As a result of these events, users have an outlet to let their voice be heard. According to a new study from Topix and Equation Research, the gap that once separated voters and politics is getting smaller and smaller, largely because of the Internet.

Where do you go to get your political information? Let us know.

The companies surveyed 1,000 U.S. voters and found that more voters are going online for political information. In addition, more than a quarter of voters are going to the Web to participate in political discussions and debates.

“People are working these issues out themselves by talking to the people on the Net,” said Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix.

One of the reasons people are going to the Web is because many in the U.S. distrust the media for issues of bias, as the Gallup Poll found last year. Tolles told us that Internet gives users choice and lets them be a part of the political process in a scalable way.

As he explained, voters want to see both sides presented. They’re not just looking for an echo chamber, but they’re looking for an interactive experience that platforms such as Topix, Facebook, and Twitter provide.

TV is still the biggest source that voters rely on for political information, but the Internet isn’t too far behind with those surveyed weighing in at 78 percent and 68 percent respectively. Although the Internet is gaining ground, Tolles does not believe TV will lose its value. Instead, he thinks the two will merge to some degree.

The main difference between the two is the interactivity that the Web offers. Tolles told us that voters want to have a “personal relationship” with news, which interactivity helps to promote.

“The Internet gives you a chance, as an individual, to get [to be] a little bit bigger part of the process,” he said.

He went on to say that the relationship between politics and the Internet would continue to grow and that more voters would look to the Web for political information going forward. Tolles also said that politicians would have to figure out how to embrace the Web more effectively.

How do you see the relationship between politics and the Web evolving over time? We’d love to know.

That Topix is turning to such a young search engine to power its entire site search, particularly as competition grows in the local content space, is certainly a ringing endorsement. As Google has proven, search is an incredibly important tool for news consumption. That said, it is worth noting that Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta is the former CEO/co-founder of Topix.

“It is rather unprecedented for a search start up to be able to power search on a site of scope and scale as Topix,” said Skrenta. “We have a long history of collaboration and camaraderie with the Topix team so it’s a thrill to be working together again in bringing a new search experience to Topix users.”

Watch our recent interview with Skrenta:

“We truly believe that curated search is the future of the Web and we’re proud to bring that experience directly to Topix pages and directly to our users,” said Topix CEO Chris Tolles. “The team at blekko knows our users and our content extremely well and this background will help in delivering a very powerful search experience to our users.”

The curation Tolles speaks of would be the slashtags Blekko users create to curate sets of search results organized around specific topics. According to Blekko, users have created over 110,000 slashtags since the search engine’s launch.

Topix currently has over 360,000 edited news pages featuring content from over 50,000 sources made up of newspapers, blogs, radio and TV stations, government, magazines, and corporate information sites.

Everybody’s waiting to find out if Google will really buy Groupon. We may find out very soon, as Groupon’s board is supposed to be meeting today to come up with an answer. Groupon is all about local, and that’s something Chris Tolles, CEO of local news powerhouse Topix knows a bit about. He offered some of his insights on a possible Google Groupon acquisition to WebProNews today. 

First off, Tolles has some thoughts on Google’s larger local strategy. "This is the largest area of online advertising growth, and expansion here is one of the few areas that’s fragmented and still rife for disruption," Tolles tells us. "They are going to need to expand local sales efforts and staffing, as well as create products and partner for local inventory."

On why Google is looking to buy Groupon rather than build this type of product internally, Tolles says, "It’s pretty clear from the hundreds of unsuccessful Groupon clones that building one of these things is not as easy as all that." 

"Plus, Groupon has a $600M local sales run rate," he adds. "It’s not obvious that Google is making that much from local advertisers. Plus, Google has always been about the algorithm and when they need to build outside of their core experience, they have done a great job in acquiring companies to help them in products like maps, Android, YouTube etc.  While they’ve not succeeded in everything, they’re successes are pretty impressive."

Tolles says Google could help Groupon reduce its operating costs. "Groupon’s growth depends on their building out email lists, and they use Adwords from Google for a big portion of that," he explains. "Presumably getting the wholesale rate on that kind of advertising, or creating new ways of integrating Groupon signups into search results, Gmail or Places would be a potential huge economy of scale for Groupon to tap into."

There’s no question that Google could greatly help Groupon expand internationally, although the company has gradually been doing this on its own. "Groupon is going to have to expand internationally to continue the kind of growth that we’ve been seeing from them, and being able to leverage Google’s existing international infrastructure is a potentially game changing time to market advantage," says Tolles. 

"While I’m sure Groupon could soldier into countries where they have no presence, having native speaking staff on the ground in as many companies as Google is operating in would be a big asset," he notes.

