Geolocation game Foursquare has teamed up with the Wall Street Journal in an initiative that rolled out today, appending stories about restaurants or other “cultural coverage” with a not-very-obtrusive “add to Foursquare” button.

While such a venture might initially seem to be more in line with entertainment-oriented publications (the Village Voice, for instance) Foursquare and the WSJ have played together before. (Not a very playful incident, but Foursquare is mostly about fun and drunkeness and karaoke.) And in Foursquare’s concise post about the venture on their blog, the fast-growing social-techno-geo game purveyors hint at upcoming partnerships of the same ilk:

We’re super psyched about the new “Add to foursquare” button that The Wall Street Journal is rolling out today! Now, when you’re reading a restaurant review or other cultural coverage on WSJ.com, you’ll be able to click a button to add the venue(s) mentioned in the article to your foursquare to-do list, along with a tip written by a WSJ editor and a link back to the original article.

The Wall Street Journal is our first partner to experiment with the “Add to foursquare” button, but we hope to start rolling out this feature for other partners soon. Stay tuned!

If you’re a regular user of Foursquare, this could be a very cool feature. Depending on how packed your social calendar is, a simple function for adding places of interest to your Foursquare to-do list can make finding a place to eat or grab a beer a bit easier. Venues that get reviewed stand to gain a lot, and the link at the bottom of reviews and event listings will give Foursquare lots of opportunities to get noticed by prospective new players. Foursquare has declined to elaborate on who or where the new “add to Foursquare” button will grace next, but I’d expect the link to become much more pervasive in the coming months.

WSJ introduces “add to Foursquare” button is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you use Foursquare, it’s kind of hard to justify what you’re doing as you inevitably explain for yourself to non-playing companions that you’re not being rude and texting, you’re part of a larger, location based game with internet people and you don’t want to lose your Chipotle mayorship or you’re trying to get the “Bklyn 4 Life” badge.

Even then, most people don’t really get what you’re doing- the first time I excitedly tried to explain Foursquare to a boyfriend, he looked at me quizzically and said, “well that sounds kind of… childish.” But now you have an anecdote for the haters who might find Foursquare to be a juvenile or pointless pursuit.

You may have heard by now that Times Square was evacuated today for the second time this month due to a bomb scare. The NYPD has to be Billy Ray Serious about this kind of thing, because we don’t know which attempts to blow up the great city of New York will actually be successful in their execution. And while some of us geekily have our phone beep when there’s breaking news on the wire, most Foursquare users are more likely to respond to a buzz or beep when a friend checks in somewhere. (So even if you’re not checking the news every second of the day, something like this could come in pretty handy.)

When reports came in that a someone saw something and said something, and that the north end of Times Square was being evacuated, the Wall Street Journal checked in to Foursquare. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley tweeted the screenshot above reporting to users that an evacuation was underway. And really, isn’t that clever? While Twitter has been used to great effect to spread news that may not be as easily reported through mainstream channels, it doesn’t have that ability to grab your attention in such a direct way. Something compelling or relevant to you might be going down this very second, but if you’re walking down a crowded city street, you’re not going to see or hear it. (Or, by extension, possibly get out of harm’s way in time.)

Disaster management via channels like Foursquare may be far off down the road, but this is certainly compelling as a standalone incident that illustrates how location aware services could be more than a way of telling people how many shots of Grey Goose you just downed. In other words, Foursquare could save your life.

WSJ uses Foursquare to tell people about Times Square evacuation is a post from: The Inquisitr

Starting in late June or July, Google Editions will be offering books the search engine giant is “clearly authorized to sell” and plans to offer the content across many platforms.

Unlike Apple, another recent entrant to the e-book milieu, Google will allow customers to use content in a more liberal way without the prerequisite of a proprietary device. Google said last year that they would offer works in the public domain in EPub format, but it is unclear how new releases would be handled by the company. Google will also allow booksellers and independent retailers to carry the books and turn a profit expected to be higher than the 4-8% commission offered by Amazon for books on their Kindle platform.

Publishers say the device-independent initiative and search engine driven traffic are appealing:

“This levels the retail playing field,” said Evan Schnittman, vice president of global business development for Oxford University Press. “And as a publisher, what I like is that I won’t have to think about audiences based on devices. This is an electronic product that consumers can get anywhere as long as they have a Google account.”

Separately, a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin is expected soon in Google’s fight to distribute “millions of out of print books,” splitting revenues with rights holders.

[WSJ]

Report: Google waltzing into e-book game is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Wall Street Journal, the daily broadsheet for financial types, is getting a tech savvy makeover with a correspondingly high price tag.

As we haven’t yet had time to acclimatize to and whine about iPad app pricing, no one seems quite sure what to make of the leaked WSJ iPad app pricing. On one hand, getting the actual physical paper delivered to you costs about $29 a month. (That version also leaves an unpleasant newspapery film on your hands and can get soggy in the rain- however, the iPad app can’t wrap glass for shipping, so there’s that.) On the other, the iPhone app for the WSJ tops out at $8 a month.

