Next Tuesday, Pratt will be speaking at SXSW about her life in publishing and some of the things she's seen and heard along the way. We thought it was as good a time as any to catch up with her and talk about the transition from print to pixels and why, in her view, print just doesn't cut it anymore. 

What is the most striking difference between publishing today and what you were doing back in the 1990s? 

I was always really intent on engaging with the community back in the Sassy days, but it was so cumbersome. For example, we would do a reader-produced issue of the magazine once a year. It meant that people had to actually mail their ideas in, via the U.S. Postal Service. Then we would pick who we wanted, write back to them, get them on a plane, fly them to New York, put them up and have them work on the issue. Now it's just getting feedback and content from readers is just so much easier. On xoJane we put up stories written by readers everyday, multiple times a day. That's one big difference. 

So, you were doing the UGC thing back in the 90s. 

Yeah, we were and also very much incorporating what now would be comments from the readers throughout the magazine but it was all done through the mail. It was a much slower, more expensive and more cumbersome process. I always wanted to make the magazine like a conversation. 

Your South By Southwest talk will focus, in part, on why the print model doesn't work anymore. Why do you think print is broken? 

I actually don't think that print is going to completely die. I think that there are going to be far fewer titles and maybe like one title per category. But I do still think that there's something about the physical format. People still like lying in bed at night and flipping through a magazine. 

There are still some times when I think print makes sense, but for the most part, I think that there's just so much good stuff out there that people can get, for free obviously and that they can get it more quickly. But also I think that people don't necessarily have the trust in experts that they used to. And that's sort of what magazines' bread and butter is: This person knows better than you do how to take care of your skin or whatever. I think that now the people that you trust to get your advice from are the people that are living it and are willing to tell you the truth. And you can get more of that online.

Is there anything from the print days that you miss? 

Aesthetically, the crafting of a layout and every layout being able to be unique and not formulaic or not like what we do now, where everything is templatized. I like being to take imagery and take different fonts and to feel like it's just very open-ended what you can do creatively. So that aspect I do miss. 

There's also something little bit warmer about print. I like the smell of magazine paper. I've liked it since I was a teenager. Other than that, it's a dying medium, for sure. 

What are some of your favorite things about the Web, by comparison? 

The instantaneous interaction with the community. I live in the comments section of xoJane and xoVain. My daughter gets really frustrated that I spend more time with the commenters. She'll notice when I'm doing it - "You're talking to CatButt again!" - But I love that type of interaction. 

Online, people are able to be really raw and put themselves out there. There's a willingness to just completely put yourself out there and now just show people the before or after, but show them the process. Talk about what you're going through before you've got it all sewn up and before you have the ending to the story. I think that works really well online. 

One of things I've always loved is discovering talent. Cat Marnell is a really good example of somebody who I found that I thought was a really compelling personality and a great writer. You introduce her to people and overnight, she becomes a real sensation. I've always really liked watching that process, and now it's even faster. It's also more democratic now. People can rise to the top more quickly because so much stuff is getting determined by social. 

On the other hand, lots of outlets have found the participation to be a little too open and wind up having to do battle with the trolls. Have you dealt with any of that? 

I wasn't sure when we were launching xoJane if we were going to have to moderate comments and how all of that was going to work. I had never been in that realm before. I've been amazed to see how the community just does it themselves. Like, someone goes on there and leaves trolling comment and other regulars on the site will come forward and [say that's not cool or whatever]. So it's really a pretty safe space without us having to do much. I think partly that comes from when people write nasty things about me, for example, I"m in there so much that I'll come forward and say "Oh, I see what you're saying" and I'll just put myself out there and open myself up to it and that defeats it. That's not my intention. I'm actually really interested in what people are saying.

What's the most challenging part of publishing online? 

Everything is competition. Back when I was doing print, it was like, okay, there are four teen magazines. Or there are seven women's magazines. Now, someone's on their screen and are they playing Angry Birds? Are they on Facebook? Or are they XOJane? You're competing with everything. That's much trickier to wrap your mind around. 

Any other sneak previews you can give us about your SXSW talk? 

The premise of the talk is nine secrets. Things that I've learned. I'm going to be telling things that I've never told before about what happened when I left Jane magazine and a bunch of other stuff that I've never talked about before. 

Jane's presentation, Secrets Of A Publishing Renegade will be held on Tuesday, March 12 at 11am in Exhibit Hall 5 of the Austin Convention Center.  

Disclosure: xoJane is owned and operated by SAY Media, ReadWrite's parent company. 

Probably not anytime soon. But it's certainly true that these high licensing costs make it much more difficult to do business. For evidence of that, look no further than Last.fm. Next month, the algorithm-fueled Internet music service is scaling back its most radio-like feature in several countries.

In the United States, Canada and the UK, Last.fm's radio streaming feature will still be available via Web browsers, but using it from their desktop client - just like its mobile apps - will become a subscription-only feature. The reason? You guessed it: The cost of securing rights to that music is too high for Last.fm to make the end product freely available, the company says.

In the UK, music licensing costs are even more onerous than they are in the United States, says radio futurologist James Cridland. It's exactly why Pandora isn't available there, nor is there an equivalent service. Last.fm is probably the closest thing the UK has, and it's about to see its functionality scaled back. 

"I'm not sure what the magic bullet is," says Cridland. "But at some point people need to stop and ask why there isn't a Pandora in the UK, which after all is one of the countries that produces the most music in the world." 

Cridland has done the math. Running a service like Pandora in the UK would require a company to pay out more money in licensing fees than they could conceivably earn in revenue.  

Internet Radio Is Expensive And Hard to Monetize

For Last.fm, licensing costs aren't the only part of this equation. It's also worth looking at the other end of the business model - namely, the revenue side. The fact that Last.fm is cutting its free radio service out of its desktop app suggests it's tightening up its freemium business model overall. 

It makes sense. Last.fm's desktop app collects a lot of listener data, but it doesn't appear to directly make money. I can play personalized stations from this app all day long without ever seeing or hearing an advertisement. Starting January 15, I'll have to go to the Last.fm website, where the entire layout is wrapped in display ads and before my Notorious B.I.G.-inspired station starts playing, Taylor Swift will try to sell me some perfume. 

The fact that Last.fm is pulling radio out of its desktop app all together - as opposed to augmenting it with audio ads - suggests that audio-only Internet advertising isn't quite as potent a force as once thought. Personalized, targeted radio ads seem powerful in theory, but they're far more lucrative when paired with video and display advertisements. Paying subscribers are even more valuable. Clearly, Last.fm is hoping to push users in either of those two directions as it continues to navigate a digital music marketplace that looks very different than it did when Last.fm was founded almost a decade ago. 

Last.fm isn't the big fish here - it's the canary in the coal mine. Pandora is far better-positioned than Last.fm, its chief U.S. competitor. Yet even at the head of the pack, business in the streaming music space is brutal. Music licensing costs may not kill Pandora, but Last.fm's troubles make it clear that the issue can wreak havoc on a music service's core functionality. No wonder Tim Westergren won't shut up.

We don't know exactly what radio will look like in 20 years (or if we'll even still call it that), but it's safe bet that it would it be utterly unrecognizable by the likes of Edwin H. Armstrong, who was awarded the patent for FM radio in 1933. We'll always have audio, but transmission via radio waves will be augmented by wireless Internet standards like 4G mobile broadband and Wi-Fi. Those networks will carry much more interactive and smarter audio content, which will likely push traditional broadcasters toward a more personalized experience. 

