Author: Mathew Ingram

Ever since the web first started to become mainstream, there have been attempts to build the “Daily Me,” a personalized newspaper that learns what you like or are interested in (does anyone remember PointCast?). But as I noted in a recent post on the topic, many of these efforts are lackluster at best, and irritating at worst. They either require too much fiddling to tune them, or they don’t show any intelligence at all (or both). But that doesn’t stop companies from trying — and the most promising entrants in this race so far are those that try to build their recommendations on top of the social signals coming from Twitter and other networks.

The latest to join the field is a personalized magazine app for the iPad called Zite, whose name is a play on the German word “zeitgeist,” meaning “the spirit of the times.” The company behind the app is based in British Columbia, and has been funded by angel investors and research grants from the Canadian government, and CEO Ali Davar says Zite has been working on its recommendation engine for several years. An earlier version of the project, which is based on technology developed at the University of British Columbia’s Laboratory for Computational Intelligence, involved a browser extension called Worio that suggested related results when users did a Google search.

The Zite app pulls in your Twitter account and your Google Reader feeds (if you have them), and then suggests topics based on your interests. This was the first place where it fell down for me — it said that it didn’t have enough information about me, which I thought was odd, since I have been on Twitter for about four years, have posted more than 35,000 tweets and follow over 2,000 people. I’ve used Google Reader for years as well, and am subscribed to about 600 feeds. Although Zite got some of its suggestions right, it recommended Barcelona as a topic, which was totally out of left field — in fact, I can’t recall ever mentioning the Spanish town before.

Although Robert Scoble says that Zite doesn’t feel as slick as Flipboard, I thought the app worked quite well in terms of usability — you can swipe to move through articles, click to read them in a built-in browser, and share them easily (although you can’t save them to Instapaper, which is a shame). And you get asked with each one whether you like the content or want to see more of it, which is something that other apps and services such as Flipboard are missing. It requires some effort on a reader’s part to do this training, and many will probably not do it, but it is crucial for learning likes and dislikes.

One glaring omission from Zite is the lack of Facebook integration. Davar says that Facebook tends to provide sources that are too heterogeneous (that is, too diverse) to be a source of good recommendation data, and that might be true, but it’s still a giant social network and a huge part of many people’s online news consumption, so it seems odd to leave it out — especially when the data coming from the billions of “like” buttons scattered around the web could be a source of so much data on what people want to read (Yahoo Labs has just released an interesting survey of what that shows for some of the major news sites).

There’s one nagging question that keeps jumping out at me as I look at all of these apps and services, however, and that is: where is Google? The combination of smart aggregation and algorithm-driven personalization seems like something the search engine should be all over. Google News has added some personalization aspects, but they are anemic at best, and one of the original customized news-readers — Google Reader — hasn’t really capitalized on that opportunity much at all, although it does provide some recommendations.

The reality is that the RSS reader has been eclipsed (for the small proportion of the population who even used one) by Twitter and Facebook and other social news sources, or smart aggregators such as Techmeme and Mediagazer. Google has more or less failed to take advantage of that transition at all when it comes to news reading, although it is trying to add social signals to search. Why not take FastFlip and try to make it a Flipboard or Zite or News360 competitor?

And apart from the Washington Post’s new Trove project and the News.me spinoff from the New York Times that Betaworks is close to launching, newspapers — who should know a thing or two about filtering and recommending the news to people — are virtually nowhere in this game.

If there’s one thing that web users need more than ever, it’s smart filters to help them navigate the vast tsunami of information that comes at them every day (it’s not information overload, says Clay Shirky, it’s “filter failure”). Someone is going to solve that problem, and if they do it properly they could capture a significant share of the online news-reading market.

As the financial screws continue to tighten on traditional media companies, more and more are choosing to throw their eggs into the basket labelled “paywall,” despite a conspicuous lack of evidence that erecting barriers to non-paying readers — or turnstiles that charge them after they have read a certain number of articles — has any beneficial effects. The latest to go this route is the Dallas Morning News, which put up its wall this morning, and the New York Times (s nyt) is also said to be close to launching its metered-access plan. But in the long run, these walls are really just sandbags against a rising tide.

The Dallas Morning News paywall, which the paper has been working on since the middle of last year, does have some holes in it that are designed to mitigate the extent to which it shuts out readers: non-subscribers to the paper will be able to read headlines, blogs, obituaries, classifieds and any syndicated content for free, but local news will be blocked. And the news doesn’t come cheap: a subscription to the print newspaper and all of the Dallas publisher’s digital content (which includes an iPad app) is $33.95 a month, and an online-only subscription is $16.95 a month. By comparison, Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad app The Daily costs $4 a month or $39.99 for a year.

