On the AppScout side there are some compelling numbers in digg’s favor. They cite a popular PC Mag article which received 38,069 referral visitors from digg, against a measly 84 from twitter. For those scoring, that’s 453 times more traffic from digg. Obviously this is an article that happened to make it high on digg’s front page, but you’d think that something that digg-worthy would have brought in more than 84 hits from Twitter.

On the TechCrunch side, though, you’ve got the fact that Twitter is their 3rd largest source of traffic. Not referral traffic, ALL traffic. That’s impressive. One important detail that’s lacking, though, is how TechCrunch accounts for RSS traffic and how much those feeds account for. If you plugged Twitter into this chart as just another feed reader, how would it compare?

That’s the crucial comparison because, as Steve Gillmor rambled, twitter is supplanting RSS. Some say RSS deserves to be replaced. That’s a far different proposition from replacing digg and other aggregators. Twitter, like rss, is now part of the plumbing of the web, while digg is a news site.

If twitter is to be a digg competitor, it will have to take the form of a Tweetmeme or something similar. In effect, with every retweeted link or tag people are voting on stories without realizing they’re voting so it’s easy enough to power a digg type site with twiter. As Gillmor further rambled, capturing the moment via twitter could turn into something beautiful and organic. That should be great for users right? A more pure version of digg, before it was controlled by elite members.

Wrong.

Guess what - People don’t like organic and random, and that’s not what digg provides. People like the patina of the organic. Digg is curated by its group of die-hard users, much like the New York Times is curated by its editors. I go to digg because I want a certain brand of off-the-wall, semi-topical, slightly geeky news. I go to nytimes.com because I want to know what’s actually happening in the world. I go to techmeme to see what I need to know about the web on a given day. Why would I go to tweetmeme? I don’t have the answer, and that’s one reason AppScout’s results so strongly favor digg - AppScout fits the digg brand.

Does Twitter have the potential to drive as much traffic as digg? Yes. Does that mean it’s a digg-killer? No. Just as digg, the Times, techmeme, and others coexist, so can a tweetmeme. People just need a reason to go there first.

*Update - from Mashable we have a good description of the challenges twitter faces in becoming a useful news aggregator.

Isaacson is, IMHO, partially on the right track. He should also be pleased to know that his ideas are already in motion.

There are those who say “information wants to be free,” which sounds great, but ignores so many problems. It takes time and effort to find, organize, and communicate information in a meaningful way. Saying that quality journalism should be free is like saying “handcrafted furniture wants to be free.”

In a related example, I disagree with Michael Arrington’s assertion that the price of music will approach zero. I think anything that requires resources to produce and distribute should fetch a fair price. To rephrase Mr. Arington’s thesis, the price of distributing recorded music will approach zero. It’s the middle-man that the internet has replaced, but it will not replace the band.

I don’t know a blogger out there who would refuse payment for his or her content. And I don’t mean scraping by on insurance quote click-throughs, or product placement of the ESPN variety. Payment for the work produced. Almost sounds too good to be true, right?

With a little more help from a certain internet titan, it just might come to pass.

Charging for your product is the most basic market concept there is, but there are many ways to execute it. Razors and blades may work as a gimmick because people are already buying something, but on the internet no one even wants to open their wallet. So what’s the answer? Go to the place where more people open their wallets than anywhere else - Amazon.com

In his article Mr. Isaacson imagines a fantastic system whereby people can consume articles in an information buffet via subscription, or a la carte using small payments of pennies per article:

The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment.

Isaacson’s theory is a bit pie-in-the-sky at times, but the micropayment system that Isaacson imagines exists in part actually, and other parts are being developed by a variety of players. Jeff Bezos, the best CEO on Wall Street, is a true innovator. He loves books, he loves efficiency. He knows that innovation will happen and the best anyone can do is ride the wave.

