Reflecting interest from the U.S. (the site’s users are split evenly between the U.S. and Europe), the company opened an office in New York in March, and today is rolling out new features that let users receive rewards as points that are redeemable as exclusive offers from merchants.

Roxanne Varza, the company’s communications director, declined to disclose the number of Shopcade users, but said the user population is growing about 20-30 percent a month and is 35 percent male. The website also features about 65 million products, including those from brands like Urban Outfitters, Adidas and Forever 21.

Users log into Shopcade with their Facebook account to follow brands, people and categories. They can also select products from the overall pool and add them to their personal “shopcades” (or individual collections of favorite items). As they recommend and buy products, users receive cash or points from the sale. (User actions generate affiliate links, which enable the site to give users a cut of sales.)

Previously, Shopcade only let users redeem points to customize their shopcades (with different colors, decorations, etc.). But Varza said the new changes will enable users to redeem their points with exclusive offers from merchants, as well as digital goods, such as music from iTunes or Spotify. The company is also exploring the use of those new points to drive offline shopping.

Previous reports have suggested that the affiliate e-commerce site encourages social spam. But Varza said users are rewarded per purchase (when friends make a purchase after entering their Shopcade) and not per click, so they’re incentivized to choose products others will buy and not just overwhelm their friends with products.

While the site hasn’t boasted of a multimillion dollar funding round, its founder and funders offer compelling pedigrees. Nathalie Gaveau, the founder and CEO, co-founded PriceMinister, a French eBay rival that was later acquired by Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten (which recently invested in Pinterest).  Its angel investors include Daniel Bernard, former CEO of European retailer Carrefour, Ian Livingston, co-founder of Eidos Games and Lord John Birt, former director general of the BBC. The company hasn’t disclosed the amount of its seed funding but is looking to raise a new round.

Shopcade’s latest changes come on the heels of Fab.com’s recent decision to step up its social options. And, like Pinterest, Varza said, people are using the site to express themselves through shopcades dedicated to specific categories and interests (like Hello Kitty or, oddly, Moose).

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By now, many people are familiar with the story of how NPR editor Andy Carvin used Twitter to create a kind of crowdsourced newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East last year, inventing a brand-new kind of journalism on the fly and in full public view. In a discussion with me on Thursday in Toronto about the lessons that can be learned from his experience, Carvin made some interesting points about the value of such an approach — including the importance of being transparent about the process, and the virtues of being human.

The discussion at the Mesh 2012 conference (full disclosure: I am a co-founder) touched on a number of different elements of what Carvin did during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, including two important factors that allowed him to take on the role that he did. The first was the nature of his job at NPR, which — as a senior digital strategist — allowed him to experiment with new tools and take risks. The second was the fact that he already had a number of contacts in the Middle East through his work with Global Voices and other social advocacy groups (Harvard researcher and author David Weinberger, whom I also interviewed at the conference, live-blogged the session with Carvin).

Both of these meant that Carvin was perfectly positioned to do what he did when dissidents started revolting in Tunisia, and then following that in Egypt and Libya. He also noted with a laugh that “it helps when you have ADHD” (which he does), because for several months during the height of those revolutions, he was spending almost every waking minute reading or posting on Twitter, managing several lists of dissidents and thousands of responses from followers. His peak output reached 1,400 tweets a day at one point, whereupon Twitter blocked his account as spam.

Not a newswire, but a crowdsourced newsroom of public editors

But Carvin also talked about how he approached the reporting of real-time events on Twitter, and how he doesn’t really like having what he did called a “newswire.” Instead, he says he prefers to think of it as a crowdsourced newsroom — with him as the reporter, or the anchor (or “news DJ,” another term he likes to use) pulling in reports from different places, and then relying on his followers to act as editors and sources, fact-checking and verifying and also distributing the news that he was curating. As he put it:

I get uncomfortable when people prefer my twitter feed as a newswire. It’s not a newswire. It’s a newsroom. It’s where I’m trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That’s a newsroom.