So who's forging this future? It's still early - and this space will undoubtedly be occupied by a few now-unfamiliar names by 2030 - but there are a handful of organizations already busy chiseling out that future. Keep an an ear on these 5:

Stitcher Radio 

Stitcher Radio is amazing. The four-year-old company blends terrestrial broadcasts with popular podcasts to let users build a highly personalized, lean-back radio experience. Since I started using Stitcher, I've spent a little less time in the NPR iPhone app (though I haven't abandoned it completely) and Instacast, which I had used to subscribe to podcasts. Stitcher also streams other local, non-commercial radio stations in your locale, which you might miss if you don't have an FM radio in every room in the house. 

Like Pandora does with music, Stitcher builds smart radio stations based on your preferences, which are based on your listening history and the familiar thumbs up/down tapping. It's great. If I want to listen to audio hands-free, Stitcher will play back new episodes of my favorite podcasts and public radio shows without me having to fidget with a radio dial or smartphone app interface. Stitcher features content from CNN, NPR, BBC, Fox News and a host of providers large and small. 

How It's Looking Forward: Earlier this year, Stitcher Radio announced a partnership with Ford, who will build the service (along with Pandora) directly into its new cars. Smart. 

Pandora

This one might seem obvious, but Pandora has stayed on top of the personalized Internet radio market for years, despite challenges by everyone from Last.fm to Spotify. The company faces some significant hurdles. As a public company, Pandora now must deal with pressure from investors - and the ongoing battle over artist royalty payments will likely come to a head in the U.S. Congress next year. But Pandora isn't going away.  

For my money, Pandora's Music Genome Project still provides some of the smartest semi-automated music recommendations out there. It doesn't yet rival the brain of a real live tastemaker, but it's getting there, thanks in large part to the human intelligence that heavily fuels Pandora's algorithm.  

How It's Looking Ahead: Like Stitcher Radio, Pandora is finding its way into new cars. It's also begging Congress to rethink the unbalanced artist royalty payments that Internet radio providers pay. Not everybody loves Pandora's proposal, but something has to give for this model to remain viable. 

Spotify 

Not so long ago, you wouldn't have associated Spotify with Internet radio. That's because the on-demand streaming service never attempted to offer the type of functionality that Pandora, Last.fm and Slacker have long been known for. That all changed last December, when the Swedish startup launched Spotify Radio, which emulates Pandora's functionality using the Echo Nest, a competing music recommendation engine. Any doubts that Spotify was serious about this push were cast aside in July, when Spotify Radio was made available for free in the service's mobile apps. 

How It's Looking Forward: Spotify's most promising feature is its third-party app platform. The year-old store now boasts more than 60 apps focusing on discovery, social music, promoting individual artists and whatever else developers can cook up. The platform is still desktop-only, but once it starts to go mobile, it will fundamentally change the way listeners consume music on the go. 

National Public Radio

If old media are supposed to be crusty and slow-to-innovate, you couldn't tell it by looking at NPR. The public radio nonprofit first went on the air in 1971, but unlike some of its counterparts in print media, it hasn't been sitting out the digital revolution. NPR's Digital Services team has been busy creating application interfaces, Wordpress plugins and experimental Web radio products. Its social media presence is impressive and its podcasts are some of the most popular on iTunes. 

Most importantly, NPR has invested heavily in its mobile strategy. It's got some immersive and content-rich apps for iOS, Android and Blackberry and has been proactive about using HTML5 to build a cross-platform, modern radio experience that works on just about any device.

How It's Looking Forward: NPR knows that it needs to be present on every platform its listeners might be using, and its done an impressive job of achieving that. By maintaining this spirit - especially when it comes to mobile devices - it pretty much guarantees itself a prominent role in radio's future. And NPR also knows the importance of partnering with car makers. 

Clear Channel 

NPR isn't the only industry incumbent that's thinking ahead. Terrestrial radio conglomerate Clear Channel sees the threat posed by innovative startups and has responded accordingly. Its iHeartRadio service combines 1,5000 live broadcast stations with personalized channels fueled by the Echo Nest's music recommendation application programming interface. 

The company's digital efforts are merely breaking even, but it hopes to change the equation by joining Pandora in its quest to get Internet radio royalties reduced. Digital may make up only about 5% of Clear Channel's total listenership, but the company knows where radio is headed. 

How It's Looking Forward: By putting its massive weight behind Pandora's quest to reduce Internet royalty rates, Clear Channel helps make change more likely. It also provides its own API that developers can use to bake iHeartRadio into other products, including cars. 

Other Players Forging Radio's Future

Narrowing this list down to five organizations was tough. So many technology and media companies are working on things that will make up the future of what we today call radio. Satellite radio will play a key role alongside FM and Internet radio, presumably led by Sirius XM for the foreseeable future, at least in North America. 

When I prop up my iPad and stream content from NPR, Stitcher or Spotify, it's a bit like using a futuristic radio. On my iPhone, smaller versions of those same apps let me bring the content with me in the car or when I'm walking down the street. Along with Samsung, Nokia and others, Apple is already building much of the hardware from which we stream audio content. Cupertino recently solidified this role by partnering with car makers to tighten iOS integration in vehicles. The company is even rumored to be launching its own Pandora competitor in 2013. 

It's not just giants that are jockeying for a spot in radio's future. Under-the-radar upstarts like Shuffler.fm and the Hype Machine turn music blogs into lean-back, mobile-friendly listening experiences. Even SoundCloud is growing more radio-like. Meanwhile, The Echo Nest's complex music recommendation algorithm is woven throughout a long list of Internet radio products, each of them aiming squarely at Pandora.

Lead photo by Rafael Kage. 

The reason News Corp. has shut down The Daily, its iPad-only newspaper, is due to a simple math problem: not enough subscribers to cover the cost of production and distribution. The Daily had reportedly 100,000 subscribers at $40 per year which, by my math is only $4 million annually.

The mistake News Corp. made was hiring (expensive) editorial, journalists and technologists to build and provide content for the newspaper. On top that cost structure, The Daily had to pay Apple 30 cents on the dollar to distribute the newspaper via iTunes. No doubt overhead was way in excess of income.

Murdoch obviously made the decision that The Daily was not growing fast enough to ever have a chance of covering its costs, let alone making a profit. So The Daily bites the dust. Fair enough.

But what could have News Corp. done that might have had some chance of surviving or at least have been a less costly experiment?

Syndication Versus Creation

Across the News Corp. portfolio, the company is producing a ton of content that could have been syndicated to The Daily. The team to run the iPad-only newspaper could have been a whole lot smaller (and less expensive) which would have given it a chance of, at least, covering its costs.

There is no guarantee that consumers would have ultimately paid for the iPad-only newspaper but with NewsCorp’s marketing muscle it might have been able to attract a respectable number of subscribers.

And herein lies another problem that The Daily faced. In the offline world there is no way you can launch a new newspaper, put it in the distribution channel and expect customers to find it. Media companies spend tens of millions of dollars to launch a new paper. You have touts lining up on the streets to give you free copies and paid media to support a launch. In the offline world that is a defined market: distribution is in one city. A single market that is easy to cover.

How To Find Subscribers?