Google is doing all it can to own local and that will continue for the foreseeable future as long as Marissa Mayer is in charge no doubt. The company’s been doing some interesting things in the local space, from adding a great deal of emphasis on local to its regular search results, and introducing a social recommendation engine (Hotpot). All of that said, local is too large a space for any one company to dominate, according to Tolles.

"Local advertising is a $100B year business – 2/3 of the ad spending in the US," he says. "You’d have to control billboards, TV, radio, online, mobile and email lists to be able to ‘dominate local’. While I think Google is on a path to have a major part of that ecosystem, I don’t see them dominating local advertising anytime soon."

To me, there are clear advantages for Google if they acquire Groupon (particularly as it battles with Facebook, which recently encroached on Groupon’s model). Some think the acquisition would be a mistake on Google’s part, however. We’ll see what happens. We should find out soon whether it’s going to even go through or not.

Meanwhile, Groupon has been making acquisitions of its own. TechCrunch reports the company has acquired Ludic Labs, the local marketing services startup behind offerfoundry.com and diddit.com. The company has also acquired Asian sites uBuyiBuy, Beeconomic and Atlaspost. In addition to all of this, Groupon just announced some major features for local businesses.

Do you think Google should acquire Groupon? Share your thoughts in the comments.

AP Is Dead … Killed By Blogs & Aggregation

In the pre-Internet days the AP had little competition beyond a few other news syndicators like Reuters and UPI. The AP’s world has now changed forever with the advent of blogs and news aggregation sites.

Blogs are the new "AP" journalists and aggregation services which started with NewsLinx.com in 1996 (founded by me!) and which now include Google News, Topix, Techmeme, WebProWire and the new Blogrunner have made the AP much less relevant. There are now tens of thousands of  bloggers around the world providing coverage and analysis of current events too! It comes down to why pay when you can get the news for free.

The AP is scrambling to remain needed in this fast paced up to the second blog news world. As reported and analyzed by WebProNews, the AP is suing Moreover for of all things… linking to AP stories. Does the AP not realize that winning this suit would result in less readers of their stories? The old news order is dead, the AP will have to adapt or die.

AP President and CEO Tom Curley does seem to realize that something has to change. In a speech yesterday Curley remarked:

" We — the news industry — have come to that fork in the road. We must take bold, decisive steps to secure the audiences and funding to support journalism’s essential role in both our economy and democracy, or find ourselves on an ugly path to obscurity."

Curley goes on to say that "we must understand and embrace the new ways people are consuming content".

Right …. like blogs and news aggregation and linking! Does the AP really get it? I personally don’t think so. Tom Curley’s entire speech on how news is changing does not even mention blogs or news aggregation. He also seemingly references his linking lawsuit when telling the audience …

" We have the power to control how our content flows on the Web. We must use that power if we’re to continue to be financially secure and independent enough to speak truth to power." 

The Associated Press model of news is dead … dead as can be. It is a business model that pays reporters to travel and write stories and then syndicate those stories to traditional news organizations. This model cannot compete with bloggers who write for free and often live where the news is. Additionally these bloggers are often experts, not just reporters looking in. News is now being reported by the news makers themselves who blog about it and then analyzed by hundreds of experts who themselves blog.

Aggregations sites have made the need for news syndicators like the AP obsolete. Bloggers themselves, by linking to related stories have also become content syndicators.

The AP’s relevance has disappeared. The AP’s business model has evaporated. The AP is dead, killed by blogs and news aggregation.

A deal with Internet Broadcasting coincided with that first announcement; no obvious changes occurred as a result.  Yet this new development has seen a Topix box get prominent placement on the main CNN page – it’s not at the top, but it’s still above the “More News” section.

As “amy” puts it on the Topix.net Weblog, “To see this in action, just swing by their homepage and scroll down to the ‘Local News’ widget and input your ZIP.  Voila!  Local headlines at your service.”

While describing the overall arrangement, “amy” continues, “CNN.com’s local news headlines are now powered by Topix . . . .  We’re proud of this partnership, because it showcases our ability to localize news for ZIP codes across the country.”

Still, not everything’s perfect at the “leading news community”; while covering the development with CNN, Greg Sterling notes, “Despite the fact that Topix is owned by newspapers they have yet to leverage all its capabilities on their own sites.  There’s much to learn and borrow from the site, yet no newspaper site is really doing that fully more than two years after the Topix acquisition.”

It hasn’t been very long since Topix moved from a focus on news aggregation to a more local search/community orientation. Although Skrenta led the company through that change and beyond, Tolles will take over from here.

