WebProNews

Google Improves Google News on More Mobile Devices

Google has announced a new Google News for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. The company already offers one for other devices like Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and S60, although they say more improvements to those versions will be coming soon, as well. Today's new version includes a new Google News homepage, which shows more stories, sources, and images, but keeps the same basic look and feel.

80% of Consumers Would Not Pay For Content

As you've more than likely heard by now, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in an interview last week talked about the possibility of blocking search engines from indexing News Corp. publications' content. While this may or may not actually happen, it is one of the latest (and biggest) examples of a publisher taking the position of search engines hurting them rather than helping them.

Some Bing Users Seeing Latest Posts on Publisher Searches

Bing appears to be either testing or rolling out a new feature for news sites in its search results. The feature brings up a few of the most recent posts from a news source, when that source itself is the query. I say this is either a test or a gradual roll out, because it is not happening in my own searches. TechCrunch has a piece about the feature (and a screenshot), which shows it, so evidently some people have it.

Consumers State They're Willing To Pay A Little For Online News

It seems like every month another news organization toys with the idea of charging for their content. But, we always rejoin, you’ll ultimately sacrifice your audience if you charge for news content. However, the Boston Consulting Group says that may not always be the case—in fact, even Americans are willing to pay for online news.

The Traffic News Corp. Would Lose Without Google

As you may know, Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp., is saying he may block search engines from accessing the organization's content. He expressed this notion in a recent interview. If Murdoch were to act upon this, it would mean theoretically that you would no longer be able to find Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc. content on Google. Of course that would be in a world where scraped content isn't frequently crawled by search engines.

6 Ways Twitter Lists Are Changing the Game

We knew Twitter lists were going to be big for Twitter. We knew they were going to greatly increase the usefulness of the service, and for many, even the enjoyment. What we didn't know, however, was that right out of the box, we would see so many different uses for them, providing a window to the potential that they really do hold not only for Twitter itself, but for any business or individual who uses it. Let's look at a few of those ways that Twitter lists are being used.  

More Stories Get a Shot at the Digg Home Page

Digg has launched a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends. The feature will promote "certain highly active stories" as they are trending, not unlike Twitter's trending topics. The feature could give stories a better chance of getting more exposure when they otherwise wouldn't necessarily made it to the front page. Digg's Kurt Wilms explains:

Google Further Customizes the News Experience

Google has launched a new Google News feature called the Custom Sections Directory. This is a page where users can go to find and create customized sections covering narrower topics to put on their Google News homepages or share with other users.

What Twitterers Want: News

Twitter can be a lot of things for a lot of different people. However, according to online ad network Chitika, more of them want news than anything else. Chitika released results from a study of its users, looking at what Twitter users want. Chitika categorized the sites that get the most links from Twitter. Here's how it shakes out by genre according to the ad network:

Can New Media and Old Media Get Along?

An interesting topic was discussed at the BlogWorld Expo in a session called the "Death and Rebirth of Journalism," which WebProNews attended.