• Google News's Josh Cohen points out that if you're a newspaper and operate a subscription service, then you won't show up in regular Google searches (though you will in Google News searches, according to a complex formula) - which are the sort that drive a lot of traffic to newspaper websites.
Quite where the whole "subscription/paywall/club/advertising/free" debate is heading is impossible to see at the moment, because there simply aren't enough examples at the top level to compare. But it's worth being mindful of what Nick Carr, an erstwhile Guardian Technology columnist, has to say about the principle and possible practice, and about the situation as it pertains just now:
The essential problem with the newspaper business today is that it is suffering from a huge imbalance between supply and demand. What the Internet has done is broken the geographical constraints on news distribution and flooded the market with stories, with product. Supply so far exceeds demand that the price of the news has dropped to zero.
That actually tallies with Rupert Murdoch (remember him?) and his comment that there's too much ad inventory out there (which means "there are more web pages with ad spots than we can find advertisers to sell the spots to").
• ooh, that would be a tiny bit of fun: the new mayor of Seattle - though only his office, not the whole administration - would like to move to Macs from PCs "to let them stick with the technology they've been using". Which also includes iPhones rather than Blackberries, it seems. If you tell Steve Ballmer, make sure it's in an office with no chairs...
• just for fun: can you parse XML with regex? Well, here's an answer to whether you should
• We're counting: on November 13 (that's last Friday) Michael Arrington suggested that a beta of Google's Chrome OS (that's the netbook-powering one, sure to be souped up to be a pretty-much-everything-powering one) is "to launch within a week". We're standing by our beds.
• And finally, have you seen Miriam? She's one of the many missing people in the UK; missing from Hinton on the Green, Worcestershire, since last Tuesday, and people are concerned as she is "unwell".
Stephen Fry tweeted about her, which may show yet another way of getting us to notice missing people. Do take a look - and take a look around the Missing People site. You might make that key difference.