Last month, Dallas Morning News publisher Jim Moroney admitted that he was unsure whether the paywall would work or not, telling the Nieman Journalism Lab that “This is a big risk — I’m not confident we’re going to succeed. But we’ve got to try something. We’ve got to try different things.” Moroney was similarly blunt in a memo to his newsroom staff about the launch of the wall:

So why, beginning tomorrow, are we going to require a subscription to access much of the content we originate and distribute digitally? The reason is straightforward: Online advertising rates are insufficient at the scale of traffic generated by metro newspaper websites to support the businesses they operate. We need to find additional and meaningful sources of revenue to sustain our profitability.

The bet being made by papers like the Morning News — and Gannett, which is experimenting with paywalls at a number of its papers, and says it plans to roll the strategy out to other publications — is that a paywall can do two things: one is to keep existing print readers from cancelling their subscriptions so they can read for free online, and the second is to generate more revenue, not just from subscriptions but by convincing advertisers that readers who pay for their content are more desirable as targets of advertising.

This is the argument being made by News Corp., (s nws) which launched paywalls at two of its British newspapers late last year, and saw its online readership plummet by more than 90 percent. The company has said that it isn’t concerned about the decline, and that advertisers are proving to be receptive to its claims that the remaining readers are more engaged and therefore worth more. What impact that will have on the company’s actual finances remains to be seen, however.

The New York Times, meanwhile, is expected to launch its “metered access” plan soon, which is based on a similar model used by the Financial Times that provides a certain number of free articles per month before readers hit a wall. The NYT has experimented with a paywall before — in 2005 it launched TimesSelect, which put the paper’s columnists behind a wall, but the service (which former Guardian digital head Emily Bell credits with helping to jump-start The Huffington Post) was shut down in 2007. And some financial analysts are skeptical that the new wall will be any better in terms of helping the paper’s business: William Bird of Lazard Capital recently rated the stock a “sell,” saying it was like buying “a declining annuity,” and that the paywall was unlikely to help.

The reality is that the biggest problem for traditional newspaper companies — a combination of high costs and falling ad revenues — isn’t something a paywall is going to help solve. At best, it is a stop-gap measure that might slow their decline, and an ultimately futile attempt to reimpose scarcity on their content in an age when the supply of free content is virtually unlimited.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about Facebook-powered comments, which have been implemented at a number of major blogs and publishers (including here at GigaOM) over the past couple of weeks. Supporters argue that using Facebook comments cuts down on “trolling” and other forms of bad behavior, because it forces people to use their real names instead of hiding behind a pseudonym, while critics say it gives the social network too much power. But the reality is that when it comes to improving blog comments, anonymity really isn’t the issue — the biggest single factor that determines whether they are any good is whether the authors of a blog take part in them.

According to TechCrunch’s MG Siegler, the addition of Facebook comments seems to have improved the quality of the comments that the blog receives, but has reduced the overall number of them, which he says may or may not be a good thing — since some people may be declining to comment via Facebook as a result of concerns about their privacy, etc. A bigger issue, says entrepreneur Steve Cheney, is that using Facebook as an identity system for things like blog comments forces users to homogenize their identity to some extent, and thus removes some of the authenticity of online communication.

Although Cheney’s argument caused Robert Scoble to go ballistic about the virtues of real names online, Harry McCracken at Technologizer had similar concerns about the impact that Facebook comments might have, saying it could result in comments that are “more hospitable, but also less interesting.” And social-business consultant Stowe Boyd is also worried that implementing Facebook’s comments is a continuation of the “strip-malling of the web,” and that

Facebook personalizes in the most trivial of ways, like the Starbucks barristas writing your name on the cup, but they totally miss the deeper stata of our sociality. But they don’t care: they are selling us, not helping us.

There’s no question that for some people, having to put their real name on everything they do online simply isn’t going to work, because they feel uncomfortable blending their personal lives with their professional lives, or vice versa. Those people will likely never use Facebook comments, and that is a real deterrent to hitching your wagon to Facebook entirely.

But the biggest reason not to rest all of your hopes on Facebook comments is that Facebook logins are not a cure for bad comments, real names or no real names. The only cure is something that takes a lot more effort than implementing a plugin, and that is being active in those comments — in other words, actually becoming part of an ongoing conversation with your readers, even if what they say happens to be negative in some cases. This is a point that Matt Thompson of National Public Radio made in a blog post, in which he talked about the ways to improve the quality of comments:

Whether online or offline, people act out the most when they don’t see anyone in charge. Next time you see dreck being slung in the bowels of a news story comment thread, see if you can detect whether anyone from the news organization is jumping in and setting the tone.

As Thompson notes, the standard defense for not doing this is a lack of time, and responding to reader comments definitely takes time. But it’s something that we feel strongly about here at GigaOM, and it’s something that we are determined to do, to the best of our ability — regardless of whether it is through our regular comment feature, or through the Facebook plugin. In the end, it’s not the tool that matters, it’s the connection that it allows.

