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Techdirt applauds new efforts to repeal or rework Sarbanes-Oxley, the overwrought post-Enron accountability laws and the mass of new compliance rules and regulations that resulted from them.

As someone who lives with the overhead of these regulations every day, I agree, it's time to take another look.

Steve Outing cautions that style-over-substance print newspaper redesigns miss the best chance to retain loyal readers from older audiences:

"The key ... is to retain older readers by making the thinner print edition emphasize serious, quality journalism, retaining or expanding your paper's watchdog role in the community. Forget the stuff that's solely geared toward attracting young readers; they're for the most part gone from print.

"Then use the print edition to guide your paper readers to the extra stuff and the goodies that are on the digital side of the business."

Outing's advice seems solid. For years, I cautioned that newspapers spend too many resources on print design. In an industry with what I call design affluence, almost all print redesigns I see seem only modest, incremental improvements. Under Outing's logic, some actually would not be improvements at all, since they move print newspapers away from their loyal customers.

Considering Outing's second recommendation -- guide print readers to online features -- I would add one thing: if loyal print readers trend older, promote the online features older people would be most likely to use. E-mail, for example, remains in heavy use among older Internet populations. So rather than steering people to a Web site for breaking news updates, consider pushing them toward sign-ups for e-mail alerts.

Links all wishing I had gotten to them sooner:

• No news is no news: Jeff Jarvis' thoughts following a conference on new business models for news.
• Gannett pushes for more tech hires, data centers, niche sites: Mark Glaser interviews Jennifer Carroll, Gannett's vice president for digital content, about the company's Information Center strategy.
• An update on our Drupal conversion: Steve Yelvington provides great insights into Morris newspapers' conversion to the popular open-source site framework. Drupal powers this site, too.
• The ad network shakeout has started: Too much of a good thing, opines Om Malik. Cory Bergman recorded similar observations a few days earlier. My day-job company, however, sees much promise in the new Yahoo! Apt network.
• Blogs on their way out?: Matt Sokoloff channels a Wired magazine article about how Twitter has supplanted blogs as the lightweight channel for opinion leadership. I dunno. Thanks to free little bridge components, every post I make to this site automatically becomes a tweet, which in turn automatically becomes my Facebook status -- so why does it have to be just one or another?
• Slaughtering the cash cows a bit too early: Ken Doctor says consumers notice the effects of cuts at newspapers in the products themselves, and become less likely to buy them.
• CNN courts newspapers with new wire service: Joe Strupp reports this new entrant in, by all accounts, a declining market dominated by The Associated Press. I say bring on the alternatives, CNN.
• The cost of First Click Free: Nick Carr discusses Google's pass-through program for sites that require registration but still want Google search referrals. Carr says it's a "helluva good business idea." Agreed.
• How do mobile users spend their time?: Texting, says eMarketer.
• How to optimize your Web connection: For all you reluctant and frustrated home systems administrators, like me, Wired offers some battle-tested tips to squeeze more packets through your purported "broadband" connection.
• Recommended Web strategy reading: What would a link bucket be without a link to another link bucket? Sorry for getting all meta on you, but this roundup from Jeremiah Owyang points to thoughtful posts about overall Web strategy. If you prefer your link buckets with more of a user experience angle, there's always ...
• Look at the usability, SEO, Web design and cool stuff: Cre8pc rounds up a designer's nirvana of reading matter. Go for it, in your alleged spare time.

In 1984, I earned my bachelor's degree in journalism and political science. That second major instilled in me only two things: a deep-seated suspicion of all politicians, and an equally deep-seated desire to avoid friends-and-family conversations about politics in favor of doing my own homework and making up my own mind.

The Internet, circa 2008, makes that desire almost impossible to fulfill, worse even than four years ago, the last time I brought this up.

Facebook and Twitter friends will make their political views known within far too many of their status updates. Bloggers who, most of the time, focus on one useful specialty subject or another will change course in election season to splay their political views.

