We used to say in my profession -- public relations -- that you shouldn't say or write anything that you wouldn't want to turn up on the front page of the New York Times. Now what I like to tell clients instead is: You shouldn't say or write anything that you wouldn't want to turn up in Google search results. After all, it's a lot more likely that your communications will be reported, indexed, archived, and made discoverable online than appear on the front page of the Times.

"So what?" some will say. Despite diminishing newspaper readership, the New York Times still maintains a broader readership -- and has more influence on the news agenda -- than people making Google queries. Though this is still true, the Internet has become a veritable "permanent record" where stories and online conversations can be exhumed much more easily than when you had to dig through old microfiche.

The old rule was really about discretion. PR professionals must constantly consider how even their most seemingly inconsequential statements can be interpreted, contextualized (or de-contextualized), and publicized to unintended audiences. In a profession that encourages out-of-the-box thinking, it's a good and useful rule. But in the digital media era, it's a bit outdated.

In this new age, it's dead simple for consumers to read on-demand reviews of your product, for legislative staffers to query your public policy issue before recommending a vote, for advocacy groups to examine your organization's track record relative to their cause, and for investigative journalists (some, yes, from the New York Times) to research your company for a story or crowdsource public discussion of your organization online. In these ways and more, the online search environment has become both an indicator and an influencer of an organization's offline reputation.

What's more, the online environment is much less wieldy for us PR folks. Gone are the days of "command-and-control" style messaging and, frankly, good riddance. The ceding of message control, and the need for professional communicators to be nimble in the new age of co-creation, warrants a separate post unto itself. Suffice it to say: The timeless value of discretion is made more valuable -- and often more tricky -- when the new nature of media requires communicators to be rapidly and ubiquitously responsive.

I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that, at a time when new media technologies are changing the rules of journalism, companies are placing a new emphasis on transparency. Access to, and distribution of, information is being rapidly democratized and smart companies know to get out ahead of this trend. However, as with many corporate buzzwords (e.g., "quality" and "innovation"), the concept is suffering from inflation as too many companies claim "transparency" as part of their identity without really walking the talk.

On the McDonald's CSR blog, the company's VP of corporate social responsibility writes, "Credibility is only achieved if you get things done, demonstrate transparency, highlight challenges and opportunities..." The quote indicates that McDonald's recognizes that it operates in a trust economy where credibility is a form of currency. But it also indicates that the company uses transparency as a tactic, as a mere means to achieving credibility. Companies that are successful in this new media environment won't be those determined to "demonstrate transparency" as much as those that resolve to simply "be transparent." Put differently, transparency won't be what they communicate but how they communicate.

Some companies are doing it right. In his Wired article, The See-Through CEO, Clive Thompson characterizes this phenomenon thus:

"Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups -- and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right -- and wrong.

Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he's accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak. In February, after JetBlue trapped passengers for hours in its storm-grounded planes and canceled 1,100 flights, CEO David Neeleman tried to deflect the blast of bad publicity by using YouTube to air his own blunt mea culpa. Microsoft, once a paragon of buttoned-down control, now posts uncensored internal videos -- and encourages its engineers to blog freely about their projects...

To be sure, this is a complex topic and there are practical limits on what can be communicated transparently. In his corporate blog, Oracle vice president Frank Buytendijk thoughtfully points out that a system of "perfect transparency" would reveal competitive secrets, reduce profitability and inflate consumer expectations. More on topic, he notes that large companies that position themselves as transparent would face even steeper consequences to their reputations if, for example, an accounting irregularity in a regional office surfaced. I'd argue that this is a minor casualty compared to the trust and goodwill a company gains by making transparency integral to its operation.

Before long, it won't simply be the case that you shouldn't simply write or say anything you wouldn't want discovered in the New York Times or online. Instead, in an effort to attain the kind of transparency that is obligatory in a new era of citizen journalism, a new standard will emerge whereby organizations will be compelled not to do anything they wouldn't want discovered. The organizations that will be truly successful in this environment are those that have integrated transparency as part of their organizational culture and not just their communications strategy. To the extent that the two are inter-related, the communications strategist has a substantial role to play here.

Mark Hannah has spent the past several years conducting sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He specializes in issues and reputation management online. Before joining the PR agency world (v-Fluence Interactive and Edelman), Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently conducted advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign. He is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and he serves as an awards judge for both organizations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he's currently pursuing a master's in strategic communications at Columbia University. He is an independent communications consultant based in New York City and the public relations correspondent for MediaShift. You can reach him at markphannah[at]gmail[dot]com.

Transparent laptop photo by Brian Kim via Flickr.

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Bloggers have always been timely in their response to local, regional and international crises and Kenyan bloggers were no different when violence broke out following the December 2007 elections. Within a day, Kenyan blogs were posting hourly reports. On December 31, there was a complete shutdown of the mainstream media. Erik Hersman reported:

The only way to get any up-to-date news for the past 24-48 hours has been through the blogosphere (like Kenyan Pundit, Thinkers Room, Mentalacrobatics) Skype and Kenyan populated forums (like Mashada). The traditional media has been shut out and shut down for all intents and purposes.

Within days, the online community and blog aggregator, Mashada had set up a SMS and voice main hotline calling for people to send in local news and opinions on what was happening. This was followed by Ory Okolloha (Kenyan Pundit) who suggested using Google Earth to create a mashup of where the violence was taking place.

Nine days later Ushahidi, "a platform that crowd sources crisis information," was born.

Ushahidi is not, of course, the first dedicated software or action designed in response to a crisis. Take for example the following: In August 2005, Katrina struck New Orleans; In December 2005 it was the South East Asian Tsunami, the Mumbai bombings, and this year the war against Gaza. In each case, the blogosphere has reacted in a timely and innovative fashion, using the most up to date technologies available at the time.