According to multiple news reports this morning, AOL has agreed to acquire hyper-local news aggregator Outside.in for a sum that is reported to be less than $10 million, substantially below the $14.4 million that the company has raised from venture funds and other sources. After four years of trying, the service has more or less failed to become much more than a local aggregator, pulling in automated feeds of news, blogs and keyword searches based on location.

There is a business in doing this, but not a very big one — and that’s because simply aggregating data isn’t going to produce enough traffic or engagement to get advertisers interested. As Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, the field is littered with hyper-local experiments that have not really succeeded. Why? I think it’s because many of these, including Outside.in, focus too much on the how of hyper-local — the automated feeds and the aggregation of news sources, which sites like Everyblock (which was bought by MSNBC in 2009) and Topix do with algorithms based on location — rather than the why. And the why is simple: to serve a community. Unless a site or service can do that, it will almost certainly fail.

So how do you do that? The most successful community news operations — like a startup called Sacramento Press, which continues to grow rapidly despite the presence of a traditional newspaper competitor in the McClatchy paper The Sacramento Bee, or a Danish newspaper project called JydskeVestkysten, which has thousands of community-based correspondents who submit content for a series of hyper-local sites — come from the communities that they serve. They aren’t data aggregators that are imposed on those towns and regions by some external source, but come from within them.

The easiest way to see whether a hyper-local site is working or not is to look at the comments. Are there heated discussions going on in the comments on stories? If not, then the site is likely to be a ghost town. History is filled with local news experiments like Backfence — which was founded by former Washington Post staffer Mark Potts and shut down in 2007 — and Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, which never really managed to connect with the communities they were supposed to be serving, despite all the best intentions. Among the startups trying to take a community-first approach is OpenFile, a kind of pro-am local journalism startup based in Toronto.

In the comments at Read/Write Web, the founder of Everyblock, programmer and entrepreneur Adrian Holovaty, said that his service is trying to add more community to its sites by focusing on comments and discussion around the issues — and that’s a good thing, because without it, there is nothing but a collection of automated data, and no one is going to form a strong relationship with that.

Topix, which says it is one of the largest local news services on the web, started out doing the news aggregation thing just like Outside.in and Everyblock, co-founder Chris Tolles said recently in an interview with me, and then almost accidentally started to become a community hub for lots of small towns and regions that didn’t have anywhere else to talk about the issues. Topix has focused on expanding those kinds of discussions, by targeting local hubs with features such as election-based polls during the recent mid-term elections, in order to spark more debate and engagement.

This is the central challenge for AOL and its Patch.com effort, which has already spent over $50 million launching hyper-local news operations in almost a thousand cities across the United States. The sites are designed to be one-man or one-woman units, with a local journalist (in many cases, one that came from a traditional media outlet) as the core of the operation, writing local news but also pulling in other local content from blogs, government sources and elsewhere. And most of the sites highlight the comments from readers prominently, which is smart.

But can this massive, manufacturing-style effort from a web behemoth manage to connect with enough towns on a grassroots level and really become a core part of those communities? Because without that, AOL is pouring money into a bottomless pit.

The secret to online success for newspapers doesn’t depend on the choice of technology, or decisions about content, or even specific kinds of knowledge about the web, says Emily Bell — the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and the former head of digital for The Guardian. All it requires, she says, is a firm commitment to be “of the web, not just on the web.” Speaking at a journalism event in Toronto last night, Bell said the biggest single factor in the success that The Guardian had online was the determination to be part of the web, and to embrace even the controversial aspects of the online content game — including user-generated content and the use of tools to track readers and traffic. “Its useful to have the digital skills,” she said, “but more important to have a digital mindset.”

One of the most controversial things The Guardian did early on, according to Bell, was to launch the Huffington Post-style Comment Is Free platform in 2006, which allowed anyone to submit opinion or commentary pieces and have their blog posts run alongside the traditional columnists employed by the paper.

It was this last part of the project that really caused a furor within The Guardian, said Bell, because the traditional columnists didn’t want their pearls of wisdom to be appearing alongside the rantings of non-journalists, and they expressed their displeasure in no uncertain terms to Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. To his credit, Bell says the editor stood firm.

Bell also noted that one of the big factors in the rise of The Huffington Post was the New York Times‘ (s nyt) decision to put all of its columnists behind a pay wall, which it did in 2005. The wall was dismantled in 2007, but while it was in effect it locked the NYT’s opinion leaders away from the web, and effectively removed them from the discussion stream — which created a perfect opportunity for Arianna Huffington, and helped her build a business that AOL just acquired for $315 million (s aol). It remains to be seen what kind of impact the NYT’s new “metered” pay wall will have once it launches, which is expected to happen soon.