I will fight for anyone's right to express an opinion using all available tools, including a blog or a tweet. But I do not actively seek out blogs for political opinions. Instead, I fill my feed reader with sites whose value propositions are distinctly utilitarian and nonpolitical: covering the media business, for example, or technology, or innovation, or the search business.

When a non-political-specialty blogger diverts from such a value proposition to endorse or advocate a candidate, at face value it bugs me -- especially if the blogger makes no effort to tie the advocacy to his or her particular area of coverage or expertise.

At least most bloggers make no secret of their purpose to express opinions. Endorsing in that framework sits better with me than a site that feigns unbiased coverage of an industry, but routinely serves articles with thinly veiled political messages and only tangential connections to its industry. Know any sites like that? I do.

In these situations, political commentary usurps the privilege of my attention, like a bait-and-switch.

Even social media status messages with political tones make me queasy. Staying away from politics remains a fine strategy for keeping friends, I find.

As such, to be clear: I won't tweet who I voted for (love that early voting!) or why. And I don't talk about politics here. I do talk about media, technology, interactive business strategy and how they all tie to customer experience. I might sometimes stray to other personal or offbeat topics, but not politics. If you see otherwise, call me on it.

Content site leaders pay more attention nowadays to measures of engagement beyond the venerable but flawed page view, per an overview from Jennifer Saba, writing for Editor & Publisher.

Be it time spent on site, page views per session, or frequency of visits per user, newspaper.com executives interviewed for the article want to grow 'em all.

"Many advertisers still buy based on CPMs (cost per thousand) per page view. 'The cold hard reality now is still the more page views we get, the more ads we serve. That translates into more dollars,' notes Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor/interactive at The Dallas Morning News. But he adds that executives also pay close attention to time spent: 'As an editor, I like seeing time spent go up — that's a good thing.' ...

"Chris Jennewein, senior vice president and publisher of Greenspun Interactive, thinks that time spent is a metric that has gotten shortchanged — and one that will eventually carry more currency. 'As this medium matures,' he says, 'sites that can show greater time spent per user are going to be able to command higher CPMs.'"

All true, all good. I begin business planning for any Web venture from a set of assumptions, some about traffic, some about ad performance, some constant through the plan period, some variable as time goes by.

I make the traffic assumptions in this order:

• Monthly Unique Visitors: This is the "reach" metric, a variable component typically presuming growth through the plan period. For a new product, the growth curve will be steeper, while a mature online product might see only limited growth from organic increases in Internet usage.
• Monthly Sessions per MUV: This is the "frequency" metric, which experience shows does not vary through an introductory business plan cycle as much as I might hope. So I start most plans with this as a constant. Better to be pleasantly surprised later, I figure, and reforecast to the positive.
• Session Depth: I could express this as "time spent," as Saba's article suggests, but today's Internet advertising economics do not allow us to translate time spent into money. So I use page views per session as my depth, or "engagement," metric. Again, experience shows this metric does not vary as much as I might dream as a site grows from introduction, so I start most plans with this as a constant.
• Ratio of Indexes to Details: Most sites have a different ad inventory model for home and index pages than for article or detail-level pages. So it's important to make assumptions about the split of a session between those two page types. Increasingly, detail-level pages dominate most user sessions as people arrive at content on our sites directly from external searches. I treat this as a constant through my business plan period; it is unlikely to vary enough to break it out as a monthly variable.

Then I make the advertising assumptions separately for each ad form (banner/display, text/context, listing) like so:

• Average Number of Units by Page Type: This assumption follows the ratio of indexes to details. If I have average four units on an index page and three units on detail pages, I can treat that as a constant in my plan.
• Average Cost Per Thousand: The rate my hypothetical enterprise will get for ads it sells. Another constant, though it's fun to be able to make a rate increase stick during a plan period, and adjust forecasts accordingly.
• Average Sell-out Percentage: High rate plus high sell-out plus high traffic equals success. Without high sell-out rate, all that unused inventory drags on a business' ability to manage rate and advertiser expectations. This metric, which I treat as a constant in business planning, remains critically important yet the hardest to maintain or improve even on a high-volume, fast-growing site. In fact, traffic growth naturally conflicts with sell-out rate, especially in Web environments where inventory forecasting is unreliable.

