in each case the company serving the ads promises they aren't) and both are based on potentially private information that you may only want a select group of people to know about. Would there have been any privacy concerns voiced if contextual text ads (like Microsoft's adCenter product) were being used on Facebook -- essentially doing the same thing and targetting ads based on keywords you'd entered into you profile? I tend to doubt it.ConclusionIn all, I suspect that if Facebook provides opt-out tools on par with the ones they provide for the news and mini feeds and if the ads themselves aren't too annoying, there won't be much of a backlash from users over these ads. I was among the early Facebook users who was uncomfortable when the news feed first debuted. In time, most users adjusted and now rely on it to keep in the loop with their friends. In my personal view, ads served by a robot scanning my profile for keywords is less invasive than a news ticker that displays my every move to all my contacts. If Facebook users can get used to that, I don't think they'll have much trouble accepting this. But what do you think? Leave your thoughts about Facebook Ads in the comments below.

  Today at the Defrag Conference, Kevin Marksfrom Google gave a presentation on OpenSocial. Before working at Google, Kevin was Principal Engineer at Technorati. He's also well known as one of the founders of microformats.Kevin's speech wasn't on the Defrag agenda, but it was squeezed in due to the timeliness of the topic. Plus, tongue in cheek, it was suggested that Brad Feld and our own Alex Iskold's launch of ClosedPrivatethe day before may have compelled Kevin to get OpenSocial on the agenda! While a lot of the material was repurposed from Campfire, Kevin also sat down with Jerry Michalski and the conversation turned very interesting. There were a few nuggets I wanted to share with the Read/WriteWeb audience. What Life Stage is OpenSocial At Jerry asked Kevin: "what stage is Open Social App at?". Kevin was very clear that this is a true alpha - and he contrasted this with Google's typical perpetual beta. He explained that the leaders at Google felt it was important to get this out early, because of the need for developers outside of Google to participate. User Authentication Model One of the things I've been very interested in when looking at OpenSocial is how they plan to handle user authentication. According to Kevin: "At the moment, it is delegated to the containers. Clearly this needs to work better. We are looking at oAuth." This was actually very encouraging to hear. I was afraid that Google would require users to authenticate using Google. I believe it will be important for OpenSocial to ultimately leverage an open authentication method, notdepend on a single proprietary Google standard. In the meantime, given the alpha stage, using the container's authentication makes sense. Kevin Marks at Defrag; Photo: Graeme ThickinsSharing Data Between Services One of the concerns that Marshall raisedon Friday here on Read/WriteWeb was: "While most APIs tend to be read-only, the OpenSocial APIs might be capable only of allowing widgets to be published from one network to another. Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another? That's not being discussed at all."Kevin said that indeed this functionality is on its way. However, the authentication is important, because you don't want widgets to start pulling in data from friends of friends. Jerry also asked about the ability to add users from one system to another. For example, can I add my LinkedIn contacts to another network? Kevin said that "at the moment it is just a query mechanism, but it is in development."Conclusion One of Marshall's questions in the postI mentioned earlier was: Is Google Exercising Leadership or Control? Obviously, only time will tell. However, I did find Kevin's transparency at Defrag encouraging. He answered questions directly and he was clear that OpenSocial is in alpha mode and so there is much more to come.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/world_news/Egyptian_Blogger_Marks_One_Year_in_Prison';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman is a 22 year old law student in Egypt who blogged under the name Kareem Amer until being arrested one year ago today. Charged with 'contempt of religion' and ‘defaming the President of Egypt,' the young man was sentenced in February of this year to four years in prison. Supporters will hold rallies on Friday calling for his release in 14 major cities around the world, from London to Mexico City.The demonstrations are being organized, in part, by the Free Kareem Coalition. The group says it is an interfaith organization founded and primarily made up of Muslims who disagree with what Kareem wrote on his blog but will "defend with all our might his right to express such opinions."According to his supporters, Kareem was raised in a religious family and educated in Egyptian religious schools throughout his youth. He was expelled from college and referred to Egyptian authorities in 2005 after his authorship of the blog karam903.blogspot.comwas discovered. On that blog Kareem has criticized what he called Egyptian gender apartheid, he said that a religious riot he witnessed in Egypt showed the "barbarism and thievery and fanaticism" of Islam and on September 11th, 2006 he wrote a post titled "There Is No Deity but the Human Being." Supporters have translated his posts into English but have included repeated disclaimers that they do not agree with what he has written. They ask international supporters of free speech to support the campaign in a number of different ways.Below is an interview with Kareem performed after a college disciplinary board meeting, hosted on YouTube with translation overlayed using the service BubblePly. To learn more about the case and campaign, visit Freekareem.org.

