Apple top man Steve Jobs fears that the internet will be reduced “into a nation of bloggers” unless a sustainable way of persuading people to pay for online content is devised.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal-organised D8 conference near Los Angeles, Jobs said that newspapers’ and magazines’ futures, along with that of quality journalism, depended on media outlets finding a way of making it worthwhile for readers to pay to look at website content.

“One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free healthy press, some of these newspapers, the news gathering and editorial organisations are really important,” he said.

“I don’t want to see us descend to a nation of bloggers. I think we need editorial more than ever right now.

“Anything that we can do to help news gathering organisations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid so they can keep their news gathering and editorial operations intact, I’m all for it.”

He was keen, of course, to stress the possible role which his company’s latest big thing, the iPad tablet computer, could play in facilitating this shift in attitudes.

“What we have to do is figure out a way to get people to start paying for this hard earned content. And so this (the iPad) provides us with a potential opportunity to provide more value than a web page and start charging for that,” Jobs said.

However, Jobs appeared to hint that his attempts to take a hard line over charging for iPad apps had made media owners reluctant to develop their own apps, reported Gordon McMillan on MediaWeek magazine’s The Wall blog.
.
“I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they charge traditionally for print because they don’t have the expenses of printing, they don’t have the expenses of delivery, and to charge a reasonable price and go for volume. I think people are willing to pay for content,” Jobs concluded.

His assertion seems to have been borne out by early sales of The Times newspaper’s iPad edition, which was reported to have sold 5,000 six-day subscriptions, at GBP9.99 each (about US$16), in its first three days of availability.

The 15 billionth Twitter post was sent over the weekend of May 29 and 30, just a few months after the social networking site passed the 10 billion message mark.

According to social media and marketing blog The Wall, it has taken about 12 weeks for the those five billion new Tweets to be posted. It suggests that the speed of the achievement is due to Twitter users becoming more active – although it does sound a note of scepticism about the proportion of spam messages.

Blog post author Gordon MacMillan said: “I’ve certainly noticed more and more people on Twitter – a lot since the election in the UK particularly.”

Twitter itself only last month claimed it had 105 milion users, although there were no statistics to show what proportion of this number was active.

And a major revamp of the site was unveiled last week, allowing Spanish, French, German and Italian speakers to access help pages in their native tongue. The site’s help pages now contain answers to every question the site claims it has ever received.

As @crystal promised in the post announcing the latest update: “This is just the first round of improvements… Stay tuned for even more improvement in the upcoming months.”

The revamped websites of UK newspapers The Times and The Sunday Times have gone live, ahead of moves to put all the two newspapers’ online content – apart from the sites’ front pages – behind a paywall.

Users can register for a one-month trial of the sites, after which not only will all deeper content only be accessible to paying customers, search engines will also be prevented from indexing it.

This is a step further than previous adopters of subscription-only online models have gone. The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal both allow users limited free access, and make their content searchable via Google and other search engines, meaning that people can read much of their content for free.

But the News International-owned Times and Sunday Times sites will be almost completely invisible behind their paywalls, meaning that the media industry will be paying close attention to the subscription figures the two papers achieve.

In order to access the sites, users will have to pay GBP1 a day, or GBP2 per week. While the daily subscription is non-recurring, the weekly option will recur unless it is cancelled by the subscriber.

The look of the new Times website mirrors heavily the daily newspaper’s appearance, and is largely more conservative than its previous free-access equivalent, which was branded Times Online, along with The Sunday Times equivalent.

While The Times is a well-known and respected online brand, the new launch marks the first time The Sunday Times has benefited from a dedicated website. The design of the latter is more visual and magazine-like in appearance than the newspaper site, whose content is laid out similarly to a printed page.

The Times’ editor, James Harding, said: “The site will include live interviews with the people who shape the news and exclusive video – giving readers the opportunity to get more from their favourite sections. 

He added: “This is just the start. We will continue to add new features to ensure that the innovation that has been central to The Times for 225 years, continues into the future.”

UK consumers can pre-order Apple’s handheld iPad from today (Monday May 10), with the first of the devices expected to go on sale a little more than two weeks later, on Thursday May 28.

Apple is taking pre-orders for the touchscreen tablet computer whose UK retail price will be between £429 for a 16GB and £699 for a 64GB model.

May 28 will also see the iPad hit the shops in 27 other countries including Germany, France and Italy. Customers will be restricted to two iPads per order, after sales in the US which far outstripped supply caused the initial delay of the device’s European launch.

Spanish-owned O2 has announced that all iPad data tariffs will be available without a long contract and include unlimited free access to BT Openzone and The Cloud Wi-Fi hotspots. Pay & Go 3G broadband tariffs from O2 will range from £2 a day to £15 a month.