Now, it's one thing to say these are the metrics for which I make assumptions to build a business plan. It's quite another to devise reliable formulas for arriving at the assumptions.

Much as I would love to say the data to plot assumptions and forecast usage sits at my fingertips every time I do this, that's just not life. More often, we draw on personal experience, or call our pals who might be doing something similar, to see some shadow of the facts that might make our assumptions more valid than wet fingers held up in the wind.

Content site leaders pay more attention nowadays to measures of engagement beyond the venerable but flawed page view, per an overview from Jennifer Saba, writing for Editor & Publisher.

Be it time spent on site, page views per session, or frequency of visits per user, newspaper.com executives interviewed for the article want to grow 'em all.

"Many advertisers still buy based on CPMs (cost per thousand) per page view. 'The cold hard reality now is still the more page views we get, the more ads we serve. That translates into more dollars,' notes Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor/interactive at The Dallas Morning News. But he adds that executives also pay close attention to time spent: 'As an editor, I like seeing time spent go up — that's a good thing.' ...

"Chris Jennewein, senior vice president and publisher of Greenspun Interactive, thinks that time spent is a metric that has gotten shortchanged — and one that will eventually carry more currency. 'As this medium matures,' he says, 'sites that can show greater time spent per user are going to be able to command higher CPMs.'"

All true, all good. I begin business planning for any Web venture from a set of assumptions, some about traffic, some about ad performance, some constant through the plan period, some variable as time goes by.

I make the traffic assumptions in this order:

• Monthly Unique Visitors: This is the "reach" metric, a variable component typically presuming growth through the plan period. For a new product, the growth curve will be steeper, while a mature online product might see only limited growth from organic increases in Internet usage.
• Monthly Sessions per MUV: This is the "frequency" metric, which experience shows does not vary through an introductory business plan cycle as much as I might hope. So I start most plans with this as a constant. Better to be pleasantly surprised later, I figure, and reforecast to the positive.
• Session Depth: I could express this as "time spent," as Saba's article suggests, but today's Internet advertising economics do not allow us to translate time spent into money. So I use page views per session as my depth, or "engagement," metric. Again, experience shows this metric does not vary as much as I might dream as a site grows from introduction, so I start most plans with this as a constant.
• Ratio of Indexes to Details: Most sites have a different ad inventory model for home and index pages than for article or detail-level pages. So it's important to make assumptions about the split of a session between those two page types. Increasingly, detail-level pages dominate most user sessions as people arrive at content on our sites directly from external searches. I treat this as a constant through my business plan period; it is unlikely to vary enough to break it out as a monthly variable.

Then I make the advertising assumptions separately for each ad form (banner/display, text/context, listing) like so:

• Average Number of Units by Page Type: This assumption follows the ratio of indexes to details. If I have average four units on an index page and three units on detail pages, I can treat that as a constant in my plan.
• Average Cost Per Thousand: The rate my hypothetical enterprise will get for ads it sells. Another constant, though it's fun to be able to make a rate increase stick during a plan period, and adjust forecasts accordingly.
• Average Sell-out Percentage: High rate plus high sell-out plus high traffic equals success. Without high sell-out rate, all that unused inventory drags on a business' ability to manage rate and advertiser expectations. This metric, which I treat as a constant in business planning, remains critically important yet the hardest to maintain or improve even on a high-volume, fast-growing site. In fact, traffic growth naturally conflicts with sell-out rate, especially in Web environments where inventory forecasting is unreliable.

Now, it's one thing to say these are the metrics for which I make assumptions to build a business plan. It's quite another to devise reliable formulas for arriving at the assumptions.

Much as I would love to say the data to plot assumptions and forecast usage sits at my fingertips every time I do this, that's just not life. More often, we draw on personal experience, or call our pals who might be doing something similar, to see some shadow of the facts that might make our assumptions more valid than wet fingers held up in the wind.