Online, it can be a far harder proposition to find customers. The market for The Daily is global. To find subscribers can be a costly exercise. And because the market is global, content has to be more generic so that is appeals to all potential readers. Offline, because distribution is usually limited to one city, content is tailored to local tastes. Online this would have been impossible as there are simply too many markets to cater for and the cost of providing such content would have been stratospheric.

Faced with a low subscriber base, a paper that by definition had to offer broad generic content and a math problem that was getting worse, News Corp. made the only sensible decision it could. The Daily is no more.

Kudos must go to Murdoch for sticking with it as long as he did. It was a worthy experiment in a rapidly transforming distribution environment.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Ferriss isn't worried. He's banking on the power of digital distribution to make up for any losses in print sales. Ironically, one of his most effective tools may end up being something most content creators have grown to fear, if not outright despise: BitTorrent.

After publishing two wildly successful books via traditional means, Ferriss decided to try something different. In August, he signed on with Amazon's new publishing arm to release the follow-up to his 2010 health and fitness guide, The 4-Hour Body. That ruffled the feathers of not just traditional publishers, but also brick-and-mortar retailers like Barnes and Noble, who object to the e-bookstore exclusivity Amazon requires of its authors. That's why you won't find Ferriss's latest opus down the street at Barnes & Noble. 

As fast as e-books are growing, the lack of a presence in the nation's largest physical book retailer is a still serious handicap. To combat it, Ferriss struck a deal with BitTorrent earlier this month to distribute an exclusive bundle of content and, he hopes, sell a few extra books. 

"We were both eager to do something to demonstrate that the same type of tools that disrupted music and film can be harnessed to benefit the content creators in publishing," says Ferriss. 

How BitTorrent Is Moving Beyond Piracy

But wait. BitTorrent? Aren't they the bad guys?

To be sure, forging a partnership with the company behind the same-peer-to-peer filesharing technology that fuels rampant piracy would be unthinkable for most major publishers. In fact, they're sometimes known to sue BitTorrent users for downloading e-books. But the San Francisco-based company is working hard to rebrand itself as a legitimate partner for content creators, and there's no better way to do that than by partnering with established creators like Ferriss.

For Ferriss, BitTorrent is just an incredibly efficient way to distribute content to a large number of users. And BitTorrent has plenty of them. When asked why he wanted to enter into this partnership, the first words out of Ferriss's mouth were "one hundred and sixty million users." It's hard to argue with that. 

Here's how it works: To coincide with the launch of his book, Ferriss put together a folder of additional, exclusive content: a 62-page PDF previewing the book, behind-the-scenes photos, videos and early, hand-marked notes. It's pretty meaty, but doesn't come anywhere close to spoiling the 672-page book he's trying to sell. 

It's not just that this content bundle is available for free to Bit Torrent users. It's that Ferriss's face - along with a link to download the bundle torrent and buy the book - is on Bit Torrent's homepage, from which hundreds of thousands of users download the file-sharing client every day. 

BitTorrent has been experimenting with this type of featured content for about two years. The list of artists it has partnered with includes increasingly higher profile names like The Counting Crows, DJ Shadow and Pretty Lights, an American DJ and producer. BitTorrent has also worked directly with the Internet Archive to make more than one petabyte of public-domain content available via the P2P network. 

It's all part of the company's effort not to just to distance itself from piracy, but to figure out how it can be a bigger part of the legitimate future of digital distribution. 

"If you look at what BitTorrent really is, it's quite simply the best way to move ones and zeros across the Internet," says Matt Mason, the company's Executive Director of Marketing. That makes it a valuable tool for creators, but also helps the company figure out its own strategy moving forward. 

"The reason we're doing all of this is to try and figure out what to build next," says Mason. That is, if these experiments work, the company can develop tools to help publishers and artists launch their own promotional campagns and take even better advantage of the platform. 

Is This Experiment Working?

So does partnering with BitTorrent work? The early numbers look promising, even if they're not all the kind of hard dollar figures media executives want to see. The payoff is less direct that that, but it can still be huge. Pretty Lights, for example, may or may not have sold more records as a result of publishing his BitTorrent bundle of free music and video of a live performance. But after his bundle soared to the top of Pirate Bay's download chart, the DJ saw a 700% increase in traffic to his website, collected 100,000 email addresses and, probably not entirely by coincidence, sold out two concerts at the Red Rocks amphitheater in Colorado. 

For Ferriss, it's still too early to tell. But the initial numbers aren't bad. In the first week of the campaign, his bundle has been downloaded 211,000 times, BitTorrent told ReadWrite. More than 85,000 people have clicked through to the book's listing on Amazon (no word on how many ordered it), while 27,000 people viewed the book's trailer on YouTube. 

Even if the book only sold 100 extra copies, Ferris says, the promotion would have been worth it to him, because the amount of setup time required was so minimal. He expects to sell far more copies than that, but the real value comes in experimenting with new distribution channels. He is "not overly concerned" about the prospect of his e-book itself being shared on BitTorrent, which he views as a valuable promotional tool. 

"One of many reasons to embrace new technologies or new applications of existing technologies is the benefit that you get of being first," says Ferriss. If nothing else, such a paradoxical-seeming partnership has a way of garnering more media coverage than a typical book launch. 

"It's a wide open field for people to play in," Ferriss says. "Very few people have taken advantage of this so I would absolutely recommend it."

The site is set up like a pro/con list, with issues and referendums clearly defined and pros and cons from users on either side. It's an open discussion about the issues in the state's political system that gives voters a clear idea of their fellow citizen's views, without all ( or at least most) of the bickering. And here's the coolest part: voters can request to have statements on the user-generated pro/con lists fact checked by librarians from the Seattle Public Library System within 48 hours.

Not Fact-Checkers, Fact Finders

To get the facts straight, librarians at the Seattle Public Library use the typical tools of their trade: news articles, scholarly research, policy analyses and the Washington State Voters guide. Bo Kinney, Special Collections Librarian, says that a lot of this information is freely available to anyone online, but it may be buried within a lengthy article or report. "We are skilled at finding and evaluating the exact information that is most useful to answer a specific question."

Kinney admits, though, that there are some questions the librarians aren't qualified to answer. These are usually ones that require legal research or are based on hypothetical or opinion-based claims. In those cases, librarians will point to research materials that might hold answers, and they can spotlight facts within opinions.

"We're not the final word on what is the truth," Kinney says. "In fact, we expect that users may add additional information beyond what we are able to find. But we think that our efforts will help support informed discussion of political issues." 

This election year is the first time the service will be offered on the site and will carry over to the California edition in collaboration with the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The CNN Difference

But CNN is different. Where many newspapers and cable companies have faltered, CNN has thrived. A lot of the credit goes to  the cable news company’s acquisition of Zite, the makers of a popular iPad news app.

Zite is a social content discovery engine. It uses signals from sources like Twitter and Facebook to determine what a subscriber likes to read and deliver content they might not find otherwise. It began as an iPad app and was acquired by CNN in Aug. 2011.

Many ZIte users cringed when they heard that CNN was taking over. The acquisition had all the hallmarks of the failed strategies that have been replayed over and over in big media since the advent of the Web: aging media behemoth thinks it can innovate by acquiring hot new media startup, then runs it into the ground.

For Zite’s part, it was apprehensive about being acquired in the first place.“To be blunt, we had no desire for Zite to be acquired after what happened at Microsoft,” said Zite CEO Mark Johnson. 

