Back in January, the New York Times announced that it would be gravitating to a metered paywall system at the beginning of 2011. This would let readers access an as-of-yet unspecified number of articles for free each month, until requiring payment for further access. Meanwhile, print subscribers would have full access to content online.

Google has made a change to the way it treats its "first click free" option for publishers. The option was designed for legitimate publishers to get around Google’s cloaking policies, which discourage the showing of one web page to a crawler while the user sees something different.

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.