In the case of the Tsunami, SEA-EAT [The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog ] was started to document the disaster as well as to raise funds for the victims. "Help needed" and "Help offered" features were two of the options on the blog which enabled ordinary citizens to work together to provide as much support and relief as possible given the huge area hit by the tsunami. SEA-EAT remains an active blog which has created the necessary infrastructure to manage and document any other disasters in the future. However, Ushahidi differs from previous responses in that the design is easily customised and can be adapted to a wide range of situations and needs. According to its website:

The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

The developers of Ushahidi could have limited their idea to Kenya, but instead they had the vision and commitment to realize they had created an open source platform that could be used to monitor and document any crisis in any environment -- whether natural disaster, war, or political turmoil. In November last year, Ushahidi released Ushahidi DRC customized for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Ushahidi co-founder Ory Okolloh, explained that it has not been easy to "localize" the platform. Ushahidi works best in areas where there is already an active local blogging community, a way to ensure timely and quality translation, and finally a thorough understanding of what Ushahidi is and is not. In other words, Ushahidi worked well in Kenya because of the maturity and community of Kenyan bloggers. Most were already familiar with each other and members of the Kenyan blogging community, Kenya Unlimited. In addition, many Kenyan bloggers possessed considerable technological skills -- which meant they could see the potential of a site like Ushahidi. However, the DRC was a different story. As Ory Okolloh said:

While we did not have an unrealistic expectation about us getting thousands of reports given the challenges above, we certainly expected more than we have received so far. So I have been racking my brain trying to figure out what we could be doing better and why exactly the DRC has been a hard nut to crack, not just because I'd like to see the tool working better for the people affected by the crisis but also because it could provide useful lessons for us in the future.

Here's what I've come up with so far that I think has been useful to learn not just for us but for more importantly others interested in the applying the concept of crowdsourcing for early conflict warning and for crisis situations given the distributed model that we will apply when Ushahidi is released to the public (i.e. we will rarely handle our own deployments).

The Middle Eastern blogosphere and Twittershpere have responded quickly to the situation in Gaza, providing minute by minute updates on casualties, attacks and so on. In Egypt, a highly politicized group of bloggers has been active on Jaiku since Twitter suspended its out-going SMS to the country. Bloggers such as Arabway and Gaza have been microblogging the conflict as well. Other Egyptian bloggers highly critical of their government's response to the war on Gaza are Egyptian Chronicles and Mona Eltahawy.

It is not surprising then to learn that Al-Jazeera contacted the Ushahidi team over the New Year "via Twitter, email and Skype" and within days had used the platform to create a War on Gaza site. This site is integrated with Twitter (used to submit reports and also available as updates on their Gaza Twitter). The Al-Jazeera site is slightly more comprehensive than the DRC or the Kenyan sites as it includes Al-Jazeera news updates and video.

Although traditional news media, newspapers, TV news still have a crucial role, bloggers and microbloggers are creating new ways of presenting news. They are able to react in a much more timely manner as well as report from a grassroots perspective. As they are free from editorial constraints, they can deliver a much broader set of opinions and understandings than the mainstream media can. One of the reasons why Ushahidi works so well for the blogging community is its transferability and flexibility -- it can be used in conjunction with other Web 2.0 and traditional Internet tools like video, news reports and microblogging. For example, there is no reason why Egyptian bloggers cannot use the platform to document and monitor incidents of police violence against demonstrations or in the long term for generally recording oppressive actions of the government. Somewhere down the line it is just possible that Ushahidi, developed in Africa, could become as ubiquitous as YouTube or Flickr.

Sokari Ekine is an activist with a background in human rights in Africa. Sokari blogs at Black Looks and New Internationalist, and is the African correspondent for MediaShift.

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It's easy to see governments as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. Much of that is because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyper-connected world. Just as private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments must adapt if they wish to effectively communicate with their "customers" -- a.k.a. their citizens and stakeholders.

I propose that using authentic and transparent personalities as public outreach ambassadors can help transform "government for the people" to "government with the people." This should also have an indirect positive effect on the government organizations -- the brands -- they represent.

To be sure, governments are very different from private corporations in ways that create barriers to change. Bureaucracy and entrenched special interests make collaboration between agencies difficult. Information assurance, infrastructure, and legacy system concerns can make using or acquiring novel technologies from startup companies nearly impossible. Constant turnover of elected officials and political appointees as well as year-to-year budget concerns make long-range planning nearly a fantasy.

Nevertheless, as I have written about in my column at Mashable and elsewhere, pockets of influence inside the government as well as outside groups like the Sunlight Foundation are working to change that. And gradually, senior leadership is realizing that the upside of adopting social technologies could be extremely high.

Some criticize the use of social technologies in areas like national security and foreign relations, but I feel strongly that decision-makers cannot make informed choices about this until they or their staffs have personally had experience with this technology. And some senior officials, such as Colleen Graffy, the current Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, are bravely taking the plunge.

Behind every press release, web page, and social networking account is a person. But when people "hide" behind organizational brands, it reduces the authenticity and transparency that people -- citizens, customers, fans -- have become accustomed to seeing in the Web 2.0 world. New social tools and niche communications can empower people to connect with their audiences on a more personal level through what has been termed "ambient awareness" or ambient intimacy.

Governments everywhere are dealing with the rise of the "collaborative creative class" or C3. Often thought of as "Millennials" but in reality composed of people from all generations, C3 are the passionate, talented, and creative individuals who often blur the lines between work and play. To harness the momentum and power of C3, and to recruit and retain such individuals for public service, the government needs to embrace the spirit of creativity and trial-and-error characteristic of the social software community, fund research and development on social software, address information security risks inherent in social software, and create policy, acquisitions, and human resources incentives to encourage the use of such software.

Social software has numerous government applications, including information-sharing within and between agencies; collaborating with outside partners like humanitarian workers; public outreach and crowdsourcing; and empowering people with inexpensive, simple, mobile technology. In addition, as hostile entities become more adept at using social media for propaganda, it is imperative that governments familiarize themselves with social technologies.

How can government use social software to engage people in meaningful ways, understand public sentiment, recruit and retain employees, and harness what is often called collective intelligence? One early and prominent advocate of this is Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.), who has experimented with social software including the text micro-blogging platform Twitter and the video broadcast technology Qik.

In my opinion, there is a good deal of opportunity for bi-directional engagement between the government and its citizens. Rep. Culberson's visionary experimentation with social software prompted Congressional rules changes that effectively empower members to act as bi-directional ambassadors, bypassing traditional media to directly engage Congress on behalf of constituents, and perhaps more profoundly, vice versa.