Johnson was part of Powerset, a semantic search startup that was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Johnson notes that out of about 60 people from Powerset that went to Microsoft, only about six of them are left at the company. So when CNN approached Zite about an acquisition last year, Johnson was wary about going in that direction. 

A Surprisingly Happy Marriage

The acquisition has turned out well for both parties. Instead of CNN gutting the Zite team and letting the product languish, Zite got its own office in San Francisco and has actively hired more employees. “I had very frank conversations with [KC Estenson, CNN senior vice president and general manager of digital] about what the structure would be,” Johnson said.  

On the flip side, Zite has provided CNN with a variety of positive elements. Estenson noted that Zite gives CNN a presence on the West Coast with the ability to “tap the mindset of San Francisco.” 

CNN digital has a history of thinking progressively about online news dissemination. Zite gave CNN a distinct mobile discovery engine with backend technology that could be worked into CNN’s homepage. The next phase was to make sure that Zite survived the acquisition.

Estenson was very cognizant of Johnson’s concerns. “We wanted Mark and the team to have the freedom to try new things,” Estenson said. 

Zite Kept Growing After The Acquisition

Zite has spread from an iPad-only app to a variety of platforms, including the iPhone as well as Android tablets and smartphones. The company launched branded advertising and a publisher program. Last week it launched its first integration with the parent company, called CNN Trends, powered by the Zite technology stack. CNN Trends pairs original CNN coverage with popular related stories from around the Web. "CNN is what you need to know, Zite is what you want to know,” Estenson explained. 

So, why has the CNN/Zite partnership worked so well?

Many people thought that an old media company like CNN would not understand what Zite was doing and eventually force it to bend to the larger company's will. That has not happened.

To CNN’s benefit, it recognized that it had bought not just a popular news discovery app, but the technology behind it.

Zite started as a group of researchers in Vancouver that had a product called Worio (Web Of Research, Iteration One), which provided serendipitous discovery through a search engine. Worio was built around the concept of personalized search that recognized not just what you were searching for, but the topics related to it. The approach of personalized news and content discovery is what appealed to CNN. Estenson says that topic personalization will be the future of how big media brands need to market content.

CNN Kept An Open Mind

The fact that Zite has survived the CNN acquisition suggests that the cable news giant kept an open mind when it approached Zite. CNN recognized that it needed some skin in the mobile game and Zite has provided that - along with key backend technology to improve CNN’s homepage.

In the end, the combinattin has formed a rare success story in an arena where new media and old media typically fight for eyeballs: a mutually beneficial relationship built on trust and respect.

“There is a deep respect from me and the other CNN execs for the Zite team,” Estenson said. “We are not bullshitting about how much we get along and how well we work together.” 

The Magazine is, above all, simple. It borrows the stripped-down simplicity of Instapaper to present articles in a no-frills, text-heavy layout rather than packing in the kind of slick, animated UI elements favored by Flipboard. This emphasis extends to the editorial approach. Each bi-weekly issue will have only four articles. That's something of a relief: I'm already flooded with articles via Twitter, Flipboard and Instapaper. For some readers, though, four articles might not justify a $4 monthly subscription fee. 

Speaking of the content, it's very good. This is billed as a tech publication, but it's not an avalanche of regurgitated news stories and longwinded gadget reviews. Instead, The Magazine focuses on thoughtful, well written essays about technology and topics that "appeal to people who love technology."  

In the first issue, there's an excellent story by Alex Payne that examines the revolutionary yet imperfect role technology plays in our lives framed by a series of personal traumas. Another essay deals with "weird schism between geeks who love sports and those who don't." It's thoughtful, interesting stuff that would feel more at home in The Atlantic than on Techcrunch. 

Introducing a paid iPad magazine is an especially bold move at this moment. Several weeks ago, the Huffington Post stopped charging a fee for its tablet magazine after lackluster sales. Part of the reason may have been that readers were already conditioned to expect free content from the HuffPo brand, and the company was accustomed to bringing in revenue from ads rather than subscriptions. Across the board, publishers have seen mixed results from tablet-based magazines. 

Will people pay $2 per issue for four really good articles? That seems like a gamble to me, but perhaps readers will perceive The Magazine's simplicity (amid a roiling sea of digital content) as a value worth paying for. If the project doesn't turn a profit after two months, Arment says, he'll kill it. 

The app isn't without its drawbacks. The fact that the content isn't free creates a necessary walled garden around it. That bugs proponents of the open, linked Web, but Arment does as good as job as he possibly can of making the content shareable across the usual social networks. Naturally, Instapaper is on the list of default sharing options. I wish I could save an entire article to Instapaper (rather than a snippet), but of course this would blow a hole in the paywall. 

The experience is pretty awesome overall. My biggest gripe is probably the name. The Magazine? Try running a search for that one in the App Store, even after the post-Chomp improvements in iOS 6. Good luck!

Personally, I'm willing to stick around for a few weeks to see where this goes. So far, I like what I see. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got an out-of-control Instapaper queue to catch up on. 

To be fair, iPlayer Radio is a solid offering. The attractively designed Web app is a focused way to stream live broadcasts from any of the BBC's many channels. There's a ton of content here, both live and archived. It's all broken down by channel, category, schedule and - as you drill down further - topic area, personality, format and music genre. It's a handy online portal into the BBC's radio experience, much of which is available to users around the world. 

Geography is where the concept starts to fizzle. I live in the United States, so there are limitations on what I can hear on iPlayer Radio. For one thing, the iOS apps aren't available here, so I have no choice but to point my iPhone and iPad browsers to the Web app. To the BBC's credit, streaming a live broadcast works fairly well, and I can minimize the browser, launch another app and continue to listen uninterrupted. But even in the browser, I'm blocked from streaming certain shows in the archive. Bummer. I don't know precisely what the future of radio looks like, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't include the sentence, "This content is not available on your device." 

As well designed as the Web app is, it still feels a little fractured. Not all the audio content on iPlayer Radio is funneled to the same pop-up window, for example. Some of it plays natively in the browser tab in which you initiate the stream, while some of it launches a new player in pop-up window. If you're already streaming from one of those pop-ups and then decide to switch to another channel, iPlayer Radio will fire up another pop-up. In many cases, you end up with concurrent streams of audio, which turn into a cacophonous trainwreck of sound until you manage to find one of the stop buttons. It's weird.

To improve this particular aspect of the user experience, the BBC might want to borrow a page from SoundCloud or Shuffler.fm, both of which feature a single universal audio player that keeps streaming no matter where you navigate and then switches to a new audio stream when you ask for it. Other bastions of radio innovation have good ideas as well - NPR, Stitcher Radio, TuneIn and Pandora come to mind. 

The BBC might be, as radio futurologist James Cridland put it, a bit late to the party on this, but it's a valiant effort, on the whole. The BBC has some incredibly high-quality content, often containing deeply valuable, alternative viewpoints. This new initiative helps open it up to a wider global audience. The mobile apps (from what I can tell) look especially well designed, with innovative carousel navigation and an alarm to wake up to the BBC. It's the mobile experience that has the greatest potential to steer radio's future, especially as smartphones continue to find a place in cars. 

It's worth noting that iPlayer Radio is only the player's first iteration. The BBC knows that online streaming and mobile technology are going to be a central component of their future. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds. 