Bell said one of the mistakes most newspapers made was to not pay close enough attention to the technology side of the online content business, and to ignore the obvious impact of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Bell said she met with Google (s goog) executives in 2004, and they warned that the traditional media industry was out of touch with what readers and advertisers wanted. But newspaper executives thought “that was just about search, and that wasn’t our business — but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was our business.” The same thing happened with the rise of social media, she says: “People thought, oh that’s not our business — but it was.”

The former Guardian executive said that using tools to track what readers click on doesn’t mean that “we will all just write about Britney Spears without her clothes on,” but simply means that journalists can keep an eye on what people are interested in reading about. The idea that paying attention to such metrics is somehow undercutting journalism is “just plain wrong,” she said. Bell also noted that newspapers have seen the digital side of their business as the risky part, when the reality is that the legacy print operations are actually more risky. “Even if you don’t know what is going to happen in your legacy business, you know what is happening now — you are losing money,” she said.

When asked during the Q&A session about how newspapers should blend their traditional newsrooms with their new digital operations, Bell said that “the jury is still out” on whether merging newsrooms is a good idea. But she said one thing was clear: that having traditional print editors telling digital staff what to do was “a recipe for disaster.” A number of newspapers that have merged their newsrooms — including the Washington Post (s wpo), which used to have its print and online operations in two completely separate buildings, with separate management — have suffered after the merger because, as journalism professor Jay Rosen and others have pointed out, the “print guys won.”

Bell’s views on who should be driving the innovation at newspapers echo those of publisher John Paton, CEO of the Journal-Register Co., which owns a chain of regional daily and weekly papers in New Jersey and Connecticut. In a digital manifesto he wrote for the company last year, Paton said that newspapers need to “be digital first,” and that the best way to do that is to “put the digital guys in charge of everything.”

The writing has been on the wall for some time in the book publishing business: platforms like Amazon’s Kindle (s amzn) and the iPad (s aapl) have caused an explosion of e-book publishing that is continuing to disrupt the industry on a whole series of levels, as Om has written about in the past. And evidence continues to accumulate that e-books are not just something established authors with an existing brand can make use of, but are also becoming a real alternative to traditional book contracts for emerging authors as well — and that should serve as a massive wake-up call for publishers.

The latest piece of evidence is the story of independent author Amanda Hocking, a 26-year-old who lives in Minnesota and writes fantasy-themed fiction for younger readers. Unlike some established authors such as J.K. Konrath, who have done well with traditional publishing deals before moving into self-publishing their own e-books, Hocking has never had a traditional publishing deal — and yet, she has sold almost one million copies of the nine e-books she has written, and her latest book appears to be selling at the rate of 100,000 copies a month.

It’s true that the prices Hocking charges for these books are small — in some cases only 99 cents, depending on the book — but the key part of the deal is that she (and any other author or publisher who works with Amazon or Apple) gets to keep 70 percent of the revenue from those sales. That’s a dramatic contrast to traditional book-publishing deals, in which the publisher keeps the majority of the money and the author typically gets 20 percent or even less. If you sell a million copies of your books and you keep 70 percent of that revenue, that is still a significant chunk of change, even if each book sells for 99 cents.

(Update: As a number of commenters have noted, only books that are priced at $2.99 or higher are eligible for Amazon’s 70-percent royalty rate; books priced cheaper than that are eligible for a 35-percent royalty rate).

The overwhelming appeal of that kind of mathematics has other authors moving away from traditional publishing deals as well, including Terrill Lee Lankford, who wrote recently about how he turned down a deal with a major publisher in the middle of negotiations over a new book because the publisher wanted him to agree to a deal for a future e-book that would have given the publishing house 75 percent of the revenue — and tried to entice him with a hefty advance for the original book. But the author said no to both deals, saying:

I see it as a permanent 75% tax on a piece of work that generates income with almost no expense after the initial development and setup charges.

Just as the music industry did, many book publishers seem to be clinging to their traditional business models, despite mounting evidence that the entire structure of the industry is being dismantled, and the playing field is being leveled between authors and publishers. And it’s not just individual authors who are taking advantage of this growing trend — author and marketing consultant Seth Godin has created something called The Domino Project in partnership with Amazon, which he sees as a new kind of publishing middleman that can help authors take advantage of the e-book wave. More traditional publishers should be paying attention, or they will find their lunch is being eaten.

Making the transition from traditional print publishing to being digital-first media outlets hasn’t been easy for newspapers — in fact, many have stubbornly resisted this change, and tried to dip their toes into digital waters gradually without really investing any substantial effort or resources. As media analyst Frederic Filloux pointed out in a post yesterday at The Monday Note, this strategy (or lack of a strategy) is turning out to be a slow-motion train wreck. As author Clayton Christensen described in The Innovator’s Dilemma, it is almost impossible to cope with market disruption by making incremental changes, and newspapers are a perfect example of that principle at work.