The term "branding" is most often associated with companies selling products, but government components are arguably brands themselves. And failure to monitor conversations about brands is guaranteed to be PR trouble. Just look at the recent "Motrin Moms" controversy, which has been written about extensively here, here, and here. Briefly, Motrin failed to keep abreast of negative public reaction to an online advertisement aimed at mothers, a failure that may very well have damaged the brand's reputation in a major niche market.

Conversations like those that surrounded the "Motrin Moms" video are happening every day on issues that directly pertain to governments. How well do governments monitor what their constituents are actually talking about on Twitter and similar open information-sharing platforms?

Businesses, governments, and other organizations are still struggling to find the best way to use social software to engage people about their brands. I have argued elsewhere that on social networks, brands are best represented by individual people as "brand ambassadors." Ashton Kutcher and Maria Sharapova are in digital camera commercials for a reason -- so you'll watch (and hopefully listen and learn, too).

But television commercials, billboards, and press releases are unidirectional -- the audience sits back and passively receives information. Through social software, brand ambassadors have the potential to promote messages through what I term "indirect, intimate influence" or I3. Brand ambassadors ideally listen and learn from ongoing conversations, and then engage in them, creating bidirectionality as outlined in books like The Cluetrain Manifesto. Ideally, they also talk about more than just their brands on social networks -- a good ambassador will also talk about other aspects of his or her life, to the point that followers eventually begin to see the brand ambassador as something of a trusted friend.

As the influence of traditional media sources like television networks and newspapers declines, I predict that brand ambassadors will become a critical part of government public relations and outreach. In an environment of rapidly changing global issues, an increasingly fractionated media sector, and people more and more defined by unique combinations of niche interests, the government sorely needs enhanced public relations that involve bi-directional multimedia engagement with specific niches of public interest.

Every citizen now has the potential to be a collector, an analyst, a reporter, and a publisher -- and so does every government employee. Engaging, trusted personalities employed as brand ambassadors will complement -- not replace -- traditional public affairs and government outreach. Depending on their agency or office's mission and goals, individuals can follow customized strategies to engage specific niches of the public at events, in interviews, and through constant, pervasive use of new and emerging media tools. In an ongoing bi-directional conversation, brand ambassadors employing I3 would work not only on behalf of the government among the people, but also on behalf of the people within the government.

Government social ambassadors should be fully accessible, transparent, authentic, and collaborative leaders that inspire people to cooperate for the sake of common concerns. As part of their missions, government brand ambassadors should conduct community-based research to understand the "marketplace." What do the elderly living in the Southwest think about health care? What do kids from different household incomes think about their public schools? What does the man-on-the-street in Greece think of U.S. foreign policy? My guess is that most people don't know who the government authority is on elderly health care, impoverished schools, or foreign policy towards Greece. And while many interests are represented in Washington DC, the interests of the average person are sometimes misunderstood or overlooked.

The strategy of lethal generosity can be incredibly powerful when engaging micro-niches. Lethal generosity holds that the most engaged and sharing person in a community will eventually become the most trusted. By leading overt discussions online and in person, combined with the ambient intimacy brought about through I3, government brand ambassadors will gain a greater sense of public sentiment, which in turn will allow lawmakers to formulate better informed public policy.

While governments certainly face challenges in using social tools, the pros of using these tools far outweigh the cons. Social technologies can make networking and engagement with the public simple and powerful, make research faster, identify influencers in useful micro-niches, provide mechanisms for combating negative publicity, and measure public sentiment to help inform public policy.

These tools can also be used to advertise job vacancies or agency needs as well as provide live broadcast coverage of niche events. And there are increasingly quantitative measurements of social software return-on-investment. Finally, they may even save money. Phone calls, focus groups, and airline tickets can be expensive; social software can provide a cheaper alternative in some situations. Governments everywhere will benefit greatly by adopting progressive new approaches to social software and the indirect, intimate influence it propagates.

Dr. Mark Drapeau is a biological scientist and government consultant. He has a B.S. and Ph.D. in animal behavior, conducted postdoctoral research on complex genomic and neural systems, and has published writing in Science, Nature, Genome Research, American Scientist, the New York Times, the Washington Times, and other venues. He is also a contributing writer to Mashable.com on government and social technology. These views are his own and do not represent the official views of the National Defense University, the U.S. Department of Defense, or any other part of the U.S. Government.

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Once again, it's time to look back on the year that was, and consider the new media highlights. Overall, it's been a topsy-turvy year, with a deep recession and historic election giving us reason to despair and hope. The economic turmoil pushed people to read online news at historic levels this past fall, and econ blogs became required reading for those who wanted to gain insight into the complex problems of the financial world.

In politics, the drawn-out Democratic primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gave political junkies more reason to stay tuned to news sites and political blogs, including the rise of poll-watching blogs and fact-check sites. And when Election Day came, Americans were glued not just to their TV sets, but also their computer monitors and mobile phones, for updates.

When it comes to mobile media usage, the smartphone continued to make inroads as Apple released a new generation of the iPhone and competitors sprung up all over. In many urban settings, people stuck in line or taking a work break increasingly turned to their smartphones to fill the time, texting, surfing the Net and playing games like never before. The vision of computing everywhere is closer than ever to coming to fruition -- which means that more than ever, we're seeking breaks from technology.

Without further ado here's the list of the top MediaShifting stories for 2008, listed in order of influence, and voted on by MediaShift readers in the Reader Poll and on Twitter.

1. Obama uses the Net in victory.
Barack Obama ran a presidential campaign that will be studied for generations to come. He used the Internet to raise more individual donations to a campaign than ever before. And while it's difficult to say that all his Facebook and MySpace friends got him enough votes to become president, the Obama campaign's social media push definitely helped get younger voters involved. Obama's victory was largely fueled by his online fundraising and organizing, with innovative efforts like the custom social network MyBarackObama.com and reminder text messages sent out to supporters. Now the question is whether Obama will govern in the bottom-up method he touted in his campaign.