According to the study, "The Future Of Mobile News," 43% of survey respondents who own a tablet say the device increases the amount of news they see. Outside of sending and receiving email, news is the most-used function on tablets, with 37% of tablet owners reading news on a daily basis and 64% on a weekly basis. News outstrips mobile gaming (34% daily, 60% weekly), the activity widely considered to be most common on mobile devices. 

31% of respondants said they spent more time with news since they purchased a tablet. About 43% attended to their favorite news outlets more frequently while 31% turned to new ones. People who own both smartphones and tablets consumed the most news, averaging 64 minutes with a tablet and 54 minutes with a smartphone. Tablet users tended to gravitate to news from trusted brands, with 60% getting news from specific publications, versus 30% from a wide range of sources. 

The problem facing the news industry is how to turn this new attention and engagement into revenue. As the Web evolved, traditional news operations sacrificed analog dollars for digital dimes; that is, they made less revenue per news consumer on the Internet than in print. With mobile, those “digital dimes are turning into mobile pennies,” as Ad Age stated in a recent headline. According to Pew, about 50% of tablet and smartphone users notice mobile ads, but only 12%-14% click on those ads. 

See the infographic of Pew’s study below. 

The initial wave of SoundCloud users from the radio world included CNN Radio, Boston's WBUR and KCRW in Los Angeles. Since then, the company has been cultivating the on-air community in earnest.

This summer, SoundCloud nabbed Jim Colgan from public radio station WNYC to help sharpen its new focus on bringing traditional radio content to the browser. Earlier this week, Philadelphia-based WHYY became the latest NPR affiliate to join SoundCloud, using it to post clips from recent episodes of shows like Fresh Air. For WHYY and many other public radio outlets, it's less about hosting the program's entire digital presence and more about using SoundCloud as a way to extend their brand and grab the attention of listeners on a large - and rapidly growing - platform. 

See also: How Journalists Are Using Google+

"The range of usage by journalists is quite broad," SoundCloud Head of Audio Manolo Espinosa told ReadWriteWeb. "Some use it to help fuel the online distribution of terrestrial programs, others for additional content that is of interest to their listeners." 

Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, services like SoundCloud have been able to grow beyond content distribution and morph into mobile content creation tools. The potential here is quite powerful, and it just got a boost last week when SoundCloud updated its Android and iPhone apps to support mobile audio-editing along with a few other enhancements. 

Columbia University's chief digital officer Sree Sreenivasan uses SoundCloud to publish interviews he conducts with company founders, industry experts and other people at the intersection of media and technology. Robert Scoble is doing the same. New York Times reporter Ben Sisario is more experimental. He uses his SoundCloud account to post recordings he makes in the city's subways. This includes everything from musical performances to soundscapes uniquely familiar to New York commuters. 

No social journalism tool would be complete without the ability to crowdsource reporting. The Huffington Post uses SoundCloud to allow readers to submit robocalls it receives from political campaigns. Readers can record and submit calls right in the browser, taking things beyond embedded audio players toward a more read/write experience.  

SoundCloud can also deliver audio slideshows. The company has a beta feature called StoryWheel, which lets users pull photos from an Instagram account and add audio commentary. It's a very basic Web app, but taken a few steps further, it could provide an alternative to clunky slideshow software like SoundSlides. The company has no immediate plans to build out a feature like that, but Espinosa said that the demand among media partners certainly exists. 

Part 1: How Journaists Are Using Instagram

Part 2: How Journalists Are Using Pinterest

Part 3: How Journalists Are Using Google+ 

Part 4: How Journalists Are Using SoundCloud

Rookie Magazine, which has attracted a readership of all ages and genders, is best known for its “Ask a Grown Man” YouTube series featuring celebrities fielding questions from teen girls on everything from relationship, fashion and school advice.

Banking on the President’s penchant for unusual outlets as part of his “under the radar” and “unusual” campaign media strategy- from local radio hosts to the President’s recent and historic Reddit AMA - the teen magazine has taken its campaign to Twitter with the hashtag #obama4grownman.

"I just decided to start a Twitter campaign to ask Obama to do Ask a Grown Man with no expectations beyond that it would be fun for me and our staff and that it would be funny and that it might get us five new Twitter followers," said Rookie editorial director Anaheed Alani in an interview with the Guardian about the Twitter campaign.

Twitter campaigns, believe it or not, have a higher than expected success rate. Just two weeks ago, Twitter personality and Community superfan @rare_basement appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson after repeatedly tweeting at him. “Honestly, I didn’t think this would work” said rare_basement on-air to an exasperated Ferguson. (Rare_basement happened to be in the neighborhood, as she was hanging out with the cast on the Community set - a feat also set up through Twitter.)

But it did work, and chances are, Rookie’s #obama4grownman will work too. Its founder and editor-in-chief, after all, is the sixteen-year-old Tavi Gevinson, the child prodigy of our digital age. 

Gevinson’s original blog Style Rookie - started when she was 11 -  propelled her to Internet fame and caught the eye of top designers who courted her with front row seats at various Fashion Weeks by the time she was 14.  Rookie Magazine was founded in 2011, and has left many a seasoned journalist in awe. 

It’s not hard to believe that Malia, Obama’s oldest daughter at 14, probably reads the site and would think her dad cool for doing Ask a Grown Man. #justsaying. 

There are still GOOD staff behind the scenes. In fact, GOOD founder Ben Goldhirsh says “we’re going to create more original content in the next year than we did in the past year.” But instead of dictating what’s good to the audience, which is already active and engaged in its own projects, GOOD now works for its members.

“We are moving GOOD from a media company to a global community of pragmatic idealists,” Goldhirsh says. GOOD’s problem was that its audience didn’t need to be told what was good by editorial experts. The readers were the experts.

GOOD learned its lesson at the events it hosted. “People weren’t coming to engage with the staff of GOOD,” Goldhirsh says. “They were coming to engage with the people who share the values of GOOD.” So the new site is a place for them to hang out and collaborate. The staff are there to support and amplify the audience’s efforts.

The site has been designed as a forum. It has three sections. The section called For You displays links from people you follow on the site. These can lead to articles, and members can vote on whether they’re good, or to tasks called Dos, which call the activists on the site to action.

The GOOD staff takes the pulse of its community and bumps up worthy material to the For All Of Us section. It’s organized into topical sections, currently education, design, business and living. Much of this is sourced from the community, but original GOOD material also shows up here.

And since GOOD is ultimately about spurring its members to action, the third section is a sidebar called Together Let’s… It displays tasks or events that need community support. Events featured in this sidebar are displayed prominently, so it gives worthy causes a better chance to succeed.

It’s an intriguing model for a media company with a focused and passionate audience. It does away with the editorial guesswork of trying to educate these already smart people and lets them generate the ideas instead. Goldhirsh made an interesting comparison: As LinkedIn is to the professional self and Pinterest is to the aesthetic self, GOOD.is aspires to be for the civic self.

Your GOOD profile is a collection of the things that seem good in your world. And since the whole site is designed around your ideas, you can change it just by contributing. To pragmatic idealists like those GOOD wants to attract, society itself should work that way.

The voting closes on August 31st at 11:59pm Central Daylight Time, not much time to review all those choices. To check out 3,656 sessions in 36 hours, you would need to cover about 101 sessions per hour, or 1.7 panels per minute (PPM). And that doesn’t leave time for eating, sleeping or anything else.

