Which is why this qualifies as news: Financial commentary site Seeking Alpha is going to start paying some of its writers.

The seven-year-old site, which relies on a pool of several thousand contributors to stock it with chatter about stocks and anything else you can trade, will now offer them a chance to get paid for their work. It’s a one-size-fits-all rate: $10 for every 1,000 page views a story generates, as long as the story doesn’t appear anywhere else on the free Web.

That’s not going to make any of the site’s writers rich. Seeking Alpha CEO David Jackson says “it’s possible” that his most popular writers could generate a couple of thousand dollars per month, but most are going to make much less.

Jackson, on the other hand, is potentially on the hook for a decent-size bill.

Quantcast pegs his site’s daily page views at around two million. Not all of those views come from contributors–Seeking Alpha’s free transcript service, for instance, is popular and useful, and I assume the site gets a decent chunk of direct traffic. But if, say, half its page views were from volunteers who now want to get paid, that’s an outlay of $1,000 a day.

But why pay anything at all? Jackson’s longtime strategy has been to get people like newsletter publishers and money managers to give him free stuff, and offer them exposure/leads in return. Why change now?

You can read Jackson’s explanation of the move, along with some other details, in a letter he’s distributing to his writers today. But maybe he’s just following this sound advice from the Joker:

Dear Seeking Alpha contributor,

I wanted to let you know personally about three new initiatives that have rolled out on SeekingAlpha.com this morning:

1. Sharing revenue with contributors

I’ve always viewed Seeking Alpha as a partnership with our contributors: you provide us with outstanding articles, and we invest heavily (we now have over 70 employees) in technology, web design, editors and traffic partnerships to get your ideas in front of a large and valuable audience and drive customer leads to your business. But we’ve always known that some of our contributors don’t have businesses we can drive leads to, and that many contributors would appreciate additional direct income from their articles.

We’ve spent over a year building a direct sales team, and our readership has hit an all-time high and continues to grow (see: http://www.quantcast.com/seekingalpha.com). As a result, we can now share meaningful revenue with contributors: you’ll earn $10 for every thousand page views to articles which are published by Seeking Alpha and given to us exclusively (i.e. they don’t appear for free elsewhere on the Web). We call payment for exclusive articles our “Premium Partnership Program”. It’s on an article by article basis, so there are no contracts or forward commitments, and if for any reason you don’t want to receive payment yourself, you can pick a charity to receive your earnings instead. And if you don’t want to give us exclusivity for articles, nothing will change from the way we publish your articles now.

2. Upgrade to our leaderboards and reputation system

We’ve introduced a new reputation system and set of leaderboards, called “SA Opinion Leaders”. You’re now ranked by page views (trailing 90 days) to your articles according to the themes you write about. For example, if some of your articles are tagged “Media”, you automatically appear in the Media Sector leaderboard and are ranked by the number of page views you received to those articles. You can appear in multiple leaderboards, determined by the themes your articles are tagged with. Additionally, if you’re ranked in the top 5 for any theme, that information is displayed on your articles and also on your profile page.

We think this new reputation system has strong advantages. First, we’ve discovered that the number of followers a person has on Seeking Alpha (and, parenthetically, Twitter also,) doesn’t necessarily equate to reader engagement or influence. In contrast, the number of people who read your articles is a direct measure of reader engagement and thus your influence. Second, reputation is far more meaningful when measured in specific areas of expertise. So if you focus on media stocks, it’s far more valuable to know (and tell people) that you’re the number one on Seeking Alpha in the Media Sector than that you’re number 33 in some general ranking. We think that measuring real engagement and ranking contributors in categories will be valuable for contributors and — critically — valuable for readers.

3. Access to stats

You can now view detailed stats on Seeking Alpha, including total page views, page views by article, and page views by category. Additionally, you can track your page views and earnings for exclusive articles.

The future

Any major change carries risk, so why are we doing this? After all, churn in our contributor base is remarkably low, we’re about to add our 4,000th contributor, traffic is at an all time high, we recently crossed our 600,000th registered user, we have over 40,000 comments on the site per month, and our audience is of outstandingly high quality.

The answer is: this is about a vision. Investment research has been dominated by the sell side, but there’s a world out there of other people who have considerable knowledge and insight about stocks, options, bonds, ETFs and investment strategy. Whether you’re a fund manager, financial advisor, industry expert or a smart individual investor, we want to be the partner that brings that insight to light and unlocks value for contributors by offering exposure, reputation, customer leads and direct income. If this is successful, it should transform the investment research industry.