The other major UK sellers of the iPad, including Vodafone and Orange, have yet to announce price plans.

Apple has already sold over one million iPads in the USA, with more than 300,000 being snapped up on the first day of sale, April 5.

Customers have also downloaded more than 12 million apps from the App Store, as well as over 1.5 million ebooks from the new iBookstore.

The iPad allows users to browse the web, read and send email, share photos, as well as watch HD videos, listen to music, play games and read ebooks.

Full pricing details of the iPad are available on the Apple website.

Offering people the chance to express their enthusiasm for, and thereby connect with each other through, a particular piece of web content will be a cornerstone of how Facebook develops and adapts its services for the future, founder Mark Zuckerberg says.

In a speech to web developers in San Francisco, he hinted that the site’s next step forward would be “one of the most transformative things we’ve ever done for the web.

“It means the web can become a set of personally and semantically meaningful connections between people and things,” Zuckerberg added.

In a nod to his audience, he said that he hoped his company could help developers benefit from better data collection and retention features.

He called the new concepts an “open graph”, and said that users’ ability to comment through Facebook on content they had seen on a particular site could be done without that site’s authors’ knowledge, thereby assuring users of their confidentiality.

Zuckerberg added that a major benefit he could envisage of this functionality would be that companies could connect with all their customers through a single account (Facebook, of course), and keep track of what they were thinking and talking about, through their updates.

“If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them together then we can create a web that is more social, personalised and semantically aware,” he said.

The result will allow instantly personalised experiences for users when they visit a company’s website and offer easier options for companies to share its news and output, and benefit from better engagement with its users.

Facebook has also partnered with review site Yelp and music discovery service Pandora, to enable more widespread sharing of users’ preferences across those sites.

In addition, Facebook and Microsoft, which owns a small piece of the social network, are launching a document creation and sharing application, based on Office 2010, that can be accessed through Facebook and an external site.

Having faced criticism in the past for sharing too much user information, Zuckerberg played down questions about privacy concerns.

“I think people are going to be sharing less of their information when they don’t need to around the web,” he said.

Facebook is the most visited website in the UK, the fourth most visited site in the United States, and it displaced Google in January to become the top US site by total number of web pages viewed.

It was billed as a new form of politics, the leadership debate that the UK has been calling out for in a somewhat vain attempt to tap into some of the political energy emanating from Capitol Hill and the Obama presidency.

The idea for a UK version of these debates pre-dates the current hoopla surrounding last night’s event. Harold Wilson was among the first to challenge an incumbent Prime Minister, Alec Douglas Home, to a debate, only to see his request rejected by Home on the grounds of turning the General Election into a ‘Top of the Pops’ contest. Latterly, Jim Callaghan broached the topic with a young Margaret Thatcher, only for the Iron Lady to reject his request through fear that a confrontation would eat into her already sizeable advantage in the polls.

Well, last night saw the idea become reality – and the reality proved somewhat disappointing. Nonetheless, it would be fair to conclude that the real winner of the night was the man who many had, to this point at least, written off in the General Election – Liberal Democrat Party leader Nick Clegg.

Within five minutes of the debate closing, the now legendary tag line ‘I agree with Nick’ – which came out of the mouths of both Labour leader Gordon Brown, and Conservative top man David Cameron during the debate – began reverberating around the modern-day political talking shop otherwise known as Twitter.

The SERPs became awash with real-time proclamations of support for the young upstart Liberal hopeful. SEO hopefuls began registering every conceivable domain extension in the hope that they might ride this wave of activity. Google Insights for Search registered a sizeable spike in search volume. Yahoo identified the furore as the buzz term of the moment. The SERPs were, and the following morning still are, awash with activity.

Just how big a part will the channels of the internet play in determining the next resident of Number 10 Downing Street? Has the internet redefined the way in which political parties must channel their propaganda? Have the main parties been active enough in their online marketing efforts?

The Conservatives have taken the lead, establishing paid search campaigns in Google and bidding on their competitors’ terms. Labour has failed miserably in its attempts to generalise Dave as a Gene Hunt figure, much to the amusement of its rivals. The Liberal Democrats, to this point at least, have neglected their online marketing strategy, to the point where we can say with some conviction that Vince Cable has forgotten to budget for it.

However, with a new range of ‘I agree with Nick’ t-shirts making their way on to Spreadshirt.net, and with the SERPs literally awash with support for Clegg, this year may see the Liberal Democrats demonstrate, albeit unwittingly, the power of the social media driven political campaign.

The internet agrees with Nick – do you?

News home

Top of the agenda at the next meeting of the UK’s Digital Editors Network will be ways of building revenues from various data sources. 