Two posts caught my eye for their discussions of print-online relationships:

Mark Van Patten of the Bowling Green (Ky.) Daily News, writing at MediaShift, describes "How the Focus on Print Hurts Our Newspaper Site":

"It's definitely no tangled bureaucracy, but even within this simple system you find conflicts holding the website back. The problem is that the different people in that system just have different priorities. As general manager, I want to see both a strong online presence and continued healthy print circulation. In contrast, the managing editor doesn't want to 'hurt' the print edition by making the online edition too strong, fearing that it could tempt subscribers to abandon print."

Read down through the comments to see Tim Windsor's reply, which describes how his online team at The Sun in Baltimore had, if not authority to influence sweeping collaboration between print and online staffs, at least a veto power regarding Web content.

Another post, on Online Journalism Review, comes from my old colleague Curt Cavin at The Indianapolis Star. He has covered auto racing for the paper and its Web site (still my proudest start-up) as long as I can remember. He describes the evolution of his online work from a crude weekly "ask the expert" format we set up in the mid-1990s to a very active blog today:

In the height of racing season, I receive about 150 questions a day and answer about 10, almost all before 9 a.m. ... I haven't kept track, but it's safe to say that I have received questions from all 50 states and two dozen countries. Many of them have followed me to a weekly radio show that began in 2007.

Here's a newspaper writer who builds steam for all his efforts, print and online, from the interaction with racing enthusiasts on his blog. In the process, he builds a personal brand as racing expert that complements the newspaper's brand as local information provider. Way to go, Curt!

Content site leaders pay more attention nowadays to measures of engagement beyond the venerable but flawed page view, per an overview from Jennifer Saba, writing for Editor & Publisher.

Be it time spent on site, page views per session, or frequency of visits per user, newspaper.com executives interviewed for the article want to grow 'em all.

"Many advertisers still buy based on CPMs (cost per thousand) per page view. 'The cold hard reality now is still the more page views we get, the more ads we serve. That translates into more dollars,' notes Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor/interactive at The Dallas Morning News. But he adds that executives also pay close attention to time spent: 'As an editor, I like seeing time spent go up — that's a good thing.' ...

"Chris Jennewein, senior vice president and publisher of Greenspun Interactive, thinks that time spent is a metric that has gotten shortchanged — and one that will eventually carry more currency. 'As this medium matures,' he says, 'sites that can show greater time spent per user are going to be able to command higher CPMs.'"

All true, all good. I begin business planning for any Web venture from a set of assumptions, some about traffic, some about ad performance, some constant through the plan period, some variable as time goes by.

I make the traffic assumptions in this order:

• Monthly Unique Visitors: This is the "reach" metric, a variable component typically presuming growth through the plan period. For a new product, the growth curve will be steeper, while a mature online product might see only limited growth from organic increases in Internet usage.
• Monthly Sessions per MUV: This is the "frequency" metric, which experience shows does not vary through an introductory business plan cycle as much as I might hope. So I start most plans with this as a constant. Better to be pleasantly surprised later, I figure, and reforecast to the positive.
• Session Depth: I could express this as "time spent," as Saba's article suggests, but today's Internet advertising economics do not allow us to translate time spent into money. So I use page views per session as my depth, or "engagement," metric. Again, experience shows this metric does not vary as much as I might dream as a site grows from introduction, so I start most plans with this as a constant.
• Ratio of Indexes to Details: Most sites have a different ad inventory model for home and index pages than for article or detail-level pages. So it's important to make assumptions about the split of a session between those two page types. Increasingly, detail-level pages dominate most user sessions as people arrive at content on our sites directly from external searches. I treat this as a constant through my business plan period; it is unlikely to vary enough to break it out as a monthly variable.