Filloux uses financial results from the Washington Post to make the point. In some ways, the newspaper company is better off than a lot of other media entities, because it generates a lot of revenue from its educational arm — more than 60 percent of the company’s revenue comes from it, as well as 60 percent of its operating income — which creates a nice cushion for its newspaper business. And that business needs the help, Filloux notes, because advertising revenue for the paper side of the business has continued to decline at a rapid rate, and even though online revenue has grown, it hasn’t even come close to making up the gap. This is the “digital pennies in exchange for print dollars” problem:

As Filloux points out, the math in this graph is not pleasant: over the last seven years, the Washington Post has lost five dollars in print revenue for every dollar that it has added in the form of online ad revenue — losing almost $90 million in print revenue while its online business has grown by less than $20 million. Other newspapers may have somewhat different numbers, but the trend is likely to be very similar. And Filloux correctly diagnoses the main reasons for this online-revenue problem:

• Too much free content, which has diluted the value of editorial brands like the Washington Post

• The rise of competitors such as The Huffington Post, who have taken advantage of digital technology to build audiences at much lower cost

• The downward pressure on ad prices created by the explosion of content, as billions of pageviews depress the market for banner ads

The big problem for newspaper companies is that incremental change is not really helping them adapt, or as Filloux puts it: “mere adaptive tactics won’t save the traditional news industry in their multi-front war against disruptive technologies.” The Washington Post has done as good a job as any paper of trying to build a business online — online revenue accounts for 43 percent of overall revenue, up from just 10 percent in 2004, according to the figures that Filloux quotes — but overall its business continues to decline because online ads are worth so much less than their print counterparts.

There are no signs that this is going to change any time soon — if anything, online advertising just keeps getting cheaper (newspaper companies are forming private ad networks, but this seems both too little and too late). Newspapers are fighting the law of diminishing returns.

So what is to be done? Many companies, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and the New York Times, are trying to fight a rear-guard action by putting up paywalls to protect some of their print revenue, or pinning their hopes on iPad apps and subscription revenue, despite Apple’s 30-percent fee for doing business on its platform. Filloux argues that “radical re-engineering is needed,” and I think he is right — print may still be producing a large proportion of revenues, but it is also the source of a large proportion of a media company’s costs, and that spells doom if you are competing with digital-only outlets such as AOL and Yahoo that have a dramatically cheaper business model.

The radical restructuring that Filloux describes, which involves a much smaller newsroom, lower costs and a digital-first approach to publishing, sounds very much like what Journal-Register CEO John Paton is trying to do with the company he took over last year after it emerged from bankruptcy. Above all, Paton says, media outlets need to become digital-first, because the print side is only dragging down their businesses and preventing them from being as competitive as they should be. So far, that’s a message too few traditional newspaper publishers have heard.

News360 says it does recommendations using semantic filtering, etc. Washington Post launched a service called Trove that it says will do the same — and aspects of recommendations appear in other apps as well, and the New York Times recently launched its own recommendation service attached to its site.

These kinds of recommendations are largely algorithmic, although the NYT has some behavioral info that comes from anyone who has joined its internal Times social network, which was an interesting experiment — although it’s not clear how many people are actually using it.

The biggest source of recommendation-type data is Facebook, which can see when your friends like something, when they share it, etc. Huffington Post has driven a lot of traffic to the site by making smart use of Facebook integration to recommend stories that people you follow have liked or read, and as I keep pointing out to people — social networks like Twitter and Facebook are inherently farther ahead when it comes to recommendations because of all the social signals that are embedded in my social graph, the relationships with the people I follow and my friends and social network.

There are some services and apps that make use of the links that get passed around via Twitter and Facebook — there’s Twitter Tim.es and Paper.li for showing you links from your Twitter stream, and PostPost does something similar for Facebook links, producing a kind of personalized newspaper. News.me, the social news platform that Betaworks and the New York Times have partnered on, shows you content from other peoples’ streams, which is an interesting twist. And Flipboard pulls in links from your Twitter stream, your Facebook graph and RSS feeds and shows it to you.

But no one is really doing much when it comes to recommendations. I’ve tried playing with Trove, and it is not much better than a random sampling of news that is being shared on the web — and News360 seems equally haphazard. It’s possible that they could get better over time, of course, although there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell either service that it is wrong when it suggests a particular story to you. And News360’s choice of a visual interface with photos sliding by is interesting, but I’m not convinced it’s particularly useful.

Others are trying to solve the recommendation conundrum, including **, which former ** is developing as a kind of **. But so far, if you want recommendations about what to read, your Twitter stream and Facebook graph are probably the best solution — and anyone who wants to do better is going to have to leverage both of them to do it.

Blogging is on the decline, according to a New York Times story published this weekend — citing research from the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project — and it is declining particularly among young people, who are using social networks such as Twitter instead. Pretty straightforward, right? Except that the actual story said something quite different: even according to the figures used by the New York Times itself, blogging activity is actually increasing, not decreasing. And as the story points out, plenty of young people are still blogging via the Tumblr platform, even though they may not think of it as “blogging.”