The WSJ app isn’t ad free either- Coke and FedEx have both purchased three month, $400K advertising packages for it. The new content delivery method is a boon to advertisers, too, because they can target the hell out of you based on your browsing habits. It will be interesting to see how this pans out both for the WSJ app itself and the influence it has on iPad content pricing.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few news providers that can really get away with setting the bar this high out of the gate. People who don’t get bored easily already willingly shell out for the paper online, and if they’re planning on getting iPads, this will be cost-effective and probably convenient. However, other iPad app purveyors who follow suit may see interest flag tremendously if they expect readers to drop $218 a year on their content. Remember what happened to Newsday when they put up a paywall?

WSJ on iPad will carry $18 monthly price tag is a post from: The Inquisitr

So what will the Apple Tablet do to help resurrect a business that has been sleeping for the last decade? According to WSJ and TUAW these rather dodgy details:

* Always partial to the education market, one thing this device might be used for is e-textbooks, presumably including the sort of multimedia content that goes beyond the printed page.
* Textbook publishers aren’t the only publishers Apple has been talking to. They’re chatting up Conde Nast, Harper Collins, The New York Times, and even CBS, Walt Disney Co, and Electronic Arts (for games).
* A “Best of TV” service is possible, with a subscription to a set of on demand programs chosen by the consumer.
* Those same people are also reporting there is a revamp of iTunes coming, which would separate the purchase of iTunes content from the iTunes application.
* The device will have a 10 or 11 inch screen, a virtual keyboard, and “sharing” is mentioned — two ideas being thrown around are the ability to leave sticky notes on the device or even have the camera recognize faces of those using it.
* Price is expected to be around $1000, and they’ll be selling it to people who already have iPhones and laptops as well.

We won’t know for sure until January 27th where Apple has invited the (new) media to see their ” latest creation”. Unless it’s the release of iPhone OS 4.0, I’m pretty confident we’ll see the new Apple Tablet there and the twitter fail whale.

The Apple Tablet Brings New Life to Old Media is a post from: The Inquisitr

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I’m The Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”

2009: Via social networking.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece today about the newfound popularity of vengeance over the web: webtribution, they call it. Apparently, wreaking havoc on the lives of those who wronged you used to be a huge pain in the ass. It was easy to get caught and embarrassing if you were found out. But now that everyone and your mom has a Facebook account, it’s not too hard to at the very least shame the hell out someone who’s upset you, and just as easy to damage their marriage, career and social standing.

Of course, the web has been used for revenge since its inception. And the WSJ discovered 4chan in its research:

“We know that in a mob people will do socially unacceptable things they would never otherwise do,” says Elizabeth Englander, director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center and professor of psychology at Bridgewater State College in Bridgewater, Mass. “They feel invisible, so they cede responsibility.”

But it’s not until recent years that webtribution has really soared alongside venues like Facebook and MySpace, where everyone’s relatives, friends, co-workers and exes are gathered into one easy place. The WSJ article tells the tale of a woman who revealed her husband’s betrayal via his Facebook account, remaining remorseless even while the couple is trying to mend their marriage:

…when she found out her husband was cheating on her last March, she logged onto his Facebook account, deleted all his privacy settings—allowing anyone to see his page—and created a new status update for him: “Moving back to my mom’s because my wife caught me cheating with a woman from work.”

Almost immediately, her husband’s friends began sending questions, which Ms. Eschbach answered, acting as him. She named the other woman and explained that the affair had been going on for four years and had been carried on over lunch, sometimes at the woman’s house, sometimes in a car. She asked if anyone had a room for rent. Finally, she disparaged his physical attributes, adding that “I am surprised Jackie stayed with me for so long.”

“I wanted everyone to know what a jerk he was, and this was the easiest way to do it without saying it to each person’s face,” says Ms. Eschbach, 39 years old.

By the time she was done about an hour later, there were 55 comments from family and friends on her husband’s Facebook page. Some asked if the status updates were true. Others, including his sisters, angrily criticized her husband and the other woman.

Okay, show of hands- who wasn’t totally like go, the wife in that story! But of course, web vengeance isn’t always (or maybe even often) fair. The piece begins citing a woman who claims to have been wrongly outed as a homewrecker by the ex-girlfriend of her now husband. The potential exists for all of us to be damaged by a romantic rival, a disgruntled co-worker or someone who just plain doesn’t like us.

While it’s worse news for jerks, it does kind of give the average schmuck a bit more insurance they’ll be treated more fairly across the board- retribution resolution is just one scathing Yelp review or blog post away.(Liskula Cohen most definitely disagrees with me there). But venting anger on the web doesn’t always have to be about revenge in a vacuum- scams and questionable business practices are exposed through web anger, too. In the comments, I’d be interested in hearing if you’ve ever been on either side of web revenge. Have you used social media, blog posts or message boards to vent at someone specific? Or have you been on the receiving end?