Tolles discussed the changeover at the Topix blog. Though all is going well at Topix, including a place in the Hitwise top 20 news & info sites for May 2007, Skrenta evidently did not relish the role of being more of a salesman than a coder:

Rich told me that he wasn’t having as much fun right now, and looking at what we needed to do, didn’t see much opportunity for what he really loves to do — architect from the metal on up and put out the 1.0 that is so far ahead of everything else – the first computer virus, one of the first MUD’s, NewHoo/dmoz, Topix – that even his no good co-founders couldn’t screw things up. No, we had just deployed the big new re-invention, and now it’s time to keep tweaking it, and also push up the marketing and sales efforts a couple of notches. Rich would rather chew off his arm, I think.

Skrenta won’t have to look for the salt and pepper, though. Tolles will report to him, but the real day to day duties will be on Tolles’ shoulders. That leaves Skrenta some freedom to cook up something new. Perhaps his recent blog post about social networking provided a peek into Skrenta’s latest interest.

Google is getting hit by a class action lawsuit from the Premier League (a British soccer league) and Bourne Co., an independant music publisher, both angry that their copyrighted material appears illegally on YouTube. They’re asking other companies to join the class action and band together in suing YouTube. The suit claims Google is guilty of “engaging in, permitting, encouraging and facilitating” copyright violations.

(via Topix)

In a seperate lawsuit, YouTube is being sued by Los Angeles News Service operator Robert Tur, who took video of Reginald Denny being beaten during the 1992 LA riots. That suit has been ongoing. What is new is that both NBC Universal (which has not sued YouTube yet) and Viacom (which is suing them for $1 billion) have filed “friend of the court” briefs in support of the lawsuit. The companies are making it clear that, even in cases that have nothing to do with them, they stand as enemies of YouTube.

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How Has Web 2.0 Changed Our Interaction?

Reading a story online doesn’t just motivate people to write a letter to the editor anymore. People want the instant gratification of comments, and the knowledge that other readers, and very likely the writers and editors, have seen what the people have to say.

Topix CEO Rich Skrenta said during a session at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco: ""The Internet isn’t taking over for everything it’s destroying. The Internet is replacing it with something else."

He said the Internet isn’t as effective for localized information, and cited the role small town newspaper publishers play. Web 2.0 follows the audience, and the bigger stories.

(It’s interesting to find this coming from Rich Skrenta, since the whole point of the recent Topix relaunch was to adopt a hyperlocal focus, with local editors signing up and taking a role. – David)

TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera said the way things are structured now allows the promotion of content stars.

Their work steals readers away from traditional media, which needs to figure out how to either acquire these stars or develop them.

The roles of publishers seem to be changing. Ted Shelton, whose Personal Bee site was just purchased by Technorati, said of that redefining definition: "Publishers will be less and less about the creation of content and more about the curation of content – the collection and aggregation of content."

If publishers could do this in the print world, they could offer more benefit to those readers.

Advertising revenue remains the touchstone concern in media.

Skrenta called Google "a great place to start" with ad displays and tracking, while Shelton suggested just how Google could be an even greater ad power in online media:

"If you narrow the advertising world down to reaching someone looking to buy something, then Google is certainly the 800lb gorilla," he said. "What Google hasn’t figured out is how to provide branding. (Branding) is where there is the largest opportunity for innovation."

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“We’re now inviting members from our hyperlocal communities to take over the controls and help us edit the news.”

Topix (which recently raised $15-million) has been a bit of a wallflower at the social-media dance — perhaps in part because local news isn’t quite as sexy as national or international news — but as Skrenta’s post points out, the service has been growing fairly rapidly, and contributions from readers (in the form of posting in story-related forums) have also been increasing dramatically:

“We went from zero to 1 million users posting in our forums, and now have over 1,000 active local forums (5 posts/day or more). The traffic is growing 10-20% per month — and now accounts for nearly half of our total traffic.”

Skrenta says that Topix is getting about 37,000 posts a day, and the site was looking for a way of featuring the top 1 to 5 per cent of those contributions that actually add something to the story. Now, anyone can submit a story, or facts about a story, or an opinion, or cellphone photos, and they will be handled by what amounts to an editor.

In some cases, editors will be drawn from the pool of active contributors, in the same way that Wikipedia.org does — but in some cases, stories or tips or opinions will be handled by an editor from one of Topix’s member papers. It will be interesting to see how Topix fares with a model that is also being pursued by Newsvine and (to a lesser extent) Daylife.

Greg Sterling has some thoughts on the relaunch at Search Engine Land, and so does Jason Chervokas at the Social Media Club. Ross Mayfield thinks that there could be some old media-new media acquisitions coming as more media entities realize the benefits of the local community model.

P.S. On a completely unrelated note, Rich Skrenta created the first computer virus when he was 15.

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