Thank you for your partnership with us, and wishing you a happy and prosperous 2011,
David

“The FBI is aware of these possible computer intrusions and has opened an investigation,” said Katherine Schweit, an FBI spokeswoman. Ms. Schweit said the FBI opened the investigation Thursday but it will not comment on what it is looking at. “It’s very early in the investigation,” she said.

AT&T, the sole U.S. provider of wireless service for the Apple Inc. (AAPL) tablets, acknowledged Wednesday that a security flaw in its website made it possible for iPad users’ email addresses to be exposed.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

WaMu’s failure is historic–the largest bank bust on record. The company’s assets are equivalent to about two-thirds of those held by the 747 insolvent thrift institutions and sold off by the Resolution Trust during the S&L crisis.

With more than 20 percent of global technology spending coming from the financial industry, WaMu’s failure and the collapse of other institutions are certain to have repercussions in tech. “This is game-changing,” Gartner (IT) analyst Joanne Correia said of the economic crisis recently. “People are going to stop new software deployments. They’ll cut in the applications space. In PCs and servers, everyone will stop putting in new hardware.”

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• Lehman Brothers: $2.5 Billion for a Bankruptcy Well Done
• Here’s $39 Billion in Recognition for Your Hard Work on the Forthcoming Financial Crisis
• Weekend at Bernanke’s II
• Weekend at Bernankes

[Image Credit: Ape Lad/Flickr]

When the moment comes to take the perfect picture of a snowy mountaintop, Fourth of July fireworks or soccer goal in midkick, most people forget about these features or don’t know how to use them. And while many digital cameras can now detect faces and make sure they are in focus, they can’t tell whether that face is smiling or not. The results aren’t bad, but they could be much better.

Sony’s Cyber-shot DSC-W170 uses Smile Shutter Mode to snap pictures when a subject smiles.

This week, I tested three new digital cameras that claim to do the thinking for you. Some digitally analyze the scene you’re about to capture, automatically choosing the setting that would take the best picture. Others can detect when a subject is smiling so as to automatically know when to snap the photo. One camera even attempts to digitally alter frowning faces into smiles, with amusing results.

I tried out Sony’s $300 Cyber-shot DSC-W170, Kodak’s $250 EasyShare Z1085 IS and Olympus’s $200 FE-340. Only the Sony (SNE) includes all three of the aforementioned features; the Kodak (EK) has scene detection, and the Olympus (OCPNF.PK) camera has built-in smile detection. I found the automatic scene detection offered in the Sony and Kodak cameras to be the most useful feature for everyday photos. It improved my photos and didn’t require any extra adjustments. I handed the cameras to other people to take pictures, without having to change any settings.

The automatic smile detection offered in the Sony and Olympus cameras was fun to use and could be especially helpful for families whose young kids never seem to smile at the right moment. But it didn’t work consistently and had trouble detecting my bearded boss’s smile and even that of a beard-free colleague.

I found Sony’s frown-fixing tool, which is called Happy Face Retouch, to be rather unusual. It took already captured images of my friends’ faces and turned their frowns or ambivalent looks into smiles, but didn’t adjust the subjects’ eyes. Though this was good for laughs, the eerie-looking grins pasted on faces reminded me of painted-on clowns’ mouths. And some attempts to retouch a face couldn’t detect the face to alter it. But a handful of the Happy Face Retouches looked somewhat natural.

Similar Specs

These cameras boast many similar specifications. All three use 5x optical zoom lenses, and the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W170 and Kodak EasyShare Z1085 IS each have 10.1 and 10 megapixel image sensors while the least expensive Olympus FE-340 has 8 megapixels. The Sony and Olympus both have generous 2.7-inch viewing screens and almost identically sleek builds, though the Sony is the only one of these three cameras to have an optical viewfinder.

The Kodak’s viewing screen is slightly smaller than the other two digital cameras, measuring 2.5 inches, but its build isn’t nearly as compact as the others. It reminded me more of small, high-end SLR camera, with its comfortably large hand grip, a settings knob on the top edge of the camera, and a protruding zoom lens.

Sony’s Happy Face Retouch feature digitally changes facial expressions into smiles, but all it did was make me look unnatural and awkward.