2. Print newspapers crater, push readers online.
American newspapers are in a perfect storm: readers are going online; advertising is moving online; advertising has taken a hit in the recession; the industry hasn't made innovation a priority. That storm has caused various newspaper publishers to pull back from print delivery, with the Christian Science Monitor going from daily print delivery to weekly, and the Detroit metro papers going to three-day-a-week home delivery. Even though online revenues are not currently making up the difference in lost print ad revenues, newspapers are now looking at every experimental alternative to make more money online. If innovation takes hold, the newspaper crisis could lead to an online renaissance for journalism.

3. Twitter becomes important news source.
In 2007, Twitter gained notice beyond being a casual micro-blogging tool during the bridge collapse in Minneapolis and the Southern California wildfires. In 2008, Twitter became a "first-responder" platform to hear about an earthquake in China and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. While it's difficult to report a story on Twitter, it's easy to get a quick text note out to the "Twittersphere," which then could get picked up by journalists, who are now using the platform even more.

4. Recession speeds ad moves online.
So just how has the recession brought about a media shift? In advertising, traditional media has suffered mightily from the downturn, while many online ad types -- including paid search, dominated by Google -- have been spared so far. Zenith Optimedia, for instance, predicted that online advertising worldwide would be up 18% next year, even as overall U.S. advertising is predicted to drop 6.2%. Still, Internet startups trying to depend on advertising alone are having a tough time getting funding.

5. Josh Marshall wins Polk Award; could be eligible for Pulitzer.
Bloggers again made inroads into traditional journalism territory, with Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall winning an investigative Polk Award for his site's series on the firings of the U.S. attorneys. Plus, the Pulitzer board said that its prizes for next year will include entries from online-only publications, meaning that some blogs and news sites could be eligible (if they can prove they fit the criteria).

6. iPhone 3G drives smartphone adoption, mobile web.
When the next-generation iPhone was released last summer, the lines started forming outside Apple stores and competing phones like the T-Mobile G1 and BlackBerry Storm proliferated. Not only has the iPhone been a success, but its App Store has created a lively platform for developers. All that means that people are using the mobile web like never before, using GPS-enabled maps to find their way around town, and listening to Net radio services such as Pandora.

7. Yahoo staves off Microsoft takeover.
The major business drama of the year was the soap opera around Yahoo. Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid, which was eventually shot down by Yahoo and its co-founder/CEO Jerry Yang. Yahoo made a search advertising deal with Google, that was about to be nixed by federal regulators until Google pulled out of it. Yahoo activist investor Carl Icahn and others tried to push the company into Microsoft's arms, but Icahn was given a board seat and a deal never happened. The fallout so far is Yahoo's stock has swooned and Yang is out as CEO.

8. TV audience continues to fragment.
Watching a TV show during its scheduled time is now as old-fashioned as using pen on paper. Now, you can use a DVR to time-shift a program, or a Slingbox to place-shift a show and watch it on the Internet. You can buy TV shows on iTunes or watch them free on Hulu by watching a few ads. While TV is far from dead, all the other media options -- from videogames to social networks -- makes it hard for one-way entertaiment to stand out. Except when it's on a big honking plasma flat screen TV.

9. Fact-check sites become indispensable during election.
As the political campaigns turned ugly, and the rhetoric flew, voters were stumped on whether all those political ads were really true or not. Most journalists would report in the "he said/she said" style without saying an ad was blatantly false or not. That left an opening for sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact to jump in and offer non-partisan fact-checking on political speech. The sites grew in popularity and were quoted innumerable times during the campaign.

10. Non-profits, experimentation abound in journalism business models.
So if newspaper journalism is threatened, is there another way Americans can support for great journalism? In 2008, we saw a lot of new approaches. Sites such as VoiceofSanDiego and MinnPost tried the non-profit donation model, while Spot.us launched to support freelance journalists with crowdfunding, or micro-donations. Plus, ProPublica was started with a hefty donation from billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler, marking a start to a possible patronage model for journalism.

Honorable Mentions:

> YouTube tries various business models to bring in money
> The RIAA finally stops suing music sharers online

> NBC makes its Olympics coverage a multi-platform experiment

> Saudi blogger Ahmed al-Omran freed from jail

What do you think? What big stories did we miss on the list? What would you add or subtract? Let us know in the comments below.

Note: The MediaShift blog will be on holiday until Jan. 5, so don't expect any new posts until then. We appreciate your readership, participation and support for the site in its new incarnation, and hope you'll come back and see what we have in store for the new year! Happy holidays to all!

Additional research for this story by Mike Rosen-Molina.

Photo of 2008 new year celebrant by Jackie via Flickr.

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"It doesn't matter what Internet business you're in," Richard Jalichandra, the CEO of blog search engine Technorati told me recently. "You're either going to have direct or indirect competition with Google and that's just the way it is...[Google is] not the 800 pound gorilla, it's the 80,000 pound gorilla."

But unlike most competitors to Google, Technorati still seems to have a legitimate shot at beating Google in its niche. Though Google's main search engine has been dominant, its Google Blog Search, launched in 2005, has failed to gain similar market share. And though some traffic analysis sites have reported that Google Blog Search is edging out Technorati in terms of search traffic, they also note that more than half of that traffic stems from links on Google News.

Jalichandra claimed that in terms of front page visits, Technorati still outperforms its Google counterpart. According to Compete.com, Technorati received 2.5 million unique visitors in November while Google Blog Search received 1 million.

Perhaps the reason why there is still a struggle is because the blog search industry continues to battle a number of unresolved issues. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google in the late 1990s, they discovered a way of finding the most relevant results for a given search term based largely on the number of inbound links a site has. But when people use blog search engines they're often performing an entirely different kind of search, one in which relevancy only plays a small part; sometimes they are searching for the most recent content as well.

"One of the things that we've learned is that 99% of all blog searches aim for something less than six months old," Jalichandra said. "About 92% are looking for something less than a month old and over 70% are looking for something a week old."

As a heavy blog search engine user myself, it's not uncommon for me to conduct a search for content that's been published within the last day, or in some cases -- specifically when there's some kind of breaking news or event being live-blogged -- within the last five minutes. But when a search engine begins ignoring relevancy for speed, that perennial party-pooper spam rears its ugly head. Because of the relative ease of setting up a blog, spammers are able to create thousands in a single weekend and program them to scrape and steal content from millions of sites. Blog search engines are then bombarded with ping queries that inevitably result in spam-filled search results.