The NYT story notes that blogging among those aged 12 to 17 fell by half between 2006 and 2009 according to the Pew report, but among 18 to 33-year-olds it only dropped by two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier — which isn’t exactly a huge decline. And among 34 to 45-year-olds, blogging activity rose by six percentage points. The story also admits that the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the U.S. in December than it had a year earlier (a 2-percent decline), but globally its traffic climbed by 9 percent to 323 million.

In many ways, this “blogging is dying” theory is similar s to the “web is dying” argument that Wired magazine tried to float last year, which really was about the web evolving and expanding into different areas. It’s true that Facebook and Twitter have led many away from blogging because they are so fast and easy to use, but they have also both helped to reinforce blogging in many ways.

What’s really happening, as Toni Schneider of Automattic — the corporate parent of the WordPress publishing platform (see disclosure below) — noted in the NYT piece, is that what blogging represented even four or five years ago has evolved into much more of a continuum of publishing. People post content on their blogs, or their “Tumblrs,” and then share links to it via Twitter and Facebook; or they may post thoughts via social networks and then collect those thoughts into a longer post on a blog. Blog networks such as The Huffington Post get a lot of attention, but plenty of individuals are still making use of the long-form publishing that blogs allow, including programming guru Dave Winer, and Hunch founder and angel investor Chris Dixon.

One of the reasons why Tumblr seems to have taken off, particularly with younger users, is that it is extremely easy to set up and use — but it also offers many of the same real-time sharing options that have become popular with Twitter and Facebook. For example, Tumblr makes it easy for users to follow others, and then with a simple click they can “re-blog” another user’s post, which redistributes it to all their followers in much the same way that a “retweet” does on Twitter.

So what we really have now is a multitude of publishing tools: there are the “micro-blogging” ones like Twitter, then there are those that allow for more interaction and longer-form or multimedia content like Facebook, and both of those in turn can enhance existing blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. And then there is Tumblr, which is like a combination of multiple tools. Not every platform is going to appeal to every user, but the fact that there are multiple methods available means there is even more opportunity for people to find a publishing method they like.

So while “blogging” may be on the decline, personal publishing has arguably never been healthier.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Did you hear that noise? It sounded like a cannon shot. And it was: a cannon shot fired from Twitter headquarters, directly across the bow of UberMedia — and, by extension, across the bow of every third-party developer whose app competes in some way with the micro-blogging service. With little or no warning, Twitter flipped the “kill switch” and shut down several of UberMedia’s apps on Friday afternoon, including UberTwitter and the popular Android app Twidroyd.

Twitter says the reasons were simple: trademark infringement and breaches of the terms of service. But there is more to this than just a squabble over usage, and Twitter’s heavy-handed behavior is drawing some fire even from the company’s supporters.

The first notice that anyone had of serious issues between Twitter and UberMedia came when users suddenly couldn’t access the network through UberTwitter and Twidroyd. Shortly afterward, a blog post appeared on the Twitter support blog saying that the apps had been shut down for “violating our policies” — but even that explanation only came after a description of the “official” clients for Twitter (with some helpful links to them) and a generic-sounding statement about how the company asks applications “to abide by a simple set of rules that we believe are in the interests of our users, and the health and vitality of the Twitter platform as a whole.”

The blog post didn’t even describe what the actual violations by UberTwitter and Twidroyd were — those details didn’t come out until someone posted a question on the Q&A site Quora about the shutdowns, which drew a comment from Twitter communications staffer Matt Graves that included the statement the company sent to the media. According to the statement:

The violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.

Graves said the company had “had conversations” with UberMedia about some of the violations since April 2010, including the use of terms such as “tweet” and “twitter” in product names, and that the company hoped “that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon.” Meanwhile, UberMedia founder Bill Gross was busy doing damage control, posting on Twitter that the company was making changes to bring its applications into compliance (including changing the name of UberTwitter to UberSocial, something he said had been in the works for some time) and issuing a news release with the details.

I wrote recently about the potential for a serious collision between UberMedia and Twitter — based on Gross’s accumulation of Twitter clients, his attempts to launch a competing advertising product, and a recent financing that saw a series of venture funds put $17.5 million into the company — and this seems an obvious signal that Twitter is not going to take UberMedia’s potential competitive threat lying down.

If it had wanted to handle things quietly, Twitter could easily have negotiated something with UberMedia via back-room diplomacy. Instead, it clearly decided to send a message, both to UberMedia and to other third-party developers: Namely, don’t step out of line.