In many cases, Carvin says, this process worked remarkably well — and quickly. In one photo of Egypt, for example, someone he asked for an opinion said that the corner of a building in the background was clearly a prominent local landmark, and then sent a link to a Google Earth view of the building, allowing Carvin to confirm within minutes that it was the same location. He also gave his followers what he called “fire drills,” in which he would ask them to fact-check photos that he knew were fake and then he would look at how many errors they found.

And what happened when he made a mistake and posted something that wasn’t accurate? In one case, he distributed a photo he thought was of a woman who had been shot in battle and was being attended to by nurses — but it turned out she was actually dead, his followers told him, and her body was being prepared for burial. Carvin says he admitted his mistake multiple times, and then retweeted both the criticisms and the corrections as broadly as possible:

You have to be prepared to be accountable in real time. When I screw up, my followers tell me.

News as a process, and the virtues of being human

The NPR editor, who is now working on a book about his experiences, says he believes in the “news as a process” approach, as author Jeff Jarvis and others have described it — in which not only is the reporting of an event crowdsourced in real time, but new information is added and mistakes are also corrected by readers, who journalism professor Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience” (recent events have also shown how social networks like Twitter and Reddit can act as fact-checking engines).

As I tried to argue in a Twitter debate on Friday with a number of people (which Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute curated with Storify) I think there is a lot of public value in doing what Carvin did, by assembling and fact-checking and correcting information in real time. That’s not to say editors don’t have value, or that reporters shouldn’t try to report things as accurately as possible. But when errors are made, I think admitting them publicly and being seen to correct them (not something traditional media is very good at) actually builds trust.

For me — and I think for Carvin — doing this is connected to a larger principle, and that is the value of being human, and of expressing that humanity, even if it means acknowledging a mistake. The NPR editor also admitted that in some cases he was so disturbed by the videos and images he was seeing from Egypt and elsewhere that he responded on Twitter in a way that he says might not have been professional — but he still felt was justified. As Weinberger noted in his live-blog: “Andy perfectly modeled a committed journalist who remains personal, situated, transparent, and himself.”

This is the kind of thing that mainstream media outlets discourage, just as many try to avoid admitting that they have made mistakes. Restrictive social-media policies put in place by many of these outlets seem designed to remove as many of the elements of being human as possible from the practice of being a journalist — which I think is the exact opposite of what needs to happen if traditional journalism is to survive. And I think Andy Carvin is a pretty good example of what one possible future of real-time, crowdsourced journalism actually looks like.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Luc Legay and personaldemocracy

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Enter Talktala, a NY-based startup that believes it can bring counseling to more consumers with a Web platform that provides anonymity and more affordable prices.

Launched with $650,000 in seed funding from angel investors in New York and Israel, Talktala says it provides a secure online platform for people to join topic-based group therapy sessions led by certified therapists. If users want to remain anonymous, they can participate via text or audio. They also have the option to participate as themselves with Web video.

“In a way, it’s a hybrid between traditional therapy and support groups,” said founder Oren Frank, adding that it’s also like an “introduction” to therapy for the 35 million people that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration estimates could benefit from mental-health treatment but don’t receive it. In the week since its launch, Frank said it has attracted 800 patients and 150 certified therapists.

Because the sessions are split among a handful of people, the price is more affordable than a traditional session for each user, but therapists earn the same amount online as they’d make offline. Most sessions cost $9.99 for an hour, although bigger-name therapists have the option to charge more.

Frank is an advertising executive (formerly global creative officer for MRM Worldwide) and his co-founder wife, Roni Frank, was a software developer before returning to graduate school for psychoanalysis. But they developed the site in consultation with psychologists, including Dr. Irvin D. Yalom, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford and a well-regarded author. The site, which is in beta, isn’t as clean-looking as other design-driven contemporary sites, but it does provide an accessible environment that could attract consumers intimidated by traditional treatment.