But perhaps trumping all issues is the blog search engine's still-ongoing quest for monetization. People use blog search engines much differently than they use regular ones; rarely will you find someone using Technorati to search for an electrician or where to rent an apartment. It's because of this fact that keyword search advertising -- an enormous moneymaker for Google's main engine -- has been unsuccessful on Technorati.

"Blog search is very different," Jalichandra said. "Blog search users are wanting to find content; they're not necessarily looking for a plumber...With blog search people are really interested in looking for conversations or participating in conversations and it's a very different reason for searching."

The realization that keyword advertising wouldn't be a very effective moneymaking tool forced Technorati into what Dorion Carroll, the company's VP of engineering, called an "identity crisis." The website has had more than a half-dozen face-lifts since it first launched in November 2002, some of which radically redefined what kind of content would be delivered on its front page.

And with those changes came some accusations from tech bloggers over the years that Technorati had taken its eye off its core feature: search. For a long period of time the search bar, what some would consider its most important tool, migrated to the right of the page, a move that some cynics would read as Technorati downgrading the search into a secondary function. The company became an aggregator of content, trying to display the most popular video, news articles and posts that were being discussed in the blogosphere. Later the company developed a Techmeme-like algorithm that highlighted important blog posts and articles that were gaining steam on the Net.

"In early 2007 or late 2006 we shifted a lot of our focus -- and really in hindsight we did it mistakenly -- to people who maybe didn't even neccessarily know what blogs were or care," Carroll said. "And that's really where a lot of search-oriented features got downplayed. And again it was probably a mistake, when really our service is to be a resource for bloggers and people who read blogs and the marketers who want to reach or influence those bloggers for their readers. What we do stand for is being the center of the blogosphere."

But perhaps Technorati's biggest problem came about a year ago when there were constant outages and bloggers were reporting not being able to access the site for hours at a time. And even when the site would load it would sometimes take over a minute to complete a search or return no results for a popular term. The Technorati Monster is the search engine's downtime mascot, similar to Twitter's Fail Whale. Eventually, the monster had escaped so many times that it seemed that its cage door was permanently left open.

"Spam has historically been a very big problem," Carroll told me. "Over the summer we had the monster outages directly as a result of a significant increase both in terms of spam trying to get into the system, and then probably moreso -- and where the monsters came from -- the spammers actually querying our search engine."

Because spam blogs (known as "splogs") benefit in blog search results by offering up constantly updated content, they continually scrape from other websites and then send thousands upon thousands of pings to search engine crawlers. Those pings inundated Technorati's servers and debilitated their capacity for crawling legitimate blogs. Carroll said that at one point they were having to deal with five times the normal traffic, all because of spammers, a trend that brought the site to its knees.

Nicholas Carr, a tech writer and author of the widely circulated Atlantic essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," recently addressed Technorati's reliability problem on his blog. In a post titled "The Centripetal Web," he noted that a number of small-staffed Web 2.0 companies -- Technorati and the RSS reader Bloglines, for instance -- get overtaken by Google's me-too products precisely because it has the infrastructure, large staff and massive server farms needed to handle millions of users. So even if the Google product isn't necessarily better, users eventually migrate to it out of frustration with its more unreliable competitors.

"[Technorati] had good coverage, and it had some good blog-specific features," Carr told me. "So whether you were doing an ego search or searching for anything, it was the only game in town. Google came out with its blog search and I tried it out, but for awhile I stuck with Technorati just because Google's didn't seem quite as comprehensive; it didn't have quite as many search tools.

"But what I found was that over time -- I think about a year ago -- I realized I was using Google Blog Search and had pretty much moved away from Technorati. And I think it was really a matter of two things. One is that Google Blog Search didn't have the kind of technical problems that plagued Technorati. As is the case with most Google search engines, it was really fast. And it also began to be equally comprehensive, and also was very very fast at picking up new postings on blogs."

Also, Carr found it much more convenient to be able to easily click back and forth between multiple search engines through Google. For instance, you can enter a term on Google's main engine and then quickly try that same term in its image, news, blog, and ("If I'm feeling really ambitious") its scholar engine.

"That advantage, which very much comes from Google's size, I think shows you how difficult it is for a small and specialized player -- certainly in the search world but also in other Internet tools and functions as well -- how hard it is for them to compete against the big guy," he said.

That's not to say that Google hasn't had its own problems as well. It's not uncommon for its search results to be heavily cluttered with splogs, sometimes requiring one to flip through several pages of results just to find a handful of legitimate and relevant blog posts.

But recently the search engine faced even more criticism because of a new method it implemented in indexing blog posts; rather than utilizing RSS feeds and just indexing the posts themselves, it began indexing entire pages, including the content on the sidebars. This caused an immediate backlash because it drastically increased the number of irrelevant results that showed up in searches.

"So this means that, for instance, every time JD Lasica adds a new post to his blog at Social Media, which includes Wordyard in its blogroll, I get a new listing in the Google Blog Search for Wordyard, even though the post has nothing to do with Wordyard," wrote Wordyard blogger Scott Rosenberg recently. "This completely messes up the utility of Google's search for me -- and, from what I see posted by other serious bloggers, many other users."

I asked Jeremy Hylton, software engineer at Google, about this very problem. I asked him what Google's reasoning behind the change was and how long ago it had been implemented. He said that Google rolled out the changes in October.

"There are lots of interesting blogs that only provide a short summary of their posts in the feed," Hylton said. "We're doing a better job of ranking results because we see a richer link structure and more text. The changes make blog search work much more like web search internally, which will be the foundation for lots of improvements in 2009."

When I mentioned the complaints that this move had increased the number of irrelevant results, he recognized the problem but at the same time downplayed its significance, saying that it only affected a small number of blogs.

"We saw a few queries that suffered from this problem when we were evaluating the change, but underestimated the number of power users who were affected," Hylton said. "If you have a very popular blog, then these links are very common. We are working on several ways to fix this problem. We made a change for [link:] queries last week that greatly reduced the number of blogroll results, but didn't eliminate all of them. The basic idea is to look for text and markup that is common to all the posts of a blog...We don't get it right for every page, but we're continuing to improve the algorithm."

