As long as the newspaper was a bundle, no one ever had to care that people were buying it for radically different reasons. But once you go online, and people can unbundle things, where you can traffic directly to a story without going through the home page or any of the rest of it, suddenly what it — the individual choices made by individual readers come to matter a lot.

– Clay Shirky, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan

That’s good for Sony, the people who paid the bill for “Dragon Tattoo,” right? Nope. Terrible, says Sony.

The studio is livid that the New Yorker is running Denby’s review today, more than a week ahead of a Dec. 13 embargo. Why does the studio care? If you want a good explanation of modern-day movie marketing and the push-pull between filmmakers and film reviewers, check out this lucid explainer from NPR’s Linda Holmes.

But for everyone else, this won’t matter at all. New Yorker readers (and now, drive-by visitors as well, since the review has been placed in front of  the magazine’s online paywall) will see the review, and a larger group of people will have a vague idea that the New Yorker likes it. That’s about it.

And that’s the moral for folks like myself in the technology-news-industrial complex, who spend way too much time thinking about, fighting with and cursing embargoes. This stuff can matter a lot (sometimes) to us, but that’s really only because we decide to agree that it matters. Readers don’t care at all.

I’d spend more time explaining this, except that if you care about this at all, you’ve already read many boring essays about it — perhaps even today! And I can’t tell you that I’m swearing off embargoes, because I can’t — I worked with three of them last week, have probably at least one more embargoed story coming this week and, I’m sure, many more down the road.

But this is a nice reminder that every time I do deal with one of these, it almost always means I’m not spending time on something geniunely interesting. Like news no one else is writing about, or a fresh take on something everyone else has already written about. Or even seeing a good movie.

There is a very cathartic crisis that’s gone on, and it’s not clear where it’s going to go. But at least everyone knows things are rotten. We’re in a much better place than when things were rotten and everyone thought things were great.

Facebook investor and futurist Peter Thiel, profiled in the New Yorker (article only available online to subscribers)

The Times saw Q2 revenue drop two percent and overall ad dollars drop four percent — digital ad dollars were up a modest 2.6 percent, and that wasn’t enough to make up for a 6.4 percent drop in print.

Circulation revenue was flat, but that number masks an interesting split. Print circulation dollars were down — the publisher didn’t disclose the size of the drop — but digital subscription dollars made up for the loss.

The Times says it now has 224,000 subscribers to the digital editions it rolled out in March; a month after launch, it said subscriptions for that service had “surpassed 100,000.” The paper also says it has 57,000 subscribers for digital subscriptions it sells via platforms like Amazon’s Kindle.

The Times also said it had signed up 100,000 free digital subscribers via a giveaway sponsored by Ford’s Lincoln brand, and that 756,000 home delivery subscribers were getting digital delivery as well, which comes free with their print subscriptions.

The Times says it expects to see circulation revenue in the “low single digits” next quarter, presumably because of more digital dollars. “Our ability to further monetize our digital content will provide us with a significant new revenue stream in the second half of this year,” says CEO Janet Robinson via press release.

Other notes:

• The paper’s About Group, once the major engine of its digital operations, saw revenue shrink yet again, this time by 17.3 percent. And again, the Times blamed part of the drop on Google: “Design changes in the cost-per-click advertisements served by Google had a negative effect,” as did “algorithm changes Google implemented during the first quarter of 2011.” The Times also cited “an increase in competition in the content space”; it didn’t mention that in May it had pushed out About CEO Cella Irvine.
• If you ignore a $161 million goodwill write-down for some of the publisher’s regional papers and other one-time charges and gains, the Times’s earnings would have been 14 cents per share, down from 18 cents a year ago. Operating profit, minus one-time charges and depreciation, amortization, etc., was $83 million, down from $93 million.
• The Times says it expects to see similar ad results next quarter.

Beginning in August, players will no longer have to spend $10 a month in order to enter Lego Universe. Now they can play for as long as they like before deciding whether to subscribe. The game is also becoming a digital download, so players will no longer need to buy a DVD.

By lifting these barriers, Lego is hoping that more players will get introduced to the game and therefore more will end up paying over the long run, much like games found on Facebook or other virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft. Lego has been very successful at building videogames on other platforms, like Nintendo, but most have been for a substantial upfront fee.

Lego says that “thousands of players” have played Lego Universe since it launched in October 2010.

Lego says it has no current plans for microtransactions and will stick to its tiered subscription model, which starts at $10 a month. Nonpaying players will have access to two adventure zones and the ability to build Lego models on one property. Full members will have access to all areas in the game and be able to compete and participate in community events.