To make your job easier, we waded in and identified nine can’t-miss panels that deserve your support, based on these four criteria:

1. Is the topic technology related?

2. Is the topic approachable?

3. Is the content unique?

4. Are the speakers/panelists reputable?

Vote early and vote often, whether or not you plan to make it to Austin in March. Click on the headline to vote for the ones you like best.

1. What Brands Must Do In The Age of Social TV

What You Will Learn: This session will share how brands, producers and advertisers (both big and small) can leverage social TV to target and engage with current and potential customers. For people just interested in what’s around the corner, this session will provide plenty of insight into the future of social TV that is sure to keep the wheels in your mind turning for days.

Speakers: Sam Decker of Mass Relevance, Olivier Delfosse of FremantleMedia Enterprises, and Mike Proulx of Hill Holliday

2. Social Media Was Fun. Has Measurement Killed It?

What You Will Learn: This session will teach you how to leverage social data to improve your personal and professional life. For example, you will learn how to use data to monitor your friends so that you know exactly what to get them for their birthday. You will also learn how to figure out what the opposite sex responds to in an effort to improve your “game.”

Speakers: Adam Schoenfeld of Simply Measured and Matt Thomson of Klout

3. Neuroscience Explains Popularity of Quora

What You Will Learn: This session will share what neuroscience has uncovered about social behavior and teach you how you can apply these neurological principles into the design of your site and your online community.

Speakers: Yumio Saneyoshi of Google and Mimi Kao of University of California, San Francisco

4. The Making of a Meme

What You Will Learn: This session will discuss the development of a photography meme titled, “Texts From Hillary” - including how it unfolded and the impact it and other memes have had on how we tell visual stories.

Speakers: Kira Pollack of TIME Magazine, photojournalist Diana Walker, Stacy Lambe of Buzzfeed

5. Love Thine Community: 5 Guiding Principles

What You Will Learn: In this session, Nadia and Chrystal will share the five guiding principles they continue to use to build and maintain their online community of over 16 million members.

Speakers: Nadia Hussain and Chrystal Chan of Polyvore

6. INTEGRATE: Evernote (The Book) Bootcamp

What You Will Learn: From marketing and going paperless to accounting and contact management, this session will teach you how to get the most out of your Evernote account.

Speakers: Lindsey Holmes of LCH Business SM & Tech and Josh Zerkel of Custom Living Solutions

7. Are You a Billionaire? Your Network = Your Net Worth

What You Will Learn: This panel will share how networking has evolved and empower you to leverage the new trends to maximize your network and reap the rewards.

Speakers: Stephanie Agresta of Weber Shandwick, Porter Gale of Porter Gale, Inc., David Hornik of August Capital and Shira Lazar of What’s Trending

8. Industrial Revolution 3.0 & Future of 3D Printing

What You Will Learn: This panel will take you into the future and demonstrate what 3D printing makes possible - including the impact it will have on manufacturing, design and creativity as we know it.

Speakers: Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine and Peter Weijmarshausen of Shapeways

9. Born to Blog: Are You Wired for Blogging Success 

What You Will Learn: This panel will help you cut through the common myths surrounding blogging and outline a comprehensive, actionable blueprint you can implement immediately. Have a question that wasn’t answered? Be sure to ask the panel for help. 

Speakers: Mark Schaefer of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich, and Stanford Smith of Fluency Media

BONUS: The following three sessions are proposed by SAY: Media, ReadWriteWeb’s parent company. You may want to check them out, too:

1. Adapt or Die, Jane Pratt’s Publishing Evolution: Featuring the one and only Jane Pratt, documenting her journey into digital publishing and what she has learned along the way.

2. Addicted to Mobile, The New Cigarette: Doug Grinspan and Jeremiah Zinn of Viacom reunite to uncover what makes mobile devices so addicting.

3. SocialX : UX :: Users : Users: SAY: Media social mastermind Ted Rheingold on how to design for the social experience.

Have other sessions you like? Share them in the comments below!

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by William Griggs, a startup strategist who helps startups with their product, marketing and fundraising strategies. You can find more about him at TheStartupSlingshot.com or follow him on Twitter @TSSUpdates.

Austin image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The New York Times has a topic pages hub called Times Topics. Each topic page in the hub "collects all the news, reference and archival information, photos, graphics, audio and video files" dating back to 1981 on a particular topic, into a single page. Not only do readers of a topic page have access to all present and past news about a topic, they can subscribe to future news about it via RSS.

Topics range from subjects (like "Net Neutrality"), to people (the current lead topic page is about foot-in-mouth congressman Todd Akin), to places (such as Iraq).

Looking at the Todd Akin page shows us some of the benefits of topic pages:

1. Context: The main article not only explains why Akin is in the news currently (a stunningly stupid comment about rape), but outlines his personal history as a congressman and the things he has done and advocated for.

2. History: Each page has a list of links to previous NYT stories about the topic; in this case any past story that mentioned Todd Akin.

3. Curated: The New York Times has a reputation for quality journalism, so many readers will trust the Times to curate an ongoing topic page on Todd Akin. Even if, as appears to be the case for NYT, the topic pages are largely automated.

4. Multimedia: This isn't evident on Akin's page, but some topic pages - such as the one for President Barack Obama - have video, interactive charts and other multimedia content. This is great content that may not be appropriate for news articles, but finds a suitable home on a topic page.

So Why Aren't Topic Pages Getting Traction For News Sites?

Times Topic is an admirable effort from The New York Times. The problem for them - and any other news organization - is that topic pages aren't showing up in search engines. A search for "Todd Akin" in Google does not surface the NYT topic page about him. A NYT news article was the fourth link on page one, but we scrolled through the next nine pages of Google search results and didn't see the NYT topic page. Even the colorful NYT topic page for President Obama is nowhere to be seen in Google - and heck, the President's MySpace page is in the first few pages of results!

Why isn't Google picking up NYT's topic pages? Most probably because blogs and other news sites simply don't link to them. You can't blame them, because NYT itself don't appear to link to its topic pages: the top NYT news article about Akin fails to include a link to the relevant topic page.

Another clue that topic pages for news organizations aren't quite ready for prime time is that the BBC has ceased doing them. Four years ago, the BBC announced a Topic Pages Beta. The idea was the same as NYT, to aggregate content about a single topic onto one page. But sadly, this was one Web 2.0 beta that didn't make it to a full launch.

Not getting high placement in search results is probably one reason why topic pages haven't quite worked for NYT and BBC. But it's also due to the real-time reading habits of people in this era of the Web. In an age dominated by chronological flows of information - such as from Facebook, Twitter and blogs - topical organization of news and social content has taken a back seat to the real-time firehose.

That's where the latest publishing platforms, like Medium and Pinterest, could make an impact. What both Pinterest and Medium are are trying to do is layer topic pages on top of user-generated, social content. We don't know yet whether this will work, but if it does then consumers may start to get used to topic pages. That in turn will prompt NYT, BBC, news blogs and other professional media to take another look at topic pages. We'll also begin to see Facebook, Twitter and other social networks experiment with topical organization of content too. Watch this space!

The image, which Day4 posted to Reddit anonymously a weeka ago, was enough to get the story picked up by Cult of Mac 12 hours later and then by Apple-watching blogs and news sites across the Web. 

