Twitter and blogs are increasingly feeding into each other. A blog post can go viral if it gets retweeted enough time. But what if it was easy to retweet a comment? TweetMeme, which powers the retweet buttons increasingly found on blog posts (like this one), is working on bringing retweets to comments, at least to comments on its own site. But once it does that, blogs will be able to implement the system using TweetMeme’s APIs.

In a post on the TweetMeme blog, founder Nick Halstead gives a preview of the commenting system he is getting ready to release On TweetMeme itself in the next few weeks. (The announcement comes on the same day that competitor Retweet is launching, and is a bit of a preemptive move to try to announce something better).

Right now, headlines on TweetMeme such as this one show recent Tweets linking to the story. TweetMeme will be adding a commenting feature there as well. The goals of the system are:

1. Promotion of quality comments
2. Works seamlessly with Twitter
3. Reply mechanism that feels familiar to Twitter users
4. Ability to embed media into comments

Each comment will have its own retweet button, and visitors will be able to reorder comments by most retweeted first. In effect, it becomes a voting system for comments with each retweet acting as a vote (and you can only vote once). You can reply to a specific commenter both within comments and on Twitter simultaneously. Another nice feature is that short links get elongated back to the original in the comments, and if the link is to a photo or other media, you see a thumbnail image in the comment itself.

While TweetMeme is doing this for itself, the functionality will be available through its APIs (the documentation is not there yet though). I’d love to see this implemented as a blog commenting system where each comment could be retweeted and comments can be reordered by the resulting votes.

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Local news always seems to get the short end of the stick, both in terms of coverage and advertising dollars. And as the entire newspaper industry continues to struggle for survival, the prospects for local news looks particularly bleak. It just doesn’t pay to have a reporter cover a neighborhood farmer’s market when she could be covering the Mayor’s office or something with broader appeal. And so traditional news organizations are abandoning local and hyperlocal news.

Don’t worry, though. Media consultant, blogger, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis has a few ideas for how to replace the local newspaper with new business models for news at the hyperlocal level. He just gave a presentation at an Aspen Institute forum on journalism today (live stream).

His answer is to organize local bloggers and citizens into a metro-wide network in each of the top 25 markets, and sell local ads across their sites. Each hyperlocal site would remain independent but join a loose federation for ad sales, distribution, and shared costs. Jarvis sketches out what a new news organization might look like at the local level, and goes out on a limb by offering actual spreadsheets showing some assumptions about audience size and how the business model would work. There is also a spreadsheet for doing this through a non-profit.

As everyone from Esther Dyson to Michael Kinsley and Marissa Mayer pointed out at the forum, the numbers don’t look very realistic. The model assumes in a metro market of 5 million people, the hyperlocal network will be able to get 1.75 million readers (35 percent penetration) in Year 1, growing to 3 million readers (60 percent penetration) in Year 3. The corresponding revenues for each market go from $5 million in Year 1 to $20 million in Year 3.

For a large local blog, that could translate into total revenues of $126,976 in Year 1, going to $331,640 in Year 2, with corresponding income for the blogger of $42,777 in the first year, going to $148, 269 in the third (see table below).

These numbers are way too optimistic. In order to get to those revenue numbers, the model had to be pumped up with SMS alerts, Twitter coupons, a “donation system for watchdog journalism,” and other lines of revenue which may never an out. Most people are just not that interested in what is going on in their neighborhoods. A local blog network would be lucky to get 20 percent of a metro area’s population as regular readers across multiple sites.

Former Slate editor Michael Kinsley asked Jarvis, “If it is as easy as you make it sound, why aren’t you off doing it?.” Google product chief Marissa Mayer was a little more diplomatic, but suggested the numbers need a “sanity check.”

To be fair, Jarvis and CUNY are presenting the models for discussion and to show how an alternative, semi-distributed local news organization might emerge that can pay for itself. The numbers are wrong, but that hardly matters. They are a starting point for a reconception of how local news can be organized.

“Aren’t you reinventing the wheel?” Kinsley asked him. “I think it needs some reinvention,” responded Jarvis. “We wanted to see if there is a vision for the future of journalism.”

When Jarvis was asked who the dominant species would be in this new ecosystem, he answered: “No one owns the whole thing anymore. No one can afford to own it anymore. So the key thing is how do you take part in the network.” His numbers might be way off, but at least he is trying to rethink the news.

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So what can those top 50 writers learn from Arrington’s business model? Well, they’d better enjoy throwing conferences. Arrington said only 10 to 20 percent of of TechCrunch’s revenue comes from normal advertising on the website, while 50 percent comes from conferences. (Yes, I know these parts don’t add up to 100 percent.)

[From Michael Arrington’s plan to save The New York Times: The best writers should quit | VentureBeat]

I wrote about the 100 year flood that newspapers are facing and my conclusion, which I believe still holds, is that newspapers have to abandon their category and create something new that combines hyperlocal information services, create new advertising units, aggressively pursue syndication, and move into video as a natural compliment to text.

So what can those top 50 writers learn from Arrington’s business model? Well, they’d better enjoy throwing conferences. Arrington said only 10 to 20 percent of of TechCrunch’s revenue comes from normal advertising on the website, while 50 percent comes from conferences. (Yes, I know these parts don’t add up to 100 percent.)

[From Michael Arrington’s plan to save The New York Times: The best writers should quit | VentureBeat]

I wrote about the 100 year flood that newspapers are facing and my conclusion, which I believe still holds, is that newspapers have to abandon their category and create something new that combines hyperlocal information services, create new advertising units, aggressively pursue syndication, and move into video as a natural compliment to text.

