Reading The Wall Street Journal articles for free through Google News will get harder if the paper decides to embrace Google's new changes to its "First Click Free" policy.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)As the journalism industry gathers once again to wring its hands about the future, Google has thrown it a bone with new limitations on its "First Click Free" policy for news stories shown on Google News.
Companies that operate subscription-based Web sites--such as The Wall Street Journal--don't want to expose the full text of their articles to Google. But despite what WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch says, most of them also want their articles and sites discoverable through Google and Google News. As a compromise, Google has allowed those publishers to participate in what it calls a "First Click Free" program, where articles accessed through Google News links can be seen in their entirety, but if the user attempts to click anywhere else on that story page, they are directed to a sign-up page.
The problem is that Web users quickly figured out that you can access almost any Wall Street Journal article for free simply by cutting and pasting the headline into Google News, which generates a "free" link that isn't available if a publisher such as CNET links to a Wall Street Journal article. "While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content," wrote John Mueller, Webmaster trends analyst for Google, in a blog post.
As a result, Google is now putting limits on the First Click Free usage. Web publishers can now decide to limit use of the First Click Free rule to five times per person per day through both Google News and regular Google search results. It's not clear whether readers could get around this issue by clearing cookies from their browser or enabling private browsing, but a Google representative said it will be up to Web publishers to decide how they want to track visitors through some combination of cookies or IP addresses.
Google is one of many companies and organizations participating in a day-long discussion about the future of journalism at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. The topic has pitted Google against the publishing industry all year, with Google insisting it's a friend of journalism by sending traffic toward media companies, and media companies accusing Google of siphoning their potential traffic by showing headlines and snippets on Google News.
Cooliris has just released a new version of its add-on that lets users run multiple instances of its media browsing wall in different tabs of the same browser. Previously, the only way to get it to run like this was to open it in different browsers. This way you can have one tab open to search YouTube videos, another that's browsing online photos, and a third that's playing a TV show off of Cooliris' Hulu.com interface.
Users are only limited in the number of Cooliris tabs they can have by what their computer is capable of. I ran four or five quite easily, and I can't see users needing more than that.
The company is also making it easier to share exactly what you're looking at on your Cooliris wall with others. It now creates a special Cooliris URL for each piece of media you click on. That link takes whoever you send it to, to the Cooliris media wall in the context of however you found that piece of media--that is, if they have the software installed. If they don't, the link won't take them anywhere, something the company says will change in a future iteration that will show a preview or link to the source in some way.
Right now these sharing URLs are quite long, although I'm told an internal shortening service is in the works. This will make it easier to share on places like Twitter and Facebook. This isn't just for users though, it's also for advertisers. These new links give Cooliris another way to track both incoming, and outgoing links. Up until now the company has been doing this internally. With this new system it's letting third party analytics tools like Google and Quantcast aggregate their own metrics.
Right now this new version only works on Firefox (Windows or Mac) and Internet Explorer but it will be headed to Safari users in the near future. Other small changes include a complete redesign of the scroll bar that lets users navigate around the wall of thumbnails. I've compiled this, and some of the other new features in a quick video embedded below:
A day after the editor of The Wall Street Journal referred to online news aggregators--particularly Google and its Google News product--as "parasites or tech tapeworms," and the chairman of the Associated Press announced an initiative to protect print media content from infringing use online, Google has fired back in a blog.
The gist of Tuesday's blog post, penned by Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray: don't point fingers at us.
"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," he wrote. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index--all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards."
As for the AP, Macgillivray noted that Google already pays the wire service to reprint its articles and photographs. A dispute several years ago led to this agreement.
Of course, Google News is far from the only aggregator out there. Digg, Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post are also big players. But Google is unquestionably at the top.
For the past few years, as many mainstream media outlets (particularly on the print side) began to lose revenue, influence, and readership, some of them had a pretty clear message: blame Google. At the same time, Viacom still has a billion-dollar lawsuit against Google's YouTube over pirated video content. And much of the publishing industry is far from signing on to Google's book digitization initiative.
With struggling newspapers in a panic over whether offering content online for free might not have been such a good idea in the first place, Google--the ultimate source of free content--is an even easier target.