Full disclosure: I was covering a - real, I swear - study showing that the new MacBook Pro is difficult to repair when I saw this headline come across my RSS reader and decided to include it at the bottom of my story (which has since been updated). From my vantage point, it looked like any other news story that bubbles up on Twitter, Google Reader or Flipboard. The crucial difference was, of course, that it was completely false. So how did I - and several other reporters - get duped so easily? 

Why the Story Caught On

The idea that Apple would start using a special, asymmetrical screw to hold its products together is not altogether unbelievable. It fits into a larger, historically accurate narrative that goes back to the days of the first Macintosh desktop computer. That machine, like later devices, was deliberately designed to discourage hobbyists eager to tear it open and start tinkering. 

In fact, this narrative was still alive and kicking last week, when iFixIt called the brand-new Retina MacBook Pro "the least repairable laptop" it had seen. Hence my impulse to grab a link to the phony report. 

The bogus story was also well-timed, coming just as leaked details are piling up ahead of next month's iPhone launch. Apple watchers are on the lookout for leaks and rumors year-round, but in the days leading up to a major product launch, the alleged details grow more numerous and the coverage more feverish. 

All of which begs the question: Didn't anyone attempt to verify the story by calling Apple, Day4, and/or an independent hardware analyst? Of course not. We're talking about the Internet.

Implications for Online News 

Many of us who work in online media proudly extoll the advantages of our craft and the innovative platforms that deliver our output to readers. And - let's be honest - sometimes we do so while turning our noses up at those who came before us in print and other legacy media. But there's something to be said for the legions of copyeditors and fact checkers getting laid off from your local newsroom.  

Publishing online is cheaper, more efficient and more participatory. Many would argue that, as a result, it's more democratic and open than the media it has supplanted. Yet one of its prime benefits - unprecedented speed - is also, as we've seen again and again, one of its biggest pitfalls. 

A more dramatic example unfolded a year ago when a prankster published a realistic-looking "study" purporting to show that Internet Explorer users were less intelligent than those who used other Web browsers. That story made it much further than the phone Apple screw report, probably because its perpetrator put much more effort into it. Tarandeep Singh, a Canadian developer for whom IE "was being a pain in the ass," went as far as to buy a domain name for a fake company, scrape content from another business' website and then send out a press release linking back to a legitimate-looking PDF of the phony study. 

The media ate it up. Mashable and Business Insider were among the first to report it, and it exploded from there, despite language in the fake report that should have raised serious doubts about its authenticity. That is, if anybody had taken the time to read it carefully. 

That's one of the major challenges in the emerging online news ecosystem. In the scramble to publish first or rack up page views, things like this to slip through the cracks. 

The frantic rush to publish isn't unique to the Web. That much was verified in June when both CNN and Fox News incorrectly reported that the Supreme Court had overturned President Obama's health care law. Cable news didn't need Twitter or Wordpress to make that gaffe, but the Web's ever more rapid news cycle may have helped build the editorial culture that let it happen.

To its credit, the media didn't allow the Apple screw story to get as far as it could have, and many reports emphasized that it was only a rumor. Perhaps it was because Day4 wasn't as thorough as Singh was with his fictional IE study. The Swedish outfit posted a fake image anonymously to Reddit, which reporters knew to take with a grain of salt. Still, the fake rumor spread further than something that is patently false should have. And it gave us just the latest reminder that as we journalists march forward into the globally networked future, we ought to do so with humility and caution. 

On one hand, most readers familiar with the Huffington Post brand never dreamed they'd have to pay for its content through any means other than ad impressions.

Yet Huffington, the digital magazine, is different from HuffingtonPost.com. Its stories are longer, more thoroughly reported and laid out in a fashion reminiscent of Newsweek or Time. It feels somewhat like tablet offerings produced by the likes of Conde Nast or National Geographic, but with an even less print-bound approach than many competitors. 

So why did Huffington peel back its price tag? The app was only live for five weeks before the shift was made, so it's not like the company had a trove of historical data to rely on. Instead, it feels like it was more of a philosophical choice. Charging for a digital magazine felt "inconsistent with the Huffington Post itself," a company spokesman told the Capital. Instead, HuffPost will rely on advertising, just as it does on the Web. 

Can Publishers Make Money From Tablets?

But for publishers hoping to monetize tablet-bound readers, hope is not lost. The research shows that people who own tablets are pretty immersed in them and most have no problem paying for content. Sixty-one percent of tablet owners have purchased digital content, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. 

Evidently, Huffington didn't see overwhelming evidence of that. But the advertising-only model isn't necessarily a doomed one.

The same survey from the association points out that not only are people glued to their tablets, many find tablet-based advertising to be more effective. Thirty-eight percent of tablet owners say they've purchased or researched a product after seeing an ad. Among those that say they've purchased content, ad conversion shoots up to 54%.

Recent research suggests a hybrid of advertising and paid content might work, but as HuffPost demonstrates, it really depends on the publisher and who their audience is. Perhaps there's a future in Netflix-style subscription model for magazines, an idea on which the folks behind Next Issue, a service that offers exactly that, are banking. Whatever the model for publishers turns out to be, it's still very much in the process of emerging.

The space agency proved it's as adept at landing a rover on Mars as it is at entertaining a global audience, be it through a smoothly executed live-stream viewed by millions or an interactive web tool simulating the rover landing.

And as Jason Townsend, the Deputy Social Media Manager at NASA explained, it’s just the beginning as far as social-media outreach is concerned:  

“We're always looking for new opportunities to connect with new audiences and share information about our missions, programs, and people. We're always exploring where the public is, and figuring out where social media is headed next. We are on the most popular platforms — and when new ones emerge, we'll go there, too.”  

Besides hitting all the social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Flickr), NASA had a variety of interactive features made just for Curiosity. “Eyes in the Sky,” an interactive computer simulation that followed Curiosity’s descent live, was a Reddit favorite, hitting the front page of the social-news site in a thread threatening NASA with a “friendly DDoSing.”

“Eyes” wasn’t the only interactive tool created for the rover. Xbox 360 Kinect owners could also download and play the “Mars Rover Landing” game for free. "Our main goal is to bring NASA back to the living room," said Matt Clausen, the lead artist at Human Interfaces at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead artist for the Xbox game. "I grew up in the 1980s, and I watched [a] space walk on TV," explained Clausen, "and this is the first game created by NASA to go into the living room."   

In fact, NASA has been experimenting with the Xbox Kinect and Nintendo Wii controllers "to control real robots," said Clausen, because "we're looking at simpler ways to do things," including bridging the gap between NASA and the public. 

The public can expect more interactive features and games in the future, explained Townsend, as they’re in line with NASA’s quest to inspire the next generation of kids.

The most recent development is Angry Birds Space update, "Red Planet," done in time with the Mars Curiosity landing.  Townsend said NASA and Rovio worked collaboratively on the game after a joking tweet between the Rovio's Twitter account and @NASA, the Twitter account managed by Townsend.

Can we expect mission-specific smartphone apps any time soon?

“Definitely,” said Townsend. "We've got several apps in the pipeline, and we have a variety of teams working on them," he added, though he wouldn't elaborate.

Clausen, who is working on a few of those apps, said "this was all a very big experiment - which we feel has been very successful."   