Speakers already confirmed for the event are Julian Tait, an organiser of the ‘FutureEverything’ arts and music conference in Manchester this month and a leader of efforts to make Manchester the UK’s first ‘Open Data City’, and Paul Bradshaw, author of the Online Journalism Blog and Birmingham City University lecturer. 

The discussions will also focus on how publishers can access useful sources of data and how it can serve users. 

This meeting of the DEN will take place on Wednesday May 12 at the offices of Northwest Vision and Media, at Media City in Salford Quays, Greater Manchester. 

Admission to the event is free but places are limited and must be reserved in advance at eventbrite.com.

Twitter is about to launch a major redesign as it looks to capitalise on its worldwide appeal and eat further into the market share of rival social networking sites. 

Details of the redesign have been disclosed as a breakdown of Twitter’s audience is revealed, with more than half living outside the US. 

Doug Bowman, Twitter’s creative director, posted a picture online showing a new-look Twitter page that indicates that a key element of the overhaul will be the use of more statistics. 

Other changes to the microblogging site are so far being kept a closely-guarded secret. 

Bowman, who previously worked at Google and Wired magazine, posted: “Working on what may end up a significant redesign. Not final yet. What we can show without giving away the farm.” 

His post has been universally well received, many saying it made the idea of using the web – as opposed to third party apps –  to post, more attractive. 

Elsewhere, another Twitter staffer, giving a breakdown of Twitter’s audience, said a significant majority was now non-American.

In a blog post, Matt Sanford, lead engineer for Twitter’s International team, says that “over 60% of registered Twitter accounts come from outside the US.” 

The preliminary final contenders for the Orwell Prize 2010 have been announced, with a policewoman, ‘PC Ellie Bloggs‘ and social worker, ‘Winston Smith‘, among the contenders for the year’s best blog.

The annual awards mark the best of British political writing in three categories: blogs, journalism and books.

Last year, the Orwell prize’s winning blogger ‘Jack Night’ was unmasked by the UK High Court, following a legal challenge by the Times newspaper – an action widely criticised by many online media writers and the prize’s organisers.

Jack Night, under his real name of Richard Horton, is a judge for the 2010 blog prize, along with Oona King, head of diversity for Channel 4, and former Member of Parliament.

The list of contenders also includes political blogger Iain Dale, legal blogger Jack of Kent and academic Mary Beard. Three mainstream journalists are also in the running, representing The Times, the Guardian and Sky News.

“Blogs have very quickly grown up into things you have to take a look at, something you can’t afford to miss or be without. The very best blogs have a distinct individual voice, far from the shouty stereotype,” said director of the Orwell Prize, Jean Seaton.

“What is especially remarkable – as evidenced by PC Bloggs, Winston Smith, Mary Beard, Jack of Kent and of course Jack Night – is how blogging is becoming a professional forum, doing a really healthy job of explaining the internal dilemmas of professions to bigger audiences. No other medium communicates this quite so well.”

Commenting on her nomination, ‘Pc Ellie Bloggs’ said: “Commentators point out that the longlist tends to include left wing opinions. I would not necessarily put myself in that category, although given that one of the purposes of political/social satire is to highlight folly in the establishment, I suppose it isn’t surprising. I’ve also noticed a suspicious number of candidates called David.

“I didn’t know much about the blogging world when I started, and I don’t have time to read as many other blogs as I’d like. But it’s nice to see blogging rising in status as legitimate journalism, although I still believe it should remain a fairly personal enterprise.”

Blow out all the candles on another birthday cake – the date of this posting marked the 25^th anniversary of the first use of the .com prefix on a website URL.

Symbolics Computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts had the honour of using the original internet address ending in dotcom.

By the end of that year, only another five companies were using the suffix, giving no clue as to how the pace of its use would accelerate over the next generation.

It was 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom address was registered.

“This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for the rest of the internet,” said Mark Mclaughlin, chief executive officer of Verisign, the company which oversees the dotcom domain.

“Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today? This really was a groundbreaking event,” he said.

For most of the late 1980s and early 1990s hardly anyone knew what a dotcom was. Scholars generally agree that a turning point was the introduction of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape which was the first to be used by mainstream consumers, outside the academic and scientific world.

Now, with 668,000 dotcom sites registered every month, they have become part of the fabric of our lives.

“Dotcoms have touched us in a way we could not have imagined,” Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) told BBC News.

“It used to be, 10 years ago you could live an okay life if you weren’t engaged on a dot com site on a daily basis. You could get what you needed.

 ”But today we see how dotcoms have enriched our lives that if you are not engaged you would be fine but much further behind than the rest of us.”