But Google says it's part of the solution, not the problem, and insists that its search and aggregation products only serve to help drive traffic to online news sites.
"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month," Macgillivray said in his post. "These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international--day and night."
The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is one of those exclusive, highbrow affairs with a guest list tighter than your belt after a pie-eating contest. But social network MySpace is leveling out the playing field by partnering with the Wall Street Journal for a competition called "MySpace Journal," in which an aspiring "citizen journalist" will be awarded the chance to attend the summit later this month.
MySpace is now accepting video submissions in which entrants explain their reasons for wanting to attend and be a member of the Davos press corps. One winner, chosen by a panel of industry figureheads that includes pundit and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, will receive an all-expenses paid trip, a coveted press pass, and a blog on MySpace that will also be syndicated to The Wall Street Journal's Web site.
They probably don't attract the same demographic, but MySpace and the Journal have something big in common: Both are owned by the Rupert Murdoch-helmed media conglomerate News Corp.
MySpace might be better known for music promotion than international affairs, but the social network showed off its civic colors quite a bit during last fall's presidential campaign. A similar "citizen journalism" competition was conducted in partnership with NBC, and a series of candidate dialogues were broadcast in conjunction with MTV.
Social-news company Loomia announced Wednesday that it has launched a new application called SeenThis, which connects news sites with social-networking sites so users can learn what their people on their friends' lists have been reading. Loomia's inaugural partners in SeenThis are The Wall Street Journal, NBC Universal, and CNET Networks, parent company of CNET News.com.
Like many other "recommendation engines," Loomia's technology can suggest content items to a reader based on what he or she has already viewed. SeenThis goes a step further by using social-networking sites' APIs--the one that the current content partners are using is Facebook--to gather what people on a reader's friends' list or within his or her regional, company, or school networks have been viewing on a partner site. So, for example, a WSJ.com reader might see that eight people from his Facebook friends list have read the latest doomsday story about the housing crisis, or that members of his alumni network on Facebook have been browsing the travel section.
CNET Networks will be using SeenThis on its business news properties: BNET, TechRepublic, and ZDNet. NBC Universal, meanwhile, will focus on video so that viewers can learn which NBC.com videos their social-networking contacts have been viewing.
Perhaps because of the brouhaha that surrounded Facebook's Beacon advertising program, Loomia has stressed that SeenThis is opt-in only. A Facebook user, for example, has to install the SeenThis application before it starts tracking habits on partner sites.
The release from Loomia on Wednesday hinted that SeenThis will expand to other social networks as time goes on.
Digg's long-awaited images section will go live later tonight. Similar to the way Facebook's sharing tool works, users submitting stories to Digg will have the option to pick and choose from thumbnails that have been crawled from whatever URL was supplied. There's no need to upload anything, or hotlink to an image--it'll simply be made available. To help users sort through it, Digg has also reconfigured Digg's category system, letting users submit all three types of media (news, images, and video) into any category. This aims to get rid of the previous system of users figuring out their own ways to get through Digg's limited categorization methods, by inserting "[PIC]" or "[VIDEO]" into submitted titles.
To help make use of the new visual draw, Digg's also launching a new way to browse through images using a "mosaic" view. It looks a little bit like Johnathan Harris' 10x10 project by organizing upcoming and popular stories in a cloud of thumbnails (which you can see in the screenshot at the bottom of the post). The company is also attempting to curb duplicate submissions using image recognition from Toronto-based Idee Inc, which is already listing Digg on its featured clients page.
One of the more interesting tidbits from the launch of Digg images is the partnership with Photobucket. The photo service is supplying integration with member images, giving users a new submission button that will jump them straight to a tailored Digg images submission page, as well as giving Photobucket users a whole new channel of photos that have been submitted to Digg. If you've been keeping track of any of the Digg buyout rumors, you should know that Digg's recently gotten deep integration with the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal to let WSJ readers submit stories to Digg, while allowing Digg users to read the premium content free of charge. Photobucket also happens to be owned by News Corp. While News Corp. owns two of those pieces (WSJ and Photobucket), why not go for all three?
Related: Digg doesn't have a photo section yet, but these seven sites do.