As for NASA's most immediate move in social-media, "we're currently expanding on Google+, and figuring out how to do Google Hangouts," said Townsend.  

Said Michelle Viotti, the Mars public engagement manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release: "Because Mars exploration is fundamentally a shared human endeavor, we want everyone around the globe to have the most immersive experience possible."

Curiosity's Shadow and Mount Sharp, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

By delaying the broadcast of key events by five hours and requiring a cable subscription to view them online, NBC managed to rile up quite a few of its U.S.-based viewers, a growing number of whom are accustomed to watching TV on the Web and mobile devices. (Meanwhile, thanks to the BBC, UK citizens could watch the games live - or stream them online for free - and, quite naturally, tweet about them.) The frustration was compounded by on-air gaffes by NBC anchors, Web streaming glitches, and the curious decision to live-tweet events from an official NBC Twitter account, despite the fact that those events had not yet aired in the U.S. 

By Monday afternoon, the Web was littered with furious commentary, a viral, anti-NBC hashtag and a fake Twitter account mocking the network to its more than 17,000 followers. So how exactly did a major broadcaster turn such a momentous occasion into a PR debacle? Here are NBC's top three mistakes:

1. Putting Advertisers Before Viewers . . . in 2012

To be fair, delaying broadcast of afternoon events until evening makes sense from a strictly financial perspective. Waiting until prime time helps nab more viewers and thus better ratings and more ad dollars. The network, which has struggled in the ratings for years, expects to lose $100 million from its Olympics broadcast. The most the company can hope for is to minimize its losses and use the occasion to promote its other programming, including the upcoming fall lineup. If the first weekend's ratings are any indication, record numbers of people are tuning in, so the strategy appears to be working out so far. 

While NBC is pleasing advertisers in the short run, it's doing so at the expense of many of its viewers. That attitude may have flown a decade ago, but today those consumers have a much louder collective voice and, perhaps most crucially, other options. 

"The problem for NBC as for other media is that it is trying to preserve old business models in a new reality," media pundit Jeff Jarvis wrote for the Huffington Post. "To experiment with alternatives when billions are at stake is risky. But so is not experimenting and not learning when millions of your viewers can complain about you on Twitter."

Jarvis, like many others, used VPN software (in his case, TunnelBear) to circumvent geographic restrictions on streaming the Olympics live from the BBC's iPlayer platform. Meanwhile, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff openly advocated watching pirated streams of the games in lieu of dealing with NBC's restrictions. 

"Think about that for a second," wrote Ryan Lawler on Techcrunch. "You’ve got a titan of industry telling viewers to ignore the local broadcast rights and pay attention to an illegal copy of the event instead."

2. Requiring a Cable Subscription For Web Access 

As though the five-hour tape delay weren't bad enough for U.S. viewers, NBC required an active subscription to a cable or satellite TV service as a precondition for watching its streams.

This isn't a new concept. Some network TV apps have started requiring users to authenticate via cable account credentials, and there's a nasty rumor that Hulu plans to do the same. But for many viewers, who are used to catching many network TV shows online, the fact that the Olympics wouldn't be streamed online for free came as a rude awakening.

It's worth bearing in mind that the Olympics are available over the air without a cable subscription if you're watching them on TV. Limiting Web access to cable customers seems like a potshot in the cable industry's ongoing war against the Internet-based TV alternatives that have grown so popular among consumers. 

Moreover, NBC and the cable giant that owns it are blocking out additional eyeballs, which they could be monetized through advertising. Do they think this roadblock will inspire anybody to sign up for cable just so they can watch the games online? More likely than not, prospective audience membesrs will: (a) get annoyed and then (b) move on to a pirated stream or watch the BBC using a VPN client. 

One of the more biting critiques of the cable requirement came from Heidi Moore, New York bureau chief of American Public Media's Marketplace report. In the UK Guardian newspaper, she likened the move to "forcing an entire nation of viewers to give CPR to a corpse."

3. Dropping the Ball on Social TV

As a live sporting event of global significance, the 2012 Summer Olympics should have been a milestone in the ongoing convergence of social media and TV. Instead, they have been marked by angry hashtags, mock Twitter accounts, and at least one journalist getting banned from Twitter for tweeting an NBC executive's email address. 

Perhaps the most glaring error on NBC's part was its failure to anticipate the spoiler effect that Twitter would present and how annoying that would be for its viewers. In the 21st century, if a major event is being televised live, people are going to comment about it on the Internet in real time for the entire globe to read. NBC is well aware of this phenomenon. The network live-tweeted the opening ceremony, which it didn't broadcast in the U.S. until several hours later! 

If the network didn't foresee that particular drawback, then maybe we shouldn't expect it to have anticipated the ensuing blowback on Twitter. Or should we? The cord cutters and pro-new media stalwarts who would find both the tape delay and the cable authentication scheme most offensive might be a minority of U.S. viewers, but they are very well represented on Twitter. If decision makers at NBC weren't aware of that fact intitially, they certainly are now. 

Law firm Loeb & Loeb issued an infographic that gives a good overview of the results of ICANN’s application process for new generic top-level domains, or gTLDs. The organization received more than 1,900 applications for new domains. Of those applications, 40% were redundant as companies vied for domains such as .app (13 applications), .blog (nine applications) and .art (10 applications). 

About 40% of applications were for specific brands such as .Amazon or .Volkswagen. This is a testament to two factors within the gTLD process: the need for brands to protect their high-level domain names from cybersquatters and the marketing benefits of owning a gTLD. 

Several companies applied for a significant number of domains. Google (under the name Charleston Road Registry) applied for 101 generic domains while Amazon applied for 76.

Despite some early hiccups, ICANN's review has commenced. It will be interesting to see how and why certain domains will be awarded. From a high-level perspective, what is the difference between Google or Amazon owning a particular domain? Both are huge companies that have ample funding to develop such domains.

A bigger question is, how will companies created solely for the purpose of applying to gTLDs fare? These companies, such as Donuts Inc. and Top Level Domain Holdings Limited (TLDHL), help their clients handle the work involved in applying for a gTLD. Donuts Inc. had the most applications for gTLDs with 307 (106 more than second-place Google). The company has been overlooked by people analyzing the review process because each application listing is under a different name and email address. Donuts Inc. utilizes a Colombian (.co) top-level domain and each application uses a different email address. The co-founder for Donuts Inc. is Daniel Schindler and the company operates out of Bellevue, Washington. It has raised $100 million to administer gTLDs (which it will operate through registrars like GoDaddy). Donuts Inc. spent $56.8 million in ICANN fees to lodge its 307 applications.

Beyond that, little is known about companies like Donuts Inc. or Top Level Domain Holdings Limited. In many cases, the companies are working on behalf of third parties. But with so many applications between the two (TLDHL submitted 70 applications, fourth behind Donuts, Google and Amazon), each company likely will be awarded several, perhaps dozens, of domains. It is reasonable to trust companies that are well known to administer gTLDs, such as Google and Amazon, but it is curious to see these shadowy corporations applying for so many domain names. 

Donuts, TLDHL and their ilk make many pundits think that ICANN’s new gTLDs will cause a gold-rush land grab for premium property on the Internet. It is understandable for Amazon and Google to be heavily invested in gTLDs, and there are reasonable expectations of what each company would do with its allotted share of domains. On the other hand, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what will come if the mysterious newcomers win a significant number of domains.