Then I make the advertising assumptions separately for each ad form (banner/display, text/context, listing) like so:

• Average Number of Units by Page Type: This assumption follows the ratio of indexes to details. If I have average four units on an index page and three units on detail pages, I can treat that as a constant in my plan.
• Average Cost Per Thousand: The rate my hypothetical enterprise will get for ads it sells. Another constant, though it's fun to be able to make a rate increase stick during a plan period, and adjust forecasts accordingly.
• Average Sell-out Percentage: High rate plus high sell-out plus high traffic equals success. Without high sell-out rate, all that unused inventory drags on a business' ability to manage rate and advertiser expectations. This metric, which I treat as a constant in business planning, remains critically important yet the hardest to maintain or improve even on a high-volume, fast-growing site. In fact, traffic growth naturally conflicts with sell-out rate, especially in Web environments where inventory forecasting is unreliable.

Now, it's one thing to say these are the metrics for which I make assumptions to build a business plan. It's quite another to devise reliable formulas for arriving at the assumptions.

Much as I would love to say the data to plot assumptions and forecast usage sits at my fingertips every time I do this, that's just not life. More often, we draw on personal experience, or call our pals who might be doing something similar, to see some shadow of the facts that might make our assumptions more valid than wet fingers held up in the wind.

I just got off two conference calls with slideshow-style Webinars in two consecutive hours.

In the first one, the meeting started at least five minutes late while participants struggled to get the Webinar slideshows to appear on their screens.

In the second one, the same problem held the meeting up for a couple of minutes. Not so bad. But about halfway into the call, a participant put the conference on hold, meaning the rest of us heard "holding pattern" beeps every 10 seconds or so from that one person's phone line.

Virtual meeting technology, be it WebEx, Adobe Connect, LiveMeeting etc., serves a good purpose for companies with distributed operations, consultants and vendors pitching their wares, or cross-enterprise collaboration. I have two conference calls a week with my teammates in the Georgia WebMBA program (we're more than halfway done now, woo hoo!), and without those, we'd fly off the handle in a hurry.

We know the benefits of virtual meetings, especially the speed and low cost of putting groups together. But days like today leave me wondering how much time we waste fiddling with what should be commonplace technologies by now, and dealing with people who never learned good practices or etiquette for using them. Those are the hidden costs of virtual meetings, and I sense they're greater than most of us ever ponder.

What do you think? What's the over/under on virtual meetings in your shop?

Bloglines, long my RSS reader of choice, should either just adopt its long-running "new" beta service as its main production service, or fix up the "old" service it still offers as its default.

The default Bloglines service seems increasingly buggy. Case in point: When trying to move feeds around among my folders today, I got thrown into some kind of error loop involving the Ajax implementation. This kind of thing happens way too often.

The error dialog, as you can see, hardly helps. (If you're browsing this site without graphics, here's the text of the dialog: "error loading data for tree: undefined => XMLHttpTransport Error 0.") Click "OK" and it just comes back, over and over again. Finally I abandoned the effort and closed the browser. My folder changes did not stick.

Unfortunately, I have to be careful what I wish for. Though I imagine most or all of Bloglines' programming energy goes into buttoning down the beta software, honestly, I've tried that new interface and just don't like it as well. It seems harder, with more steps, to mark items as read. The colors may be more attractive, but I find the text a bit harder to read.

So if Bloglines does turn the beta into its default service, I'm hosed. If it doesn't, I'm hosed trying to use the buggy old one.

As a contrast, I give props to Yahoo! for one clever redesign trick, as seen in its Mail and My Yahoo! services: keep the old version available (and maintained!) as a "classic" mode for people who have whatever quirky reasons for just liking it better. Perhaps that's all the Bloglines folks are doing, except in reverse: keep the new version as a "permanent beta" (Gmail, anyone?) and the old version as a default.

One does not need to be the world's greatest detective, or even follow routine commodities stories online, to deduce what's happening to oil prices at a given time.

In my case, all I need to see is the swarm of red text in the airline stock tracker I have in My Yahoo!

And yeah, you guessed it -- oil shot back up above $112 a barrel at the time of the adjacent screen grab and this writing.

Juan Antonio Giner calls this "commodity non-journalism": newspaper front page after front page, all carrying the same photo and strikingly similar, unfulfilling headlines trying to cover the scary crises in high finance.

I agree. Few in American journalism take on the challenge of explaining a story this severe and complex in terms that would be truly useful to everyday people that don't happen to be economists.