Talktala isn’t the first to test a platform for Web-based therapy. In 2009, BreakThrough, an online service that let patients search for certified mental-health professionals and schedule appoints conducted via chat, Skype, email or phone, was selected to be part of the TechCrunch50.  According to Angel List, the company has attracted investors such as former PayPal executive Keith Rabois and Invite Media’s Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg and was part of Stanford’s StartX accelerator. For the moment, it only offers therapists in California but has partnered with Blue Shield of California and Magellan.

A recent article in ComputerWorld also documented the rise of Web-based therapy, citing the development of Web video technology, better security and broadband as reasons behind the trend.

The increase in startups that allow professionals in other fields to share their expertise online — such as online course platform Udemy and health network Healthtap that lets doctors answer patient questions online — also suggests some potential for Web-based therapy solutions.

But despite the growing interest in the field, questions still remain. When asked about liability concerns, Frank said the website only works with certified professionals who have information about the patients and a way to reach emergency contacts if they believe a patient is in any immediate danger. But one could imagine that lawsuit-leery professionals might be reluctant to join the site. Consumers might also worry about security and the possibility that their anonymity could be compromised.

Also, consumers already have access to other free mental-health consultations online, such as PsychCentral’s Ask the Therapist service and other online support groups and discussion threads. John Grohol, psychologist and founder of PsychCentral, said it’s unknown how much of a consumer demand there is for tele-psychiatry services that consumer services need to pay for directly. But, he added that Talktala’s lower price point and focus on appealing to everyday people with everyday problems is a move in the right direction.

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The Dawsons, a family of five, created a Kickstarter project last month to raise $30,000 for a series of films aimed at children. The films, called “Clara Tales” were aimed to creating positive, family fare that would inspire kids to create their own work, complete projects associated with the videos or just provide some entertainment. The plan was to make five more and post them all on YouTube with accompanying educational activities.

Why pay for something if you can get it for free?

The first video, posted as part of the pleas for funds, is a well-done story that my own five-year-old loved. She and I watched it, but we didn’t contribute. And that’s part of the problem. Jan Dawson figures that one of the key reasons that the project failed — the family raised $4,727 in pledges — was that people who didn’t contribute would still benefit if others did. From our emailed conversation:

Not to get too nerdy about it, but it’s a classic public good / free rider problem – everybody benefits just the same whether they personally pay for it or not, as long as someone does and it still happens. … This is in stark contrast to some of Kickstarter’s huge success stories, which offered the actual paid product at a discount if you pledged over a certain amount – Kickstarter became simply a channel for pre-orders, and with a popular product that gets you a lot of funding.

He also said that the emotional toll of supporting and monitoring a Kickstarter project was hard. While listing the idea and getting the Kickstarter in place was easy, making the original video to show people what the family was doing, as well as asking friends, family and strangers for money wasn’t something the Dawsons were used to.

What made it hard was that putting yourself out there in this way and repeatedly begging people for money is emotionally draining. We sent countless numbers of emails to friends and family, posted repeated updates on Facebook and Twitter (as you saw) etc. Even though we knew lots of people wanted to pledge, they never quite seemed to get around to it, so that sort of reminding was key. (It’s also made me view our local NPR station’s pledge drives with a little more sympathy!)

Despite their pleas the original Kickstarter closed far short of their goal.

If at first you don’t succeed….

So the family went back to the drawing board, found ways to cut their production costs and came back with another Kickstarter project, this time for $3,000 instead of $30,000. Staying small helped, especially since they had managed to raise more than that the first time around. The second Kickstarter is funded and the family is working on producing more videos. Dawson said that backers from the first project collectively gave the family 90 percent of what they gave us the first time around. Many of the smaller pledges, especially from people the Dawson’s didn’t know, didn’t re-up for the second effort.

Some of the previous contributors pledged larger amounts (perhaps in hopes of seeing this come through) and another $700 or so came from new backers, some who were strangers to the Dawsons. The first project attracted 75 backers while the second raised more and had 69. The Dawsons managed to get some publicity for their efforts thanks to getting a few parenting blogs to pick up the project, but neither of them are some kind of Ze Frank or Louis CK- level of celebrity.