Today, the NY Times costs $14 monthly on the Kindle. For the amount of time I spend reading the Times, that is a great deal. Much better than a movie ticket, a cup of coffee, or other real world “micropayments” we make every day. The problem is that it’s $14 more than free. But if the choice for consumers becomes either having to pay, or having no newspaper at all, that problem goes away. That scenario looks increasingly plausible.

Also, if I’m not a subscriber and I have to enter my credit card to pay 5 cents every time I want to read an article, I’m never going to do it. But if Amazon (or a still private service called Kachingle) kept track of my Times reading via cookies and I saw a $5 charge on my credit card for a month of miscellaneous articles, I’d think nothing of it and keep happily consuming news.

Technically there are many problems to solve, and there is the issue of getting people to pay for something that used to be free. But despite those challenges, and considering the paucity of options, I recommend the papers start talking to Mr. Bezos about outsourcing subscriptions BEYOND the Kindle. Once we get used to paying for content, we may actually get the free press we’ve always wanted.

*** Update - There happens to be a lively discussion of this same topic on NYTimes.com today. Some agree that payments could work, some not.

First and foremost in my mind is - What kind of machine is this supposed to run on? With the Windows Alpha, Boxee now offers Mac, Linux and PC versions, so obviously it can run on almost any machine. But are people going to buy a laptop to run this on? For example, I also “tested” the Alpha for Linux on an old IBM Thinkpad. I say “tested” because the machine was too crippled by the graphics components that it was unusable. Granted, that Thinkpad was on the low end of low spec, but like I said, I’m not buying an additional computer to run my TV on. The cable company gives me their box for free (or they would if I hadn’t canceled cable a few months ago).

Fortunately, Boxee is fully aware of this issue. Wisely, they’re considering a bevy of options, including game consoles, apple TVs, and cable boxes. Something is in the pipes, you can be sure. But clearly Boxee knows getting this part right is vital to their growth.

Another question is what will come out of the open-source nature of the software? Why would I want to create my own skin for my TV? I don’t know and, even though I’m sure some people will do just that, I don’t think it’s going to be a killer feature. So we’ll call the open source component a bit of a Red-Herring. Yes, there is already some cool development for watching local over-the-air stations and using iPhones as remotes, but…my TV remote works well. The success of Boxee will be far more contingent on integrating content than on making it look like your new MySpace profile.

One thing open sourcing it will do is ensure that new formats and sources can be integrated quickly. But again, most large content providers are already integrated anyway, so it’s all about getting the deals in place that free the content.

Another potential hurdle is that it’s a net neutrality case waiting to happen. If Boxee is running video over Time Warner cables to display YouTube content in HD and the lines get jammed…Then it’s time to check out Google’s “Diagnostic” tools. The recent landmark ruling against Comcast bodes well for Boxee and democracy of information, but it’s certainly not the last battle we’ll see. The storm brewing over Cox Communications is looking particularly nasty.

There are countless other issues to get into in the war for living room supremacy, including a separate battle on the horizon (Netflix vs. HBO). For now, though, I’ll just take a breather and enjoy some new Lost episodes on demand.

Wrong.

The US Airways flight 1549 story is a perfect demonstration of why Twitter and the MSM work in harmony, and make each other better.

The TwitPic heard round the world, from the phone of Janis Krums is here. Take a look at the picture. Take a look at the tweet. Amazing right? Now tell me what happened.

Not so simple is it? Clearly, the picture tells a story, but not the whole story. That gets filled in here, here, and in a most engaging way here. I first heard about the crash on twitter, but about a second later a coworker shouted at me “A plane just crashed in the Hudson! It’s all over CNN.” When I asked what happened, my colleague was able to tell me they suspected birds took out the engines. From that point on I got almost all my information from the MSM. The only time Twitter came up after that was in the self-congratulatory sense in stories about Mr. Krums.

Twitter, Qik, FriendFeed, and other “Live” services are fantastic for providing firsthand, on the scene bits of information, but those bits need thoughtful investigation by human beings to be communicated in a meaningful way. Notice I didn’t say journalists, I said human beings. It doesn’t have to be a journalist, that’s not the important part. The important part is a thoughtful investigation. It just so happens that most of the time the people with the focus, practice, and resources to do that are journalists.