Exceptions? Yeah. One or two. But none are evident in Juan Antonio's gallery of so-so-ness.

Tell me, friends: which of the following home pages, each representing a major news site on the Texas coast, has a more appropriate sense of urgency about the impending landfall of Hurricane Ike?

Before you cite any bias on my part because the second example, caller.com, is a Scripps site: The first example, khou.com, is a Belo site that I used to help oversee when I was regional director there. I have friends in both places, and great respect for both organizations.

I just found it interesting that khou.com, right in the path of the storm, seems a lot calmer (too much so, methinks) than caller.com, which was in the path until about 36 hours ago.<!--break-->

What do you think?

This time last week, I complained mightily because I tried to write a blog post in Drupal's browser text entry form and lost it in progress. Drupal 6 did not have any way to save drafts in progress.

This time this week, it does: the Autosave module, just today, got an upgrade for Drupal 6.

I tested the new release with this post. It works as designed, best I can tell. It stores drafts in a Drupal database table. If you go awry with the browser history, or your browser crashes completely, you can open a new session to create content (same type as the draft), and see a prompt that allows you to recover the last saved draft. Drupal site administrators can set how often it creates a new autosaved draft -- it defaults to 10 seconds, but that seems too frequent. I'm trying 30 seconds for now.

So Autosave solves the No. 1 problem I whined about last week. My other beef centered on the lack of a good, fast, powerful, built-in rich text editor. I hear Drupal 7 may offer promising solutions in this area, but in the meantime, I simply made a couple of quick adjustments to the entry form and to BUEditor, the module I use to create easy HTML markup buttons.

I added a BUEditor button for a tag I use regularly, <blockquote>. Then I altered the style for the text entry area to resemble, closely, the text you see when you read posts here. Now when I preview a post in BUEditor, it looks a lot like the real thing -- and I don't have to save a draft to the database to see it.

That's two small steps for blog editing in Drupal, one giant leap for my sanity.

Night before last, I had nearly finished writing an item for this blog into the Web entry form offered by Drupal, the open-source site management framework that powers SI.

In wrapping up the post, I went fishing for a link, forgot to do so in a new browser tab, found the article, grabbed the link ... but when I went back to look for my post in the entry form, it was gone -- lost in browser history.

Argh. Argh!

Please understand, I really like Drupal. But losing 45 minutes of work reminded me that WordPress, which I used to use, has Drupal version 6, which I use now, beat in two key areas:

• Autosave of drafts, which would have prevented my problem. A Drupal autosave module exists, but its developers have not yet upgraded it for Version 6. Recent versions of WordPress have an autosave option built in.
• Rich text authoring and editing tools built into the posting interface, which would make writing and managing content easier. WordPress lets administrators choose between a somewhat easy HTML mode with buttons to apply common inline tags, links etc.; or a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) mode that works more like a word processor. You can find Drupal modules that enable either (BUEditor is nice for adding shortcuts to HTML editing, and more than a few WYSIWYG editors can be rolled into Drupal), but not without quirks.

Frustrated, I started looking for a single tool I could put in front of Drupal that would bring it to par or better in both areas.

I searched more than I should have to. I experimented longer than I should have to. It should just be easier to write, edit, organize, tag, categorize, preview, post and update blog items, in Drupal especially but regardless of platform.

Tried: Qumana, Google Docs and ScribeFire, all cross-platform (I prefer Mac); w.bloggar, Zoundry and Windows Live Writer, all Windows-only.

Loved: None. Qumana and Google Docs generate odd markup that cannot easily be filtered into lean, compliant XHTML. I struggled mightily to get w.bloggar and Zoundry to sync at all with my blog, and just as mightily to get the WLW installer to, ahem, install.

Found passable: ScribeFire. I don't like the way it handles markup in WYSIWYG mode (lots of break tags in lieu of any attempt to recognize paragraphs). But I can work with it in HTML editing mode much the way I do BUEditor in the Drupal native form. It does not offer autosave but does allow easy saving of drafts apart from submitting to the Drupal database.