[Source: WSJ via Gawker]

“Webtribution” on the rise as vengeance becomes easier than ever is a post from: The Inquisitr

There’s nothing like a good dose of rhetoric to galvanize the troops to fight the enemy. It doesn’t matter if there is any truth in the rhetoric. As long as you can do everything possible to demonize the enemy the truth isn’t something that need to worry about.

A perfect example of this demonizing rhetoric was the recent speech by Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton, who is also the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, at the annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook event. In his speech Hinton referred to Google as a giant vampire sucking the blood out of the newspaper industry.

“There is a charitable view of the history of Google,” said Mr. Hinton, who is also publisher of The Wall Street Journal. “[It] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

Source: Crain’s New York Business :: WSJ publisher calls Google ‘digital vampire’

As much as it might satisfy old media to believe that Google’s sole purpose it to destroy their business nothing could be further from the truth in my opinion. If one steps back from this kind of inflammatory rhetoric for even a second and consider how Google makes their money you would see the first stake piercing Hinton’s argument.

Google makes its money from advertising. The advertising usually appears at the top of the return results or along the right hand side of the page. Those ads are suppose to be geared towards matching any search term supplied. Now look at this graphic of the Google News page

Funny, I don’t see any advertising on the top part of the as shown here, and neither do ads show up any where else on the page. So explain to me just how Google is making any money from displaying links to news headlines that go directly to the news site where the article originated at.

The argument that the newspaper industry likes to use is that they aren’t seeing an effective enough click through rate on stories that show up on Google News.

The essential problem is that publishers do not feel that the click through rate to articles is high enough, and therefore any additional advertising revenue that they would gain from extra viewings of individual articles does not compensate for the income they lose from readers not going direct to their newspaper websites.

Source: Editors Weblog :: Google News and newspaper publishers: allies or enemies?

Emma Heald at Editors Weblog goes on to say that the newspaper’s are only seeing a click through rate of about 10% because they say that readers are only scanning the headlines and passing up on reading the full story on the newspaper site. Well DUH! do they really think that every person reading a newspaper reads every single article in a newspaper?

Not likely. Most people when reading something like a newspaper will typically scan a page for headlines of a story that might interest them. If they don’t they turn the page. Trying to use this as an argument against Google News only goes to show the inflated sense of self-importance that newspapers have of themselves. They are deluding themselves if they think that people buy a paper and then without fail read every single article.

The other point that newspapers like to flaunt is that they need subscription money from people that want to read their content in order to survive.

Who are they trying to kid with this?

Let’s look at the subscription argument from two points. The first is that even in the print version of newspapers subscription, and news stand prices, the amount of money earned is, and always has been the smallest part of their revenue stream. Newspapers primary income comes from advertising, the majority of it specifically from classified ads. Trying to now make the case for subscriptions being the sole way for newspapers to survive online is digitally stupid.

The other part about the subscription argument that fails the logic test is that people will be willing to pay multiple news providers for basically the same content. Excuse me but how many people do you know that have multiple subscriptions to newspapers? To think that peoples behavior online would be any different than their offline behavior is another sign of digital stupidity.

The newspaper industry is so locked into trying to bring an antiquated business model into an online world that doesn’t operate the same way that it is trying to blame anyone, and everyone, for their failings. Instead of stepping back from the whole situation and looking at this new world with fresh eyes the industry is only going to contribute to its own demise.

WSJ publisher practicing ‘digital stupidity’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Journal‘s new look may appear more modern, but the principles behind it could not be more antiquated. In our information-driven era, the subscription-based news service appears ostensibly misguided and misplaced.

Consider this: Only 5 percent of the WSJ‘s average Web audience pays for a subscription. Ninety-five percent of the visitors, then, are non-paying. Yet, the Journal is restricting its most unique (and thus highest traffic potential) content to a tiny fraction of its audience.

Imagine how much more overall traffic the site could pull in if those non-paying visitors had the added value of that enterprise content within the wsj.com site. Instead, they constantly have the experience of clicking onto something that they can’t read, getting frustrated, and then going elsewhere to find the information. More site-direct traffic, of course, equals more advertising dollars — and with the kind of high-paying advertisers a brand like the Wall Street Journal could secure, that means a lot more cash ultimately flowing through its coffers.

Information these days is free for the taking, and trying to fight it only hurts media companies in the end. Unless Lars Ulrich is on the Journal‘s advisory board, I find it hard to comprehend why the paper is reinforcing stereotypes about old media’s lack of understanding of new technology and 2.0-style thinking. In an era when so many newspapers are struggling to stay alive, this type of non-adaptive thinking just seems counterintuitive.

I guess the one good thing, though, is that the new design does more clearly mark the subscription-only content — which will make things far easier for those of us with the handy knowledge of how to access it without paying. (Hint: Headline. Google News. Search.)

Wake Up, WSJ: Paid Content Is Dead is a post from: The Inquisitr