Obviously, Twitter has the right to manage its network and provide access to whoever it wishes. But the heavy-handed way in which it terminated UberMedia’s apps drew criticism even from some of the company’s supporters, including venture investor Mark Suster. A partner with GRP Partners, Suster — who doesn’t have a stake in either Twitter or UberMedia — wrote a sharply critical Quora note and a somewhat friendlier blog post about the incident, saying he didn’t appreciate being cannon fodder in the war between Twitter and one of its third-party app developers. Angel investor Dave McClure, meanwhile, yanked the company’s chain with a tweet about the company not having to worry about any Google-style “don’t be evil” mantra.

When Twitter started buying up applications and clamping down on third-party apps last year, it was obvious that the company was no longer the free-wheeling, “everyone join the party” kind of operation it seemed to be in the early days, when third-party apps were seen as partners who could help the network grow and no one worried about things like trademark infringement (TwitPic and Tweetmeme and other apps and services continue to function without any problems — so far). But the no-holds-barred attack on UberMedia suggests that Twitter is even more willing to throw its weight around now, especially since there is a potential $10-billion valuation on the line. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

At a conference in British Columbia this morning, author and media blogger Jeff Jarvis told a room full of corporate and government privacy advocates something many of them probably didn’t want to hear: that society needs more protection for what he calls “publicness,” and less focus on locking down our personal information or prosecuting companies that use that data. “Privacy has plenty of advocates already,” Jarvis said. “It is potentially over-protected, but in any case it is well protected. But publicness also needs its advocates.” Despite stumbles by both Facebook and Google when it comes to privacy, said Jarvis, the benefits of sharing information about ourselves through social media are plentiful and obvious — including the ability to organize popular revolutions like the one that just occurred in Egypt.

In his presentation to the Reboot conference in Victoria — whose tagline this year is “Security and privacy: Is there an app for that?” — Jarvis gave a preview of some of the arguments he makes in his new book, Public Parts, which the CUNY journalism professor said he is still working on. Jarvis, who has written at length on his blog about his battle with prostate cancer, talked about how sharing what might be seen as incredibly personal and private information can have an enormous amount of value. Writing about his cancer, he said, connected him with friends who had had similar issues that he had never known about, and “I got more help and support than any doctor’s pamphlet could ever have given me.”

In the brief video interview embedded below, recorded after his talk, Jarvis spoke about what he sees as the benefits of publicness not just on an individual level but for society in general, and the challenge of balancing that with the ability for governments — including those in Egypt and elsewhere — and others to use our information against us.

Jarvis made a point of saying that privacy “is not binary, not on or off — it’s a continuum,” and that different societies and individuals come down at different points along that continuum. Scandinavians publish the salaries of all their citizens publicly, he said, something other people might recoil at. And in the United States, photos of people who are accused of crimes are published without any concern for their privacy, unlike some other countries. “I am not a proponent of 100-percent openness,” Jarvis said. “For example, I would like to point out that I am wearing clothing. [But] there are benefits to being public, and we need to acknowledge those at the same time as we talk about what could go wrong — we can’t always focus on what might go wrong.”

Among the benefits of being public, according to Jarvis, are that relationships and connections are formed that have value, which is the fundamental purpose of Facebook. “It also enables collaboration, and builds trust,” Jarvis said. And in places like Egypt, those tools have created what the author called “an incredible wave of publicness — and that deserves protection. Yes, privacy deserves protection, but by God so do the tools of publicness.”

Jarvis’s presentation came as a stark contrast to the one before him, which was from British Columbia’s Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who said that Google chairman and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg “don’t think privacy is relevant any more,” (something Jarvis challenged in his talk as untrue) and argued that with so much potential danger around “excessive sharing of personal information,” regulators need enhanced authority and broader powers of oversight, and that federal laws “need more teeth.”

Senator Hillary Clinton gave a speech today at George Washington University about Internet freedom, an updated version of the address she gave a year ago calling for more openness and an end to dictators and foreign governments repressing their citizens through the Net. As it was then, the Secretary of State’s speech was a heart-warming defence of the open Internet and the need for freedom of speech — with one notable exception: namely, WikiLeaks. While other governments need to be lectured by the U.S. on how to be more open and free, apparently it is fine for the U.S. government to persecute a web-based publisher that is widely viewed as a journalistic entity, and is run by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.

Much of the senator’s speech was eminently supportable — the parts where she called the Internet “the public space of the 21st century—the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffee house, and nightclub,” or where she called on foreign governments to “join us in a bet we have made — a bet that an open Internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries” (there’s a transcript of her address available at Scribd). The senator even waded into the debate over what role social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook have played in the uprisings in Iran and Tunisia and Egypt, and provided a summary that could easily have been written by a social-media skeptic such as Malcolm Gladwell. She said:

Egypt isn’t inspiring because people communicated using Twitter; it is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition; it is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

That said, however, Ms. Clinton also went out of her way to defend the U.S. government’s approach to WikiLeaks, which has involved not only imprisoning the man who allegedly leaked thousands of diplomatic cables (former Army intelligence officer Bradley Manning), but also going after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by any means available. The U.S. Justice Department has been working on a legal case involving the Espionage Act, despite the fact that publishing classified documents is not actually a crime under U.S. law — and despite the fact that if it is successful, the same charges would apply to the New York Times and other media outlets who have also published the cables.