ScribeFire presumes that any text you have copied to clipboard is the link address you want to add when you use the "Add a Link" tool. That saves a few ticks, except if you happen to run ScribeFire in a narrow enough window that the Add a Link tool button slips off the right side of the toolbar. Then it hides in a menu list, harder to find.

I am writing this post in ScribeFire. It feels OK. I cannot decide, however, whether the modest improvements vs. Drupal (with BUEditor added) will make this tool memorable enough to use regularly.

What am I missing, blog authoring friends?

So yesterday eMarketer tells us social network users have started to tire of those services. Today we learn, from eMarketer again, that fatigue might not extend to mobile users.

Analysts, naturally, offer a range of estimates for worldwide use of social nets via mobile devices. At the conservative end, ABI Research says 140 million users by 2013. On the wild side, Pyramid Research says 950 million users -- about one seventh of the world population -- by 2012.

If that holds true, by then it will be so very 20th Century to use a mobile device just to make a lowly phone call.

EMarketer gives us two interesting tidbits regarding adoption of online social networks:

• Per research from Synovate, 58 percent of adults worldwide do not know what social networks are at all.
• In the same study, 36 percent of current social network users worldwide (45 percent in the United States) said they are losing interest in online social networking.

That last point matters most to Internet innovators. This year alone, we witnessed sprouting of several new branded social networks, some on the backs of existing networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

When I say "on the backs of," I mean the new nets do something like this:

New Network X sends e-mail solicitations asking prospective new users to establish accounts. Some do so. When they log in for the first time, they are invited to furnish their login credentials for established Networks A, B and/or C.

If they choose to do that, Network X can use the programming interfaces (APIs) of the established social nets, with those users' credentials, to mine the users' friend lists and generate invitations to the e-mail addresses contained therein. Network X may or may not make it immaculately clear to its new enrollees that it will use their credentials for the other nets in this fashion.

People with long-standing LinkedIn or Facebook profiles may have observed a sudden peppering of invitations to new social networks late last year and early this year, probably from a net that uses some form of the process I just described. The technique, by which anyone with rudimentary API programming skills could create a social net that mines others, may ultimately contribute to the social net fatigue called out in the Synovate research.

As a result, I wonder whether we will see many more new branded social networks, or how many branded general-interest nets at a time the global or American markets will bear. MySpace largely supplanted Friendster here, and some analysts say Facebook has made great strides to supplant MySpace. Lay in big-niche players such as LinkedIn, and small-niche players focused around specific interests such as pets, parenthood or retirement, and you remove many doubts as to why people might tire of social nets.

(Lest anyone believe I am anti-social-networks, it isn't so. My early membership in LinkedIn led to my current day job, brought me consulting gigs and helped me recruit colleagues. Facebook has helped me find and reconnect to people I have not seen in years. I do grow weary, however, of new, oddly named sites wanting me to create Yet Another Profile. Recently, I winnowed my list of social networking accounts to the two I just mentioned. Don't try to find me on Plaxo Pulse, Naymz or Spock anymore.)

Social networking tools and methods should remain top-of-mind for strategists running brand-focused, content and commerce sites.

Smart online leaders should enable consumers to share prose, images, video, recommendations or just general communications in and around a site's core value propositions. By doing so, you provide a more personal experience and, potentially, extra motivation to learn about the brands, products or services offered.

Naturally, when every brand-name site becomes its own social network, we still face the problem of proliferating registration and user ID schemes.

OpenID and OpenSocial might matter here, at least as technology services that make it easier for users to consolidate profiles and accounts. But today, at least, they seem to matter more in the technology community than in the brand or business communities. Momentum needs to accelerate there, or consumers have little hope of holding their social net accounts down to a manageable number.