So a few possible lessons one can draw from the Dawsons’ experience is that funding a Kickstarter is possible for anyone — it just requires a willingness to ask people for money. Freeloaders exist on Kickstarter as they do everywhere, so offering an actual product or more tangible rewards might help someone doing a public project get the pledges he or she needs.

And finally, if the first project doesn’t work, maybe your second one will.

For more on the Kickstarter phenomenon see Om’s epic interview with Co-founder Perry Chen.

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The FCC has designated 40 megahertz in the 2.3 GHz frequency band for short-range, wideband transmission within medical facilities and homes. The idea is that cumbersome instruments and their accompanying cords can be replaced with lightweight, disposable sensors, allowing patients more freedom of movement as well as hospitals to keep their patients constantly monitored no matter where they happen to be.

While using the radio waves to assist in monitoring and caring for patients isn’t a new phenomenon, this is the first a government has specifically designated a band specifically for this kind of body area medical telemetry. According to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski it will allow medical device makers to consolidate many of the technologies they have developed on wide array on unlicensed or multi-use frequencies into a single medical band.

“This creative use of spectrum provides wireless health manufacturers with the certainty they need to streamline their product development, which for many years operated on a variety of frequencies,” Genachowski said. “I expect it will eventually lead to technologies not just for health care facilities, but also for inhume use.”

The allocation is also significant because the band isn’t exclusive to medical devices. Health sensors will have to share it with its original occupant, commercial test pilots. With the cooperation of the Department of Defense and the governments spectrum manager the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the FCC hammered out a way to divvy up the spectrum by use case, allowing the health care industry to use it within the confines of the home and the aeronautics industry to use it in the skies above.

It’s an interesting development as the government is starting to get serious about the idea of sharing spectrum between government and commercial uses. The NTIA is proposing that mobile operators and the government agencies split time on the next big block of spectrum identified for mobile broadband use. The wireless industry isn’t exactly hot on the idea, though it has pledged to work with the government.

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That, Intuit Senior VP of Big Data, Social Design and Marketing Nora Denzel told me, was the reaction of one of her co-workers after getting a view of her personal finances using Mint.com. Company bias aside, the story is telling of how individuals might expect to directly benefit from analytics today. Large companies use big data techniques as methods to simultaneously increase revenue and save operating costs, but the most-direct benefit to consumers is usually a targeted advertisement or a list of possible social networking connections. That’s pretty lame. A consumer service that actually cares about your bottom line…? Well, that’s something.

“Data for delight”

That’s what Denzel says Mint is, and it’s able to be that because Intuit collects a lot of data on more than 5 million Mint users. Intuit calls it “data for delight.” The service becomes about more than just tracking your spending, but becomes a tool for comparison. Users can compare their financial situations to others who are similarly situated by demographic, geography or other factors. The service can tell users how much money they’d save by switching to a new credit card or refinancing their mortgages.

Nora Denzel

“The [alerts users] really dig is when we give them personalized information,” Denzel said, comparing Mint to her ink-ordering printer that saves her trips to the office supply store. “At least someone in this house is helping me.”

And let’s say you’re more than one person — let’s say five people running a small business — Intuit has you covered there, as well. Small business owners often have little insight  into the broader market, because they lack the tools, knowledge, and time to collect and analyze the relevant data. “You’re running a race and you have no idea where are,” is how Denzel explains the situation.

However, while many small business owners might never have heard of Hadoop, Voldemort or other big data technologies, Intuit has. And it uses them, Denzel said. Its data store is growing exponentially as it collects more data on users from a growing number of sources. “We call it big data for the little guy,” Denzel said.

For example, a flower shop that uses QuickBooks or any of Intuit’s small-business services can compare its finances to other flower shops in the same city or elsewhere based data gathered from Intuit’s more than 4 million small-business customers. Or the flower shop could be alerted in real-time that it’s about to pay too much for new packing supplies because Intuit’s system has spotted other businesses buying the same thing for less elsewhere.

“Data for decision-making”

But before you can delight anyone with data, you first have to attract and maintain customers. That’s why, Denzel said, about half of Intuit’s big data effort goes toward marketing and social media engagement, and why she has such a unique job title. Marketing especially is a blend of art and science, she explained: “No offense to Mad Men, but it’s all tested now.”