As part of its case, the government sent a court order to Twitter — and apparently to other web companies such as Google and Facebook, although they have not admitted as much publicly — demanding that the company turn over a wide variety of personal information about Icelandic MP and early WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jonsdottir, hacker and open-Net advocate Julian Appelbaum and a number of others involved with WikiLeaks. The government order covers not just IP addresses and therefore locations, but also private messages, methods of payment and other materials. Jonsdottir and others named in the order are fighting these demands in a case that ironically was heard today.

And how did Senator Clinton justify this? She said that one of the principles the U.S. upholds is the need for transparency, but that this must be balanced with the need to protect confidentiality, and in particular government confidentiality. This has been a topic of debate in the past few months because of WikiLeaks, Ms. Clinton said, however:

It’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the Wikileaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this act was justified, because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of their work out in the open, in the full view of their citizens. I disagree.

The senator argued that by publishing the cables, WikiLeaks exposed diplomats and activists “to even greater risk” — despite the fact that no one has made any credible claims that the cables published by either WikiLeaks or media outlets such as the New York Times and The Guardian have put anyone in danger. Ms. Clinton said in her speech that denouncing WikiLeaks “does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom,” but on that point she is clearly wrong. And she seemed unfazed by the fact that her comments about targeting WikiLeaks came right after she censured foreign governments for attacking bloggers instead of upholding their rights to freedom of speech.

It’s obvious that while the U.S. government is content to preach to foreign countries like China about how they need to open up and not persecute their citizens, it is more than happy to go after WikiLeaks using whatever means necessary — despite the fact that what the organization did isn’t even a crime. That’s called trying to have your cake and eat it too, and it makes all the stirring talk about freedom in the senator’s speech difficult to take seriously.

After much rumor and speculation, Apple has finally launched its subscription service for publishers, and like many of the things the company does, it has caused equal amounts of enthusiasm and consternation. The enthusiasm stems from the fact that magazines, newspapers and other content companies now have an easy way to sign up users, instead of forcing them to pay every time they download a new issue. At the same time, however, Apple is taking its usual 30-percent cut of any sales, which is a big chunk — and it has also put up walls to keep users buying from within apps instead of on the web, and that could have a significant impact on some publishers such as Amazon.

As Darrell explains, Apple has made some concessions to publishers with its subscription offering — which comes on the heels of the recent launch of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper The Daily, the first to use the new subscription feature. While initial reports were that Apple was not going to give publishers any information about the people who sign up from within an app, the company says that publishers will get names, email addresses and zip codes (although users can also opt out of providing this). And if someone signs up on a publisher’s website, that company gets to keep 100 percent of the subscription revenue. Publishers can also offer free subscriptions, something Apple had also seemed to be cracking down on, at least in the case of some European newspapers.

That’s the good news. The bad news for publishers is that Apple now requires that all subscriptions be offered via in-app purchasing. Companies can also offer those deals on their websites, but they must offer exactly the same deal through their app (which prevents publishers from jacking up prices to cover the 30-percent take that Apple removes). The important line in the news announcement is that:

[P]ublishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

This seems pretty clearly directed at companies such as Amazon, which currently allows users of its Kindle app on iPhone and iPad to click a link and get taken to the retailer’s website to finish the transaction when buying a book. In effect, Apple has put up a roadblock for publishers that makes it difficult to route around the in-app purchase — increasing the likelihood that users will opt for the simplest choice, which is to buy the item through the app itself. Although publishers can obviously try to convince users to do otherwise, by putting call-outs to go to the website or downplaying the in-app purchasing option, many are likely to choose the easiest route, and that means a quick 30-percent payoff for Apple.

The reality here is that Apple knows that it has most publishers over a barrel, just as it did with the music industry when it first launched iTunes. Amazon may have other options since it owns its own platform, but magazine and newspaper companies are desperate to find some way of charging their readers, and Apple provides the easiest method of doing that. But the walled garden that Apple gives them access to, while it is very inviting and pleasant and well-maintained, comes with some serious trade-offs, as I tried to explain when Apple’s subscription plans were being discussed a few weeks ago. There’s a pretty attractive carrot, but there’s also a big stick.

That leaves publishers to ask themselves: How much is it worth to you to let Apple handle your sales for you? Rupert Murdoch has decided with The Daily that he is willing to make the trade-off, but Time Warner and some other publishers such as Conde Nast have made it clear that they are looking for other options, by signing up to offer their publications via Android devices as well as Apple’s iOS devices. Market dominance is a powerful thing, however, and so far Apple has the customers that publishers want to reach. For better or worse, they will have to submit to the stick if they want access to that carrot.