When I post a link as a tweet, the link gets more traffic than when I blog it (as measured proportionally according to my twitter follower number and daily pageview traffic to my blog). The traffic is immediate and often quite profound, not uncommon that within 2-3 minutes of posting a link it is not uncommon to have between 40-60 clicks on it and within an hour can have several hundred if not more due to retweets (I have 1,600 followers, a lot but certainly not what someone like Pete Cashmore has, so I can only imagine the link deluge he can create).

Not surprisingly, the link traffic for a tweeted link is immediate and very distorted in that it falls off to zero within hours. Twitter is a medium that lives in the moment so anything that falls below the fold is gone forever for all practical purposes. On my blog, thanks to search tools predominately, a link can live on literally forever as search traffic finds discrete posts and continues to send traffic to linked items. Items posted to my blog can benefit substantially from services like StumbleUpon, and Twitter itself has risen in ranking in terms of traffic sources to where it is not uncommon to see Twitter drive incoming traffic to blog posts well beyond the useful life of the link itself.

What would I conclude from this? My primary learning is that Twitter is indeed useful as a microblogging service that people are using to discover information. This is not a zero sum game between Twitter and blogs, the two compliment each other nicely provided the author uses each according to their unique capabilities. Bloggers that are using Twitter primarily as a mechanism for promoting new blog content are missing a bigger opportunity to build out a separate and distinct publishing channel that enhances and expands their blogging footprint.

This integrated approach to new media is no different than what has happened in other formats over the years.

The blog, launched in Hebrew yesterday, is a compilation of daily testimonies told by four silhouetted members of the Shin-Bet, identified only by the first letter of their names. Every day users can tune in to the site to learn about “N”, head of the QA department and his double life, “A” the software engineer nicknamed ‘the expert’, “H” fondly referred as the “secret woman” serving as a QA engineer and finally “I” the systems integration engineer known as ‘the brain’.

None of the posts in the blog of these four tech-geeks reveals details on real targets, places or names. Instead, the blog portrays the Shin Bet as just another company, trying to attract talent by talking about work hours (one of the bloggers says he’s at home by 6:30pm), salary (”no less than any given tech company”), and facilities (”aren’t gleaming and fashionably designed like I was used to in the world of high-tech”).

The blog is getting quite a few comments, in one of them a reader wrote: “Maybe I’ve watched too many James Bond movies, but you make it sound grey and charmless.” The Shabak (Shin Bet) official site, prominently promotes the new blog on its homepage. Check it out.

At some point, unfortunately, CAPTCHA devolves from a simple human reading test into an intelligence test or an acuity test. Depending on how invasive you want to be, you’ll eventually be forced to move to two-factor authentication, like sending a text message to someone’s cell phone with a temporary key.

[From Coding Horror: CAPTCHA is Dead, Long Live CAPTCHA!]

I have been spending a lot of time in Sharepoint and when I read the various blog posts calling Sites a Sharepoint killer, it was evident to me that most of these commenters had never even seen Sharepoint, much less actually have used it. Sharepoint isn’t a wiki (which is basically what Sites is), so to compare Sites to Sharepoint on the basis of Sites superior wiki-ness begins with a false premise.

Even if Sites were competitively superior to Sharepoint on the basis of product features, that alone would not be enough.

Google’s competitive weakness with regard to Microsoft in SMB and enterprise accounts is partly due to the fact that their apps are lightweight when compared, but is more due to the account control that Microsoft holds as a key asset. Sharepoint is sold into SMB and enterprise accounts as a bundle, an up-sell to existing account, or offered as an incentive to get something else. Google simply doesn’t have the ground operation that Microsoft has, nor quite frankly the resources to build it.

What I mean by this last statement is that Google is starting to come under increased scrutiny with regard to expansion plans. As their search advertising business levels off the level of scrutiny they face will only grow, which means that spending a few billion dollars to build out a true enterprise sales and channel organization, or acquire one, which is likely to take years before returns are seen, is something they are not well positioned to do right now.

In my opinion, their original assumption was that they could flank Microsoft with the Google search appliance straight into IT and end users adopting applications as a guerilla insurgency within the enterprise. That simply hasn’t happened and probably won’t. Search appliance is doing well but those IT groups have little say in what business applications are adopted, and users as well as business decision makers have little incentive to risk going with Google when Microsoft is proven and already there.

Furthermore, the total cost of an application represents a package of associated items, the least of which is the license, so going with Google apps still means you incur support, training, and administration costs. If Google wants to really beat Microsoft in the enterprise then they are going to have to execute a full frontal assault, something they are ill-prepared to do.

I started out this post writing about the lack of critical analysis in the blogosphere, but an interesting thing tends to happen as the day goes on with announcements like this. Below is a snapshot of Techmeme later in the day when a number of bloggers started showing up with a “hold on cowboy” message that does reflect a more sober look at what Google is doing.

Maybe instead of criticizing the lack of critical analysis, I should modify that to suggest it’s a lack of immediate critical analysis that I find troubling. The problem with the blogosphere, like media, is that there is a race to be first rather than to be the most complete. TechCrunch has built a nice franchise on scoops and breaking news, and as a consequence everyone rushes to be a part of that early group.

What does all this mean? Probably not much on balance as my observation isn’t unique or earth shaking, it’s more a reflection on the traditional dynamics of media and PR, as well as human desire for recognition which is played out in the blogosphere with trackbacks and links. One thing that would be pretty cool to see is a trendline that tracks sentiment on particular issue or product launch over time to see if there is any repeating pattern.