Although “the last mile is always humans,” Denzel said Intuit continuously tests everything from ads to product design to find out what’s working best for customers. After decades in the industry, one of the biggest — and most-humbling — changes she’s seen thanks to big data is that “we’ve outsourced product management to consumers.” If your experience tells you something should work but customers don’t respond, you’re wrong.

Notice the fourth tweet down.

On the social media front, Denzel said Intuit is adamant about monitoring and analyzing social data, as well as about engaging with customers. Sentiment analysis and data mining can tell a company a lot what consumers are saying or feeling about the brand, but they can also help the company meet customer expectations. Denzel said if a customer complains on Twitter, that person expects a response from the company (it’s “their Batphone to your company”). And if they complain on Twitter and then are forced to call, they expect the customer service agent to know how the situation has escalated.

“The chief communications officer is now the chief listening officer,” Denzel said. (I assume Intuit is doing plenty of listening thanks to Friday morning’s outage for QuickBooks Online.)

And Intuit is listening. Last week, I explained how LivePerson uses predictive models to help decide when website visitors might need to engage in live chat with a customer service representative. It turns out Intuit is a LivePerson customer and actually uses text from chats to make Intuit customer service even better.

Denzel said Intuit feeds that data into Hadoop, which lets it determine certain words and phrases that suggest a customer is going to stop using an Intuit product. When those phrases pop up in future chats, a customer might get transferred to the best-available agent; if they’re used on some public forum, that customer might get a call. As with most things big data, an unexpected phone call might be a little bit creepy at first, but it’s probably less so if the problem actually gets resolved and both parties get what they want.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user val lawless.

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From a post on Cicso’s blog:

“Cisco has demonstrated a commitment to delivering innovative software like Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx across a wide spectrum of operating systems, tablets and Smart Phones. We’re seeing tremendous interest in these software offerings. Customers see the value in how these offerings enable employees to work on their terms in the Post-PC era, while still having access to collaboration experiences.

Based on these market transitions, Cisco will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet form factor, and no further enhancements will be made to the current Cius endpoint beyond what’s available today. However, as we evaluate the market further, we will continue to offer Cius in a limited fashion to customers with specific needs or use cases.

Moving forward, we intend to double down on software offerings, like Jabber and WebEx, that provide the anytime, anywhere, and any device experiences. We will leverage key learnings and key collaboration experiences native to Cius in our other collaboration products.”

I recall when my colleague Stacey covered the initial Cius tablet news. She and I discussed the product at length and while it was interesting and newsy enough to report on, I remember pointing out numerous reasons the product had “fail” written all over it.

The main reasons were that mobile technology cycles were revving too fast for a company such as Cisco to keep up, it had little to no differentiation from any competing tablets and the specifications were just plain terrible. Initially the product was slated to run on Intel’s Atom CPU and offered super VGA, or 800 x 600 resolution — for a video communications device! The 7-inch screen is now 1024 x 600 but an Atom Z615 chip powers Android 2.2.2, which is software that debuted two years ago.

Instead of focusing on hardware, I mentioned to Stacey, Cisco should stick with software services that enable collaboration. Lo and behold, as the Cius tablet dies a slow, painful death, Cisco is doing exactly that.

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Thrillist CTO Mark O’Neill

Someone please tell me we’ve gotten past the either-or debate over NoSQL and relational databases.

While NoSQL databases are foundational technologies for web startups — with most of these young companies opting for MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB or something else to fulfill their database needs — they might be better served going a hybrid route instead. There’s always room for a good, old-fashioned relational database — especially if they want to conduct and store financial transactions.

Just ask Mark O’Neill, CTO of Thrillist, a New York City-based media company that fields e-commerce and consumer recommendation services. Thrillist uses the NoSQL MongoDB to track and store tons of data about user interactions, but it’s MySQL all the way when it comes to bread-and-butter transactions and financial data that runs the company.