I asked him about Google Blog Search metrics and how many users were flowing in through the blog search engine's main page, as opposed to Google News or the main engine, but he cited policy that he couldn't comment on such matters. But even if most of its blog search queries are flowing in from Google News, the site still poses a significant threat to Technorati's market share.

Despite Technorati's past usability problems, the search engine has rolled out a number of changes recently, including putting up much more stringent defenses against spam blogs, thereby decreasing the server burden dramatically. And by changing the way Technorati utilizes blog tags, Carroll argued that the quality of search has improved as well. He said that outages are almost nonexistent these days and that search results are delivered almost three times faster (my unscientific analysis concludes there is some truth to this).

Perhaps even more importantly, the Technorati team -- which after all these years numbers fewer than 50 people -- thinks that it has figured out a way to successfully monetize the site: through a blog advertising network.

"About a year ago, with Richard [Jalichandra] coming on board [as CEO], we realized we had a tremendous amount of data that's not only valuable to bloggers and their readers, but also has helped marketers achieve a lot of their goals," Carroll said. "And over the last year we've been trying to refine the underpinnings of our search and crawling feature to make it more efficient and hopefully bring higher quality of results. But at the same time we're seeing how we can focus on that same data stream toward ad targeting.

As for competing head-on with Google, tiny Technorati would prefer not to go there.

"If you think about it, Google started as a search engine, and Google didn't have a multi-billion dollar market share because of their search engine; they have that because of AdSense and AdWords, because they have the ability to take the data they have from the entire web and turn it into targeting criteria," Carroll said. "We're not trying to compete head to head with Google, but in a similar way in the blogosphere we can take the tremendous amount of data that we have and produce meaningful features for bloggers, for their readers, to allow them to search and discover, but also to help marketers identify the right places to market, not just on Technorati.com, but across the entire blogosphere."

In this sense, he said, the site's "identity crisis" has finally come to a close and its employees feel they have a much clearer vision of how to move forward. As for my own search habits, I wandered away from Technorati over a year ago in favor of Google Blog Search. But lately I find myself more and more often returning to my original blog search engine of choice as its results continue to improve. It's too early to tell whether Technorati will be able to deliver a knock-out punch in the blog search wars, or whether its blog ad network can compete with entrenched players in that field, but the company's perseverance should be studied by other start-ups that must evolve to survive in the wake of Google's massive shadow.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

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Blogs have become part of the editorial furniture of most news sites. In the U.S., 95% of the top 100 newspapers feature reporter blogs. So it seems appropriate to include blogging in the curriculum of journalism schools. For the past couple of years, my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have written blogs as part of their course work.

For several weeks starting in January, my graduate students will be required to maintain a blog with twice-per-week entries. The aim of this assignment is to introduce students to the notion of blogging as a form of journalism. Just because this is a blog, it doesn't mean the students can write about anything.

The blog has to have a specific focus. Ideally, it should cover an area where the student has some personal expertise that they can bring to bear. This is perhaps one of the most important decisions as the best blogs are those where the author brings their own personal experience and expertise to the table.

This is more than just choosing a topic like politics or arts. Students need to focus on a specific aspect within these overarching topics. In the past, students have chosen to write about marketing, consumer culture and money in sports. These blogs worked as the students chose topics they were passionate about and then approached it from a particular angle, taking a strand from events in the news and unraveling it to provide a fresh perspective.

The challenge becomes explaining that the blog is not a platform for students to pontificate about what they think about a particular issue. Rather, it is to provide a critical perspective on issues in the news within a student's specific area of expertise. In some ways, the blog is similar to op-ed writing. The value of blogging in a journalism course is as a tool for reflection and critical thinking about events in the headlines.

The blog has emerged as a powerful platform for journalists to provide context, analysis and interpretation, often including behind-the-scenes information that does not fit into the structure of a traditional news story. It has also provided journalists with a way to communicate with readers in a more conversational and informal tone, rather than in an abstract voice of authority.

Even though blogging has been around for more than a decade, there is still an unease about blogging among some professional journalists, often encapsulated in the phrase, "blogging isn't journalism." This is a tired argument that mistakes form for content.

Blogs, just like magazines, radio or television, can contain journalism, but they may not. The content, rather than the platform, defines whether or not it is a work of journalism.

However, the form does affect the content. The technology and history of blogging has lent the medium some generic qualities. Blogs are expected to be written in a personal and conversational tone, often in short posts, with links to related sites and reader comments.

In some cases, blogging can be seen as a new form of real-time reporting that does not have the filtering or editing associated with established journalistic practices.

This can be somewhat of a challenge to the students when they first hear of the blogging assignment. During the fall semester, their stories routinely went through various editing stages and rewrites. Come January, they will be publishing live to their blogs, without having passed the copy by one of their professors first.

The notion of blogs as immediate, uncensored and unmediated can appear at odds with established journalistic norms and practices. But it provides a valuable learning tool as it makes the students directly responsible for what they write.

The students are not only graded on the quality of the content and writing, but also on the links they provide. The more specific a link, the more value it has to a reader. This is intended to encourage students to look online for new and interesting material from other sources. In other words, it recognizes that a student blog is part of a web of information, part of a network of journalism.

Some students have found that having written a blog as part of a journalism course can make a difference when it comes to applying for internships. One student who kept a blog about The New Yorker went on to intern at CBC Vancouver. He worked on a summer series on climate change and ran the show's blog, which unfortunately is no longer online.

Blogs and new media have undoubtedly changed the landscape of journalism. In terms of its form, journalism as a whole has become more conversational, and iterative, as readers seek to contribute to the story, and journalists open more of their processes to public view. Blogging has played a role in this process and warrants a place on the curriculum at journalism schools.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

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The MediaShift Innovation Spotlight looks in-depth at one great mash-up, database, mapping project or multimedia story that combines technology and journalism in useful ways. These projects can be at major newspaper or broadcast sites, or independent news sites or blogs.

The Big Picture is a large-format photo-blog operated by the Boston Globe. Each entry focuses on one topic and presents around 30 images related to that topic: Recent posts have covered the 2008 Greek riots, the Hajj and Eid al-Adha, and scenes from Guantanamo Bay. The photos are collected from wire services and presented with captions at 990 pixels wide. Instead of the slide show or click-through format favored by many news sites, the images are placed vertically down the screen.