Kodak’s EasyShare Z1085 IS takes Secure Digital (SD) memory cards, which are more common than the Memory Stick and xD cards that work in the Sony and Olympus cameras, respectively.

The Kodak and Sony digital cameras have different names for their automatic scene-detection features. By default, the Kodak camera works in Smart Capture Mode, which includes intelligent scene detection, capture control and image processing. I focused on the camera’s scene detection, which automatically determines whether the photo should be taken in Macro, Text (for shots of text in a book, for example), Face, Landscape or Night settings.

Icon on the Screen

I snapped pictures around Washington, D.C., noting a tiny icon on the camera’s screen that indicated which of the five scene modes was being used to capture the photo. A flower icon indicating Macro appeared on my screen when I stooped to get a close-up shot of a tulip, and an icon of a dark sky and stars showed on the screen when I took photos at night. The camera’s flash, focus and exposure changed according to the type of photo.

The Sony camera uses what it calls Intelligent Scene Recognition to decide which settings should go along with certain photos. Like the Kodak, icons on the Sony’s screen indicated the scene settings that were automatically deemed appropriate, including Backlight, Backlight Portrait, Twilight, Twilight Portrait and Twilight Using a Tripod.

The Sony’s Intelligent Scene Recognition isn’t on by default like Kodak’s feature. Instead, it must be turned on from within a menu, but once on, it stays on until you turn it off. ISR can be used in either Auto or Advanced mode; Auto takes a single photo with automatically determined settings, while Advanced takes two shots — one with manual settings you can choose and another shot immediately following the first with automatic settings according to what the camera thinks is best.

I experienced surprising results with the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W170 and Olympus FE-340 while testing their automatic smile-detecting functions. My friends thought I was joking when I told them the camera would take their picture only if they were smiling. When the flash went off multiple times as they kept smiling, they were intrigued by this feature.

Sony’s version, which it calls Smile Shutter Mode, is easy to switch into by turning a dial on the camera to a smiley face. Once this setting is chosen and the camera’s shutter button is pressed, the Cyber-shot will search for smiles in its subjects, and will take photos whenever it detects a smile. Settings within this mode can be set to specifically detect an adult’s smile or a child’s smile, and the degree of smile can be set to low, medium or high; I kept things simple by leaving the smile detector on default settings.

Capturing Smiles

Olympus calls this feature Smile Shot, capturing three rapid shots in a row to make sure everyone’s smiling. The idea of taking three shots would be extra helpful with an indecisive baby, but most of my friends were able to hold their smiles, which produced three almost exactly identical shots each time someone smiled. Smile Shot is harder to get to in a pinch compared with the Sony: it’s buried in a list of 13 settings on the Olympus when the camera is set in Scene mode.

The Olympus seemed to be a bit slower than the Sony when it came to detecting smiles, but both had trouble with bearded men and even some folks without beards. And people felt silly standing around with a smile on their faces waiting for the camera to finally work. Closed-mouth, no-teeth smiles were harder for these cameras to detect, but not impossible. In group situations, the Olympus camera will focus on whoever’s face appears largest, which could mean the person closest to the camera, while the Sony takes a picture whenever anyone in the group smiles.

Putting a Happy Face On

If someone isn’t smiling, Sony’s Happy Face Retouch tool can come in handy, but don’t count on liking the results. In a group shot of five friends, two people who weren’t smiling put a bit of a damper on the whole shot. I used Happy Face Retouch, but it picked up on only one of the nonsmiling faces, turning a confused look into a smile that looked passable. But other results weren’t usable. A serious-looking shot of me deliberately not smiling looked freakishly unnatural after the touch-up, mostly because the rest of my face didn’t join the smile. I looked more like someone who had received too many Botox treatments.

Sony says that, in group shots, it can detect and change up to eight faces, but in my tests it usually changed only one. This retouching tool is also difficult to find: It took me 16 button presses to change each image into a smile — or what Sony calls a smile. A few times, Happy Face Retouch couldn’t identify a face in the photo, even when just one person stood in the frame.

These digital cameras took good photos, overall, and are fun to use because they take pressure off the photographer. I found the automatic scene-detection tools of the Kodak and Sony to be the most realistic and useful offerings, and I’m sure it won’t be long before automatic scene detection becomes as commonplace as an automatic flash.

The chart below compares features of the three cameras described. Click on it to make it larger.

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com