There’s a reason for that, O’Neill said. As great as MongoDB (or Cassandra or CouchDB or insert your favorite NoSQL entry here) may be, they’re still relatively immature compared to their SQL forebears. The ancillary tools aren’t as robust and it’s hard to find NoSQL talent.

“Skillsets around NoSQL are lacking and SQL [as a language] is relatively simple to learn — writing queries in SQL  is not so bad. With NoSQL, the tools are less robust and the barrier to entry is much higher,” O’Neill told me in an interview.

Thrillist, founded in 2005, looked at several NoSQL options but went with MongoDB over the NoSQL alternatives because at the time it was more stable, had a larger community around it and better tools than the others, O’Neill said.

Make no mistake: MongoDB is great for handling all the critical social interactions that take place. “For each action taken by a user, you want to know what the user’s friends were doing and you want to pull all that data out from a single location. Say you take an action on Meet Up, it will update your user references and update all your friends. Non-relational stores are really good at that and you can afford to keep that data in multiple places — we use Mongo for that,” O’Neill said.

But, for transactions? Well, “Mongo doesn’t really have transactions. If I write [data] in multiple places and want to check all that in at one time, Mongo can’t do that,” O’Neill said. When someone buys something at Thrillist’s Jackthreads site, the system must record their order and all the items associated with that order, or nothing works. “It all gets written or none of it does. Mongo is not good at that,” said O’Neill.

So a word to the wise web startup: NoSQL — in this case MongoDB — is great for what it does, but for your financial transactions stick with SQL.

For more discussion about the technologies — NoSQL or not — powering the web sites and mobile applications we all use, come check out GigaOM’s Structure conference next month.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user takomabibelot

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Newspapers like the New York Times may be piling up revenue from their paywalls, and Warren Buffett may be asserting his undying commitment to the small-town publications he has just acquired, but there continue to be signs that the printing of news on dead trees does not have a great and glorious future — and the latest is the news from Advance Publications that its New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, will no longer be printed daily. As painful as that decision likely is for the paper and many of its staff, not to mention its print readers, the Times-Picayune is grappling with a reality that almost every newspaper will have to face sooner or later, whether they want to or not.

David Carr of the New York Times broke the news that the paper was considering such a move on Wednesday, and his report was later confirmed by Advance, which said that it was forming a new company to manage both the newspaper and the New Orleans news website NOLA.com and would be letting go an unspecified number of staff, including several senior editors at the Times-Picayune. Instead of being printed daily, the newspaper will now only be available on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

Who will be the next one to stop publishing daily?

The Times-Picayune isn’t the only newspaper that is making these moves: Advance announced that three of its papers in Alabama will also be moving to a three-day printing schedule instead of being daily, and another paper owned by the company — the Ann Arbor News in Michigan — stopped printing daily in 2009, dropping to just Thursdays and Sundays. But as Carr notes, the change in New Orleans makes that city one of the largest and most significant American centers to be without a daily printed newspaper, and it raises a question that is probably in the back of every newspaper publisher’s mind: who is going to be next? As journalism professor Jay Rosen put it recently:

Printing itself remains important, and a revenue generator. But the newspaper company that is still organized around that act of production is the company whose stock you should short.

Billionaire Warren Buffett has gotten a lot of attention for buying Media General and its 63 publications in a $143-million deal, as though that somehow ensures a bright future for newspapers. But while Buffett says he is committed to the kind of community journalism that the small papers he is purchasing are theoretically known for, he is a businessman first and a newspaper-lover second — and he didn’t say anything about loving print. I don’t think the Berkshire Hathaway billionaire would hesitate for a second to make exactly the kind of moves that the Newhouse family and Advance Publications are making, or even to shut down the printing presses altogether if necessary.

As Hamilton Nolan notes at Gawker, printing news on dead trees doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense when you look at it rationally — at least, not as a way of delivering breaking news or real-time journalism or anything that would benefit from links, video, etc. Will people still read printed newspapers? Of course they will, in the same way that people still go to the theater or listen to the radio. But those industries are no longer the media powerhouses that they used to be, because the majority of their audience has moved elsewhere — and so have advertisers. And that is the printed newspaper conundrum in a nutshell.