  Charles Knight from AltSearchEnginesis blogging up a storm at Defrag. Here are his latest posts from the conference:Disruptive Technologies &InnovationGoogle and OpenSocialNext-Level Discovery PanelEnterprise 2.0 (Andrew McAfee)Web 2.0 “Made of Peopleâ€� (Ross Mayfield)Customer Reach vs. Vendor Grasp (Doc Searls)Discussing Attention (Esther Dyson)Defragging Identity (Dick Hardt)There are more posts over on AltSearchEngines.

  SpringNoteis a hosted Korean wiki service that's been in the works for some time but will make a public launch at the Web 2.0 Expo Tokyonext week. It's a strong product. The site offers a number of features that are worth a look, evidence too that there's still a lot of room for innovation in the world of wikis. There is also clear room for improvement in this particular offering.There's a lot of nice touches in SpringNote. Edits are autosaved and each page has an accompanying memo or notes page. RSS feeds are widely available throughout the site and each wiki can have feed publishing turned on or off. I'm not sure why you would want to turn feed publishing off, though, and it ought to be on by default. There's an API and plug-in development community. There's a bookmarklet for copying parts of any webpage into your SpringNote wiki, there's MSN chat integration and there's an offline version of the product. It's an impressive application.OpenIDThe company is promoting SpringNote heavily as an OpenID friendly service. It is, and the OpenID implementation is fairly well done - if you're already familiar with the concept. People who just happen to have AIM, Bloglines, WordPress or Orange accounts but don't know how to turn those into OpenID URLs aren't helped any by SpringNote. This is a common problem and a real loss for companies who want to make the account creation process as easy as possible.TemplatesSpringNote has a long list of wiki templates: from recipes to web site reviews to diets to group projects and to do lists. That's very helpful for new wiki users, far superior to a blank page for example, but the site could use more clarity concerning the editability of every field and title in the templates. Templates are a delicate matter but they are important to demonstrate the broad usefulness of any wiki platform. Every wiki company should consider embedding CommonCraft's short video explaining wikis, too (see on the right and compare to SpringWiki's video on the bottom of this post). It's not nearly as good as the same company's video explaining RSSbut it's still far better than nothing.File Import and ExportI was very happy to see how SpringNote handles file import and export. You can import Word Doc, OpenOffice, text and HTML files into your wikis. You can also export your wikis onto your desktop, which is fantastic. Unfortunately, the company requires a 24 hour wait time for document export. I can't see how to export just a single document, perhaps they would let me do that immediately. I hope so, it's my document - not theirs. None the less, these are great features.Language and UsabilityUnfortunately, the English version of the site also suffers from some real usability problems. I don't mean to be overly provincial, but the company ought to hire someone more conversant in the English language if they are going to offer an English interface and market to native English speakers. I want to see projects birthed far from Silicon Valley thrive, but a small investment in a copy editor who speaks your chosen interface language as their native language could make a big difference in product usability.The wiki world is far wider than just Wikipedia. Some say that editing a wiki is one of the first read/write experiences than many business users have online. As is the case with many related technologies, it's important for that reason as well to keep an eye on the consumer markets. That's where a lot of innovation comes from. SpringNote is a good example of that and a project well worth watching.To see a wide variety of wiki software options, check out WikiIndex.SpringNote editing demonstration

  According to a New York Timesstory this morning, circulation across the US newspaper industry fell about 3 percent over the spring and summer compared with figures from the same period last year. The drop in paper sales is indicative of a change in the way people consume news content, shifting especially toward the Internet, where traffic to newspaper web sites has risen. Even paid online content is doing well, with the Wall Street Journal reporting over 1 million paid online subscribers, now accounting for about half of its paid circulation.Newspapers are not taking this shift in news consumption behavior lying down. The Chicago Tribune reportsthat five major US newspaper publishers are considering forming a joint online ad network. Gannett Co., Tribune Co., Hearst Corp., Media News Group and Cox Newspapers are in talks to form an ad sales consortium that would, according to a Tribune source, capture seven of the top ten US newspaper markets.The alliance would compete with the newspaper ad network that Yahoo! has been buildingsince last November. Yahoo!'s network includes both Hearst and Cox, and has a reach of over 400 newspapers. Though Yahoo! initially formed partnerships with newspapers to push their HotJobscareer classifieds service out to a broader audience, they have plans to expand to search advertising by the end of this year, and display ads sometime in 2008. Tribune and Gannett co-own chief HotJobs rival, CareerBuilder.Cox and Hearst say that talking to the Yahoo! rivals does not signal a rift with Yahoo!. An unnamed executive at one of the Yahoo! alliance papers seemed to indicate that while papers may be pleased with the Yahoo! partnership, they're not opposed change. "Fundamentally, there is a need to make it easier to buy ad space on our Internet sites," said the executive. "Yahoo still has the best technology platform. But why shouldn't the newspaper industry have its own [ad sales] firm? Don't you want to get out and tell your own story?"