News alerts that lit up pixels on my screen the past two days got me thinking:

• CNN.com sent a breaking news email just after 10 p.m. Eastern last night: "Barack Obama tells packed stadium he accepts Democratic nomination 'with profound gratitude and great humility.'" His nomination long ago secured, this speech was a media-friendly event planned for many weeks; I can think of no urgent need to know he accepted the nomination in it. (All such CNN alerts carry the same subject line -- "CNN Breaking News" -- which seems silly but may, in fact, be a clever ruse. I would not have opened the message if the subject line clued me in on its content.)
• Today I got two breaking news alerts by email from local news sites I follow -- Scripps' own courierpress.com in Evansville, Ind., and NewsOK.com in Oklahoma City -- informing me John McCain had selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Evansville's alert came in pretty quickly after the news broke, though still about five minutes after CNN's alert on the same story. NewsOK's alert arrived more than two hours later. Never mind. Before any email alerts landed here, I had already seen the story, and copious blogger reactions, in the RSS feeds I follow via Bloglines. So, some questions:
  • Am I hoping against hope that we will ever find ways to make syndication technologies such as RSS easy for everyday people to use and understand?
  • Are local news site leaders wise to hit up their alert lists with widely available national/international stories?
• I have a Twitter account but rarely use it, at least for now. Yet even if I didn't have my own account, it would be hard to avoid the "tweets" of friends and business associates, many of whom have integrated their Twitter profiles with Facebook or their own blogs. Connect with a Twitter user on Facebook, and you will probably start seeing that person's tweets. There again, news of the McCain-Palin ticket got many Twitter treatments today (say that real fast five times) before I ever saw an email alert. Don't even get me started on how much Obama speech reaction I saw in tweets via Facebook.

Alert systems such as these come with poor, if any, personalized filtering. To an extent, the nature of major news compounds the difficulty of any attempt to deliver a "Daily Me."

I dream, for example, that CNN's technology could be elegant enough to know I want breaking news alerts on roughly the scale of sighting one or more horsemen of the Apocalypse -- not when a prepared political speech containing no real news is delivered uneventfully.

If CNN chose not to send an Obama alert at all, people who hang on the formalities or the words he spoke last night could consider the decision biased or disrespectful. On the other hand, if CNN allowed alert subscribers to filter based on content triggers, it might risk failure to put critical information in front of the right people at the right time. If you live on the Gulf Coast and filter all references to weather, does that mean you miss out on alerts regarding hurricanes?

So we either sign up for a firehose flow of news alerts, or we subscribe to a zillion RSS feeds, or we follow tweets and bleats on our phones or social nets, or we do combinations of the above, or we worry that the intelligentsia of society will reject us for being blissfully uninformed.

Apparently that last part isn't really a problem -- more and more people appear quite content not to know at all.

Update 7:55 a.m. 9/2/08: Once in a great while, I double-check what Google flags as spam (months ago, I changed Small Initiatives email service to use Gmail as its handler). Probably because of the recent crush of spam posing as breaking news alerts from major news organizations, Google's filters trapped almost all my legitimate alerts from WSJ.com since roughly mid-August.

Not that a single one told me anything I hadn't found out about in due time via RSS; however, the spam problem just compounds the challenges of making news alerts relevant to individuals.

Links in search of steady work:

• Vin Crosbie resumed blogging at Digital Deliverance with a vengeance. And yes, I just used "deliverance" and "vengeance" in the same sentence. Anyhoo, Vin started a series on the decline and transformation of newspapers. Part 1 is general problem exposition. Part 2 describes how newspaper companies violated the principles of supply and demand. I may have more to say about Vin's posts, but want to wait for the series conclusion before I form my own conclusions. For now, just know it's worthy reading. Amy Gahran reacts over on E-Media Tidbits, part of the (oh-by-the-way) redesigned and improved poynter.org.
• Meanwhile, over at Valleywag, we have five ways newspapers botched the Web. More problem exposition. At least Vin promises some answers.
• Steve Yelvington describes the building of a next-generation news site management system. Sounds like some good thinking going into this -- more than just a fresh coat of paint on the ol' newspaper.com model.

Last week it was business travel. This week posting will be light because I am working the annual online conference we at Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group put on for the local and corporate leaders of our newspaper division.

Next week I have no excuse, so just in case you care, I'll try to make things more interesting around here after the company confab.