Photo Credit: Christopher Vigliotti

Is that good? Bad? Make your own guess. Times PR boss Bob Christie, says that number doesn’t include free starter subscriptions offered to some readers, via Lincoln. But he says it does include launch promotions which offered a four-week trial for $0.99.

If all of those subs stick around for a year, that’s at least another $19.5 million in revenue for the paper. But that’s a big “if.”

Here’s the Times’ take: “So soon after the launch, the Company does not yet have visibility into conversion and retention rates for these paying customers after the initial promotional period, although early indicators are encouraging.”

The rest of the paper’s numbers are OKish, for a big print publication: Revenues are down 3.6 percent, with ad revenue down 4.4 percent and circulation dollars down 3.7 percent.

The Times’ digital story is a bit of a mixed bag. The publisher’s media group saw digital ad revenue increase 14.9 percent, but revenues at About.com, which have been a big component of its Web business for years, dropped 10.2 percent, and operating profit at About dropped 13.9 percent.

The Times lays some of the blame at Google’s feet: “Design changes in cost-per-click advertisements served by Google had a negative effect on click-through rates in the quarter, and the Company expects that to be the case through the second quarter of 2011. The About Group also experienced a moderately negative impact on page views from the algorithm changes Google implemented in the quarter.”

If you were looking for evidence that the New York Times’ subscription/paywall plan, rolled out last week, is very much a work in progress, here you go: A couple days after debuting a plan that limited referring links from Google but not any other site on the Web, the Times has changed its mind.

Now, the Times says, it will place a limit on links from all “major” search engines, which I assume means Microsoft’s Bing, and Bing alone.

Here’s PR rep Kristin Mason’s explanation of the change, first reported by Alexia Tsotsis at TechCrunch: “After reviewing our options, we decided to extend the policy of five free clicks per day to all major search engines by the global launch on March 28. Our pre-launch period in Canada was undertaken to enable us to test the systems and fine-tune the model.”

Which is fine. The Times is entitled to tweak and modify their system all they want. I’m hoping they finally settle on a one-price-fits-all model, which charges digital-only subscribers less than those who want paper-and-ink copies, too. But I’m not holding my breath.

And, to be fair, the Times has always made a point of saying it was mostly interested in encouraging links from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. And that the Google restriction it announced last week could be expanded to other search engines.

Still, it does make me wonder why Times digital czar Martin Niseholtz had to go through this exchange with me last week:

Peter Kafka: Just to be clear, when the Times says non-subscribers can read stories above their 20-per-month limit if they come from referring links, you’re not just talking about Twitter and Facebook, but any link from any site, right?

Martin Nisenholtz: That’s correct.

Kafka: It could be the Journal. It could be a blog, it could be the Financial Times, anything on the Web, right?

Nisenholtz: Yes. The only other thing is that Google has a methodology where they can limit the number of inbound links per day, and we intend to take them up on it.

Kafka: So that’s Google doing the actual gating, not you?

Nisenholtz: Right. They had made this feature available prior to us going pay, so it’s not like it was inspired by us per se. We’re just taking advantage of it.

Kafka: Why limit Google’s links, but not any other site’s?

Nisenholtz: I think the majority of people are honest and care about great journalism and the New York Times. When you look at the research that we’ve done, tons of people actually say, “Jeez, we’ve felt sort of guilty getting this for free all these years. We actually want to step up and pay, because we know we’re supporting a valuable institution.” At the same time we want to make sure that we’re not being gamed, to the extent that we can be.

Kafka: But if you really do want to game the wall, you’ll be able to do it. You could could go through Microsoft’s Bing, for instance.

Nisenholtz: We’re obviously going to be vigilant over the next couple of months, in looking at the ways that people are doing that.

Instead, he could have simply said something long the lines of “Dunno. We’ve been at this for 14 months, but we’re still working on it. Stay tuned.”

Back? OK. For extra credit, here’s a condensed and edited–but still very long!–version of a chat I had yesterday with Times digital czar Martin Nisenholtz. I’m not convinced Nisenholtz is convinced that the plan the Times rolled out yesterday is the best possible plan. But if that’s the case, he certainly didn’t let on.

The big takeaways:

• The Times is limiting referrals from Google because it can. Specifically, it’s taking advantage of Google’s “first click free” program. (Worth noting that the 5-a-day limit gives you another 150 articles or so a month above the initial 20-per-month cut off. So it’s not particularly punitive.)
• The Times is charging more for access to its iPad app than for smartphone apps, because it thinks it can. iPad users spend more time with the paper, and the Times thinks people who spend more time with the paper will pay more for it.
• The Times only expects a small sliver of its Web readers to become