Newspapers and other media outlets use wire photos to add art to text stories. But have you noticed how small these photos usually are? Even online, where the spatial limitations of a print product don't apply, old media outlets persist in shrinking pictures.

As newspapers struggle to figure out how to tell their stories online, many make the mistake of transfering print rules to the web. This results in the small photos and low-quality videos that frustrate so many users.

The Big Picture has created a way to display powerful images in a user-friendly manner.

Alan Taylor, a web developer at the Boston Globe, created The Big Picture after noticing that the impact of very powerful wire photographs was being lost because of their tiny display size. He wanted a way to display the photos in as large a size as possible to allow them to speak for themselves.

"You get big beautiful images off the wire that were put at the top of an article in a very small frame," Taylor told me, during a phone interview, "I thought it could be better. We've got these images and we're a news and storytelling organization. Let's do it."

The site is set up on Movable Type, a blogging software used site-wide by Boston.com.
Taylor takes photos from the newswire access sites, using a few Greasemonkey scripts in Firefox to handle some formatting issues.

Once he has all the data stored in a folder, he decides on the selection and order of photos.

He uses scripts in Photoshop to resize to 990 pixels wide, grab text files with captions and grab HTML code.

Taylor said that he has automated the process as much as possible, considering that the selection and ordering has to be done by a human.

As to the formatting of these "photo essays," he wanted people to be able to view a photo for as long as they wanted (rather than viewing each photo for a limited time as in a slide-show) and not have to click and wait for a page to load to see the next photo (as in a click-through gallery).

"These images have a tremendous amount of impact and it's very frustrating to see them in a tiny little slide show," he said. "I have a strong dislike for slide shows where you have to click next, next, next to drive up page views."

Although newsroom staff thought the idea was worthwhile, Taylor met with some friction because he was not proven in the editorial realm. (On a day-to-day basis, Taylor works on the code that resides within article pages and other parts of the website.) But after he drew up some mock-ups with example entries, he got the buy-in. The Big Picture launched last June, six months after Taylor first started working on it.

The enthusiastic public response proved to be the biggest problem for The Big Picture as Movable Type's comment system was not designed to handle multiple thousands of comments on a single post. Since the project launched, it has received almost 40,000 comments.

An entry on Hurricane Ike in Texas got so many visitors that it caused the site's servers to slow down. Although the same images were available elsewhere in the media, the large size of the photos on The Big Picture meant that only there was it possible to truly see the level of devastation. The entry got well over a million page views a day for a week.

What did you learn from creating The Big Picture?

Alan Taylor: After I launched the blog, I started hearing from a lot of people who click on the small photos in online slide shows and galleries, always trying to make the images bigger.

Do you have any plans to expand The Big Picture?

Taylor: I'm still working out some design features. When you go so wide, you get problems with left-to-right navigation and have to put them at top and bottom. There has been some talk about expanding the idea into a weekly feature, maybe with sports.

I noticed there isn't much advertising on the site; how is your project being monetized?

The advertising department is trying to figure out how to generate revenue from the site.
The audience for The Big Picture is much different from the normal Boston.com audience: Instead of being mostly local, the audience is international. Because the ads on Boston.com are regional, they need to figure out how to leverage the international audience.

The MediaShift Innovation Spotlight will run every other week. Please let me know of any innovative projects you are working on or have seen lately. It doesn't have to be from a major newspaper; it just has to be an innovative blend of journalism and technology. Please e-mail me at mtaylor[at]megantaylor[dot]org to submit a Spotlight recommendation.

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From time to time, I'll give an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and take action. I've already covered blogging, citizen journalism, political polling sites and other topics. This week I'll look at alternative business models for newspapers.

It's easy to see the problems plaguing the business of daily newspapers in America. The Tribune Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Christian Science Monitor said it would publish weekly in print instead of daily. Detroit newspapers announced they would be cutting home delivery to three days per week. Layoffs are rampant and newspaper company stocks are down in the dumps.

What's difficult is finding solutions to these business problems. With this in mind, MediaShift presents this guide to alternative business models for newspapers . The models we profile range from those that newspapers have been experimenting with for a while, to those that are brand new, or recently borrowed from other types of media. Our goal is to help spread the word about some of the best ideas and experiments in the industry.

Most likely, there won't be a "silver bullet," an idea that will catch on as the savior for the newspaper business. Instead, a successful online newspaper will need a mix of many different revenue streams to survive in the digital age.

Blog Networks

Blog networks aggregate blogs written by staffers, freelancers and readers. These blogs generate more page views that can be monetized with targeted ads, especially if the blogs are focused on specific topics like sports, health or politics. The Washington Post even started its own custom blog network called Blogroll, which offered to help run ad sales for outside blogs and promote them on the washingtonpost.com site. But Washington Post stopped adding blogs to its program due to lack of revenue.

Examples: Washington Post's Blogroll; Forbes' Business & Finance Blog Network

Prognosis: Having in-house blogs seems to be a better strategy so far than aggregating or selling ads on outside blogs. LATimes.com jumped up to the No. 2 newspaper site in terms of traffic last month, and its blogs helped it drive more traffic, leading, perhaps to more ad inventory.

Classified Networks

One of the big reasons newspapers are hurting is that their classified ad business has been usurped by online upstarts such as Craigslist, which offers mainly free ads. Newspapers have tried to offer extras online, including print/online specials for people buying classifieds. They have also invested in online sites such as CareerBuilder.com (owned by Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy and Microsoft) or partnered with classified providers such as Oodle or Yahoo HotJobs.

Examples: SFGate's Kaango-powered classifieds; NY Post's Oodle-powered Market Place

Prognosis: It's hard to imagine newspapers catching up to Craigslist and other free options online just by partnering with outside firms. They will need to super-charge listings and add extras galore -- some they can charge for -- in order to entice people back.

Crowdfunding

This more experimental business model has the audience making direct payments to support a journalist in writing a particular story or covering a beat. Many bloggers have supported themselves with donations from their audience, from Chris Allbritton having his readers send him to Iraq to Ana Marie Cox getting reader donations to keep her on the 2008 campaign trail. Now there's a startup called Spot.us that is raising money to pay for specific story pitches and then offering them up to newspapers and other media outlets. Plus, Representative Journalism or RepJ aims to have a community fund the salary of a full-time journalist to cover a specific beat. (I wrote more about this on MediaShift last month.)

