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.

Just when eBay thought they had moved Skype, the Wall Street Journal tells us “Not so fast!” A copyright suit has been filed in Northern California by the founders of Skype over the use of a technology by Skype. The license to continue its use ended in March and since then the founders of Skype and the flounders that bought it have been duking it out in a the UK which has already cast doubt on the deal.

It’s been eight months since TechCrunch announced that they would no longer honor embargoes, with several other sites jumping on that bandwagon in the interim. One of the issues here was undermining the credibility of the blogosphere at large. As Trisha Lyn Fawver put it,

Earlier this year, Google laid off about 200 employees in the sales and marketing department. Head of Sales, Tim Armstrong also left the company to become CEO of AOL. Armstrong then got Senior Google sales executive Jeff Levick to go with him.

We’ve seen newspaper publishers forbid employees from accessing social networks before. The Wall Street Journal is not restricting access, but they are restricting how social networks are used by their employees.

The Wall Street Journal Online will reportedly be launching a micropayment model for content this fall. Some other news publications appear to see this is a brilliant move, but asking people to pay for content on the web will draw its share of skepticism.

WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson says, "It’s a payments system — once we have your details we will be able to charge you according to what you read, in particular, a high price for specialist material."