It’s a great talk if you want to hear another explanation of the good content + platforms that make publishing fast, easy and cheap = new media success, but there is more here.

When talking about how his observations are not just about cheap jokes about racial stereotypes, but are in fact intended as observations on competitive elitism, class and privilege, and about how the social publishing tools and voice (casual, humor, even self-mocking) shaped a conversation about those things, Lander makes the point that many traditional journalists need to understand in order to understand the value of the Web as a social publishing platform.

In the past, publishers and broadcasters have deputized official commentators who have handed down observations about society from on high, always formatting their messages for optimal consumption within the medium’s market. The consumers of these messages provided feedback in very small, highly mediated ways through the letters to the editor, and indirectly through their continued consumption. Just as a person who repeats the same workout week after week at the gym hits a point where they just aren’t getting anywhere with it, this form of debate is atrophying, as sensitive issues become polarized or disappear from the conversation altogether as too troublesome for mainstream outlets to handle. As the stakes of the debate go up, original reporting goes down and takes the form of horse-race coverage over the effects facts have on the debate, even as the facts are being covered.

However, the social publishing tools on the Web and the interactions between them mean that social commentary can spark conversation that its authors do not seek to control. Lander is up front about the fact that he started his blog in moments on a whim as a joke, but quickly realized that he had stumbled upon an important and compelling set of facts and observations which people found funny and insightful. The difference is that the initial observations (reporting?) that informs and initiates this conversation takes place in a format that is easily consumed, shared and referenced, which invites, not just feedback, but collaboration, sharing and remixing.

Think I’m comparing apples to oranges? Today’s Columbus Dispatch has a feature on male high school students growing beards, a piece which is fun and includes some humorous comments by the subjects, but which is also about boring issues like images of adulthood and masculinity. In a society where traditionally manly careers are declining in social stature, where there is a scholastic performance gap between the genders, and where Time magazine runs cover stories about Twixters, these are not purely slow news day issues. What is more, the Q&A at the end of Landers’ speech, which is to students at the London School of Economics no less, is about race, ethnicity, race politics, privilege, globality, the media, etc.

The nut is that Google is developing a version of their Google Checkout service that will provide a simple system for users to submit micropayments to Web content platforms through. There is more information in Google’s 8-page brief, which Google submitted to the Newspaper Association of America in response to a request for information on tools sites can use to facilitate paid content.

The system Google is proposing isn’t so groundbreaking for a technical sense, and I predict that sometime in 2010 we will see similar systems from Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and others. In fact, it makes some sense to me for Twitter to be thinking about wading in, too. Technically, it could already be done using Paypal, though the obvious advantage to the big guys getting involved is that it would mean that visitors wouldn’t have to sign up for a new service from a company they might be less familiar with, and, in fact, they would probably already be signed in. Raise your hand if you don’t have a google username … anyone?

In fact this model has existed for about as long as the Web has existed as a going concern. We all know that porn is and has been big business online since people had to download JPG files over dial-up connections and Real Audio had a product people actually wanted to install on their computers. Most folks are familiar with the business model for big adult-content sites, too: they give away a little bit of it, and then they charge a monthly fee for access to the rest. However, this is not how most of the adult content sites on the Web make their money, and that’s a good thing for the avid devotee of their wares.

Many small and medium sites are affiliates of age-verification services, which charge monthly or annual fees in exchange for account credentials which can log users in to their member sites. The ‘age-verification’ part simply means that they ensure that you are old enough to consume their content by requiring you to have a credit card, but the real service they provide is collecting one fee for one account to log users in to many sites, who in tern get paid small amounts per user (micropayments even).

Of course, another big difference between adult content Web sites and newspaper Web sites is that the former immediately embraced the Web as an enabler of new business models based on providing new value to consumers in new ways, while the latter has kept trying to find ways to use new tools and platforms in support of old business models and organizational structures.

It would be hard to find an industry whose product, production and market have been more impacted than the news media’s.  Understanding this, it is easy to understand why it remains one of the most resistant to cooperative innovation, but I think everyone is starting to understand that the time has come to innovate.  The harsh economy is serving as the tipping point for many media organizations who’ve failed to replace eroding revenue or innovate their operations, and the new growth in the industry are starting to bear fruit. Consider for evidence the recent episode of Jeff Jarvis’ Media Talk USA, wherein he was joined by Deb Galant from Baristanet.com to discus hyperlocal news, online-only business models and the sad fact that less than .5% of the time users spend online is spent on newspaper Web sites.

I think therefor the most interesting read of this story is as another attempt by Google to get along with news content creators, who provide the important grist for so much of what goes on online. I think these efforts are just beginning, and I think that, if the traditional organizations continue to get on board, it’s going to very interesting in the coming months.