Digg's image section is like a giant mosaic of images. You can toggle between large thumbnails, or smaller ones with subscriptions and more pronounced buttons.
(Credit: Digg.com)... Read more
Update 4:20 a.m. Wednesday: Information from a Digg representative has been added.
Kevin Rose, founder of social news aggregator Digg, posted a quick blog entry on Tuesday night about his site's new relationship with Rupert Murdoch's latest accessory, The Wall Street Journal.
"The Wall Street Journal online is adding Digg buttons across the entire site, and you'll now have full (free) access to the articles submitted to Digg," Rose wrote. "The Digg buttons have started appearing on WSJ.com articles tonight."
The "full free access" part is key. While speaking to investors in Australia, News Corp. mogul Murdoch said this week that he planned to release the Journal's Web site from its paid-subscription mode. When the New York Times eliminated premium content earlier this fall, the Journal became one of the lone holdouts.
It looks like the Digg deal is some sort of exclusive arrangement. This is not an exclusive deal, according to a Digg representative--though it sure sounds like one: "You'll notice that it is the only button on their site," a quick heads-up e-mail from a Digg PR rep read in regards to Rose's blog post. In other words, the likes of Digg rival Reddit and bookmarking site Delicious aren't represented.
But more than anything, it's also fuel for the fire. Digg has been continually talked up as a potential acquisition target. And in recent weeks a rumor began to float that the site would soon be sold for $300 million to 400 million to a "major media player." Expect this Wall Street Journal arrangement to result in more than a few rumors that Digg is close to a News Corp. buy.
Whether that's actually true, well, we don't know yet.
Rupert Murdoch plans to give away the digital version of the Wall Street Journal, making News Corp. the latest company to give up on paid subscriptions.
"We are studying it and we expect to make that free," Murdoch was quoted by the Associated Press as he spoke to a group of investors in Australia. He said that "instead of having one million (subscribers)," the company will receive readers "in every corner of the earth."
Murdoch is banking that a free model for WSJ.com, which recently announced that it had topped the 1 million-subscriber mark, will send readership skyrocketing and that advertisers will then flock to the site.
According to the AP, the Journal's subscribers generated about $50 million in annual revenue.
Few online services have succeeded at making a go of paid subscriptions but the Journal was widely considered to be at the head of the pack. In September, The New York Times stopped trying to sell subscriptions to premium content .
One of the newest and most popular Facebook apps making the rounds is Graffiti Wall, an application that does exactly what it says: it lets your friends tag your profile. Facebook has had its wall feature for years, allowing users to write personalized messages to one another for everyone to see. With Graffiti Wall, instead of words, you can break out your art skills and go to town on a 600-pixel wide canvas.
Once you've created your masterpiece, it will show up on your friends' Graffiti Wall, assuming they have it installed. If not, others will still be able to view it in your newsfeed.
There are a few quirks: there's no eraser, and there's not a text tool. In fact, many of the things that make simple doodling tools such as Microsoft Paint so great aren't there. There's also not an archive of your drawings, so if you hide a Graffiti Wall post it appears to be gone forever. What is there is a neat idea and has the potential for something that will spice up the Facebook's wall feature, assuming its developers are willing to keep adding new features.
Related: Drawball.
[via Digg]
Facebook's Graffiti Wall app is a veritable Pandora's box for computer art enthusiasts who feel limited by their computer's keyboard.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
The Wall Street Journal has a scoopy story about Facebook's forthcoming announcement on Thursday. The report says Facebook will be opening itself up for other companies to add their wares in the form of branded pages and services made available to Facebook users on different networks.
Previously, Facebook's strategy for adding this content was in the form of specialty groups, which Facebook members had to join in order to access or gain benefit from. According to the WSJ, these services will now be integrated as standalone portions of the service and will be available without leaving the social network, although details in both execution and parties involved aren't mentioned.
A great deal of the article discusses sharing content, which has been an integrated feature of Facebook since October of last year. WSJ hints that Facebook is enhancing that functionality, although it provides no concrete examples.
We'll be covering the announcement here in San Francisco on Thursday, so stay tuned. For more analysis, check out Caroline's post on the News.com blog.