A painful transformation that more will face

These financial pressures have led to what Ken Doctor calls a “forced march” towards printing fewer papers, and it is one that has created a hue and cry in the case of the Times-Picayune, in part because of that city’s history: the disastrous floods of 2005, and the havoc they wreaked on New Orleans, is something the region still hasn’t recovered from. The newspaper heroically continued to publish during the disaster — online at least — and became a lifeline for many, although its subscription levels have declined dramatically since. And this is why some are criticizing Advance and its decision so heavily, including one impassioned open letter that says:

Journalists risked their lives for the city they loved and justly received international recognition for their hard work. It was one the finest moments for your media empire. But you are about to turn that victory into a sad defeat. All of that hard work and recognition is going to be flushed away if the daily paper ceases operations.

Is that really true though? Perhaps the audience for the Times-Picayune‘s news will have to adjust, but if anything the example that it provided when it couldn’t publish in print — when the web was the only medium available — suggests that the newspaper could be just as effective, if not more so, although some seem to doubt this. Is it a painful transition to make? Of course it is, and all the more painful for the unknown number of print journalists who will lose their jobs. But the disruption caused by the web and digital media isn’t something that can be held at bay forever, not even by the sandbag strategy of a paywall.

The harsh reality is that printed newspapers are no longer one of the dominant methods of delivering news and information to people, and arguably haven’t been for some time. That doesn’t mean the skills and expertise of journalists who work for those institutions aren’t valuable any more — if anything, they are even more valuable (although they are also facing a lot more competition from things that don’t even look like journalism). But they need to be done in different ways, and a kind of reactionary, fetishistic attachment to printing things on paper is not going to help. As Betaworks CEO John Borthwick put it at paidContent 2012, media companies need to stop fixating on specific containers for information.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Zarko Drincic and George Kelly

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According to my recent conversations with sources, a reading of Google’s blog and evasions by the search giant when I asked about its stance, Google’s not as into sharing as it once was. Soon after Google proposed its fiber to the home project in Kansas City, Kan. one of the product managers announced that other ISPs and services could build on top of the future network to deliver their own services.

Additionally, in its first blog posting, it stressed openness saying, “We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers.”

But in the last few days I’ve heard from a few sources in the fiber community that Google has been continuing to back off its open promises, I asked a Google spokeswoman if Google was still committed to opening up its network. She told me, “We are committed to providing the best product for our customers,” and declined to comment further.

This change of heart isn’t entirely new, but with the fiber to the home project set to launch later this summer it’s worth trying to understand how far Google has come from its promises of two years ago. A blog post from June of last year shows it beginning to sidestep the question.

Q: Will Google’s infrastructure be open to other companies?
A: We plan to offer ultra high-speed Internet access directly to consumers at an affordable price. We look forward to sharing more information as we begin to develop more specific plans.

Why do we care if Google is open or not?

So far the “more information” appears to be that Google isn’t keen to share. But why is Google opening up its network such a big deal anyhow? Because fiber networks are designed to meet broadband needs for decades to come, new networks are a chance to change the competition paradigm in the U.S.

In many truly open networks, the mandate is that two or three fibers run to each premise – then access providers put equipment in at the patching point and tie in to their customers on dark fiber. This lets consumers buy Internet from one provider, TV from another and so on. Different broadband and TV providers can deliver service over different strands, which fosters true competition. The Amsterdam city network is set up this way.

But instead of having an open physical network provide competition, the U.S. went with competition from two providers — a cable operator and a telephone company. It worked for a while, but as telcos stop investing in DSL and cable providers start to become the only option for faster broadband, the market looks less competitive. It’s like saying a car competes with an electric bike (or in some cases a motorcycle).

But open fiber is more like offering service providers a road (here my analogy breaks down a bit), and they can deploy car services, bus services or whatever on top of it. And seeing the model in action in the U.S. would offer powerful data about how to build a truly competitive broadband infrastructure works.

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