What Twitter makes apparent is that there is information out there, everywhere. That shouldn’t be a breakthrough discovery, but Twitter allows you to almost see the everyday dots and dashes that float in the ether. What happens next is up to those who gather the information. Not to get too philosophical, but in a way, Twitter is there to till the soil of everyday data, and journalists are there to harvest it and get it ready for consumption. For news junkies like me, that’s a very good thing.

**
Lest you think I’m just an old media apologist, Matthew Ingram and Peter Kafka have posted similar thoughts. Lest you think they’re old media apologists, well, maybe sometimes…

Adeo Ressi says the VC model is broken.

Nouriel Roubini has been saying for a while now that the US is nearly bankrupt.

Call them all pessimists, but they’re having their day right now, Roubini especially. When everyone else wants to say “Things are bad, BUT…” these guys have the fortitude to say “things are bad, AND…”

It’s hard to argue against them at this point. The only question in my mind now is, who’s the next prophet of doom?

Am I scared? No. But I know that nothing’s going to come easy, now or in the foreseeable future.

* Does “Foreseeable Future” even mean anything at this point?

As part of the acquisition the original press release states:

“weRead is headed by founders Krishna Motukuri and Harish Abbott who will divide their time between Lulu’s US offices and weRead’s center of operations in Bangalore, India.”

Congrats to Krishna, Harish, and the folks at Lulu.

According to Lulu’s press release:

“weRead gives users access to an expanded library of all books in print, so self-published works can be compared favorably, or otherwise, with Shakespeare, John Grisham or J.K. Rowling. The possibilities are virtually limitless.”

On top of the sensible partnership of publisher and marketer, Pluggd.in thinks the “teaming” might actually be an acquisition. There is some chatter in the Twittersphere, but no hard evidence yet, so we’ll have to wait and see what comes out in the near future.

But they’ve recently been testing some new video ads that focus on their core in a much more sensible way. The spots pose simple but tempting queries like “is chocolate really bad for dogs?” and “what toys are dangerous for babies?”, and pairs them with the ace in the hole of ad agencies everywhere - video of dogs and babies. It’s a tempting click that takes you straight to your answer, via ask.com. IMHO they’re very well done. They reinforce the brand, deliver on the promise, and are pretty cute as well.

Recent Alexa rankings show that the engine may be gaining some ground, and in search every inch counts:

With paid search, we’re talking about a $12 billion market here, and growing. So if Ask has indeed increased its traffic as much as Alexa indicates, they could be looking at tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue growth. Of course, Alexa is quite often wrong, and Compete is showing no such bump, so this may be a false alarm (though compete updates less frequently). that being siad, I thing the new strategy of focusing on everyday answers is a much better bet than a mass market campaign, especially one that just didn’t makes sense.

For more background, check out Don Dodge’s great piece last year on why 1% of search market share is worth over $1 billion in market capitalization.

Happy Birthday Shoeboxed, and good luck the next year and beyond.

The most notable app of the bunch is Twitterific developed by Iconfactory in Greensboro. The straightforward Twitter management tool has exploded in popularity to the point that the twitterific bird is now one of the most recognizable characters in the Twitter and iPhone communities. Its spread has taken the folks at Iconfactory completely off guard.

Other, more fun ‘n games apps, are Sumo, from Stinkbot in Durham, and Lumina from CrossComm in Durham. What’s interesting about these offerings is that they were developed as afterthoughts. Rob Terrell works full time for Avacast, a webcasting company, but wrote Sumo years ago and quickly ported it to he iPhone. Don Shin wrote Lumina as a side project.

The most useful looking app came from Modality in Durham, which ported its academic offerings, including Netter’s Anatomy, to the iPhone. That’s going to be a great reference for Med students, and even doctors, when they’re on the go.