Examples: Spot.us' Fact-Checking Political Ads; LocallyGrown's Representative Journalism entries

Prognosis: Too early to say what will happen. Crowdfunding could help freelance reporters in specific areas, but it might not translate well to a newspaper culture.

Customized Papers

Print is far from dead. Many newspapers can use technology to offer up customized print pages -- with ads -- for readers, or hyper-local editions of their papers. A Brazilian paper recently let readers design their own front page, which was then custom printed with the paper and delivered to them -- sponsored by Nissan. The new Printcasting project at the Bakersfield Californian lets publishers create their own custom publications with ads that subscribers can then print out at home or read as PDFs.

Examples: Triblocal uses Kodak's Microzone Publishing Solution; NewspaperDirect's Print-on-Demand (more examples in this great Seybold article)

Prognosis: Many people still prefer to read news in print, so these stopgap measures could help the transition to new digital platforms. Home printing could work, but color ink costs can be high.

Hyper-Local Ads

Many newspapers have tried to set up special hyper-local editions online, targeting smaller neighborhoods and letting citizens post stories, photos and videos of life there. The business case was that user-generated content was cheaper to produce, and that small businesses would flock to reach those people. But so far, the most successful hyper-local efforts have been reverse-published print editions at Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, Calif., and Your Hub in Denver, where the best online content is printed in special editions with print ads. Washingtonpost.com's LoudonExtra was touted as another innovator, but ended up falling short because staffers didn't interact with the community enough, according to media analysts who talked to the Wall Street Journal.

Examples: Augusta Chronicle's Spotted; Bluffton Today

Prognosis: This has been a hit-or-miss proposition for newspapers. The most successful efforts have put staffers out into neighborhoods and emphasized community involvement.

Local Portal

Rather than just shoveling news articles from the paper online, many newspapers have struck gold by creating local portals as guides to their locales, including entertainment listings, restaurant reviews and directories of local businesses. They can start by listing everything in the town for free online, and then enticing businesses to buy premium listings, graphical ads and other add-ons. These portals can live off of the newspaper site or within it. One successful local portal is Vegas.com, which has helped financially support the advertising-free print newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun. The Sun recently hired top new media guns Rob Curley and Chris Jennewein.

Examples: Santa Cruz Sentinel's Santa Cruz Live; Knoxville News-Sentinel's Knoxville.com

Prognosis: The more comprehensive these online portals are, the better. In order to boost traffic (and ad rates), these portals need to become the trusted source of listings in a community -- outstripping Yellow Pages and alternative weeklies.

Multimedia Ads

Many newspaper sites have been highlighting audio podcasts and video reports from staffers. It's a great way to use the power of the Internet, and also a way to bring in new types of online advertising. Despite the deep recession, eMarketer still predicts that online video-ad spend will increase in the U.S. by 45% to hit $850 million in 2009. Many newspaper publishers would like to capture some of that income, but they need to make sure the video ads aren't too intrusive and that video content is worthwhile for viewers. Currently, many video reports on NYTimes.com are preceded by 15-second video spots, half as long as ads you'd see on TV.

Examples: USAToday.com's video; OrlandoSentinel.com's video

Prognosis: Still dominated by a mix of generic wire service and poor quality videos by local reporters at most papers. Big papers like NYTimes.com, Washingtonpost.com and WSJ.com have led the way in monetizing and producing high quality original video reports.

Niche Sites

In print, newspapers have tried to cater to specific readers by adding specialty sections like technology, food, wine and religion. But online, newspapers can get down into much more specific niches -- and they are not limited by print holes in how many they can run. That has led to a proliferation of sites for moms, who provide the content with their own blogs and forums, and are filled with ads for diapers, kids' clothing and retail outlets. The Wall Street Journal, however, pointed out that sites like BabyCenter are now among newspapers' competitors online.

Examples: Gannett's MomsLikeMe; The Morning Call's Lehigh Valley Bridal

Prognosis: Niche sites can bring a new audience to newspapers online, reaching out to people who normally wouldn't buy a print paper. As long as they can stay fresh, involve the community, and stay focused on their niches, these sites can help bring in new advertisers for newspapers as well.

Non-Profit

There is a long tradition of newspapers being run as non-profit organizations, with the most prominent being the St. Petersburg Times run by Poynter. But online, there has been an even greater push to support original local journalism with a combination of foundation grants, reader donations and online sponsorships. This model has been used by NPR and PBS for decades, and is now being tried by startup sites such as MinnPost and VoiceofSanDiego, which were profiled recently by the New York Times. Plus, the patronage model has helped start the investigative journalism site, ProPublica, staffed by many former newspaper editors and reporters.

Examples: St. Louis Beacon; Chi-Town Daily News

Prognosis: While it's difficult to imagine all journalists being supported by billionaire philanthropists, many of these startups have been able to survive and thrive thanks to foundation funding and donations. The Knight Foundation recently pumped nearly $400,000 into four of these startups.

Full Disclosure: The Knight Foundation is also a funder of MediaShift.

Paid Content

Charging for content has perhaps been the most challenging monetization strategy for online newspapers . While some newspapers initially charged for access to all of their news articles online, most of those pay walls have been dropped. The New York Times started a TimesSelect product to charge for Op-Ed columnists and other features, while the Los Angeles Times tried to charge for its CalendarLive site. Both publications gave up on those paid content initiatives. Still, most newspaper sites continue to charge for archives and other premium content in an attempt to diversify their revenue streams online.

Examples: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Packer Insider; much of Wall Street Journal Online

Prognosis: People want everything for free online, but in some cases, they will pay for very specialized information that they can't get anywhere else. When Rupert Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal, he had hoped to bring down the pay wall, only to realize just how profitable it was. Some pay walls will work.

*****

This list is only the beginning. Let us know about other business models we missed, or if there are other examples of publications that are using these models in unique ways. We will update this story with your submissions, and give you credit and a link. Just let us know through the comments below, or by using the Contact Us form on the site.

Additional research for this story by associate editor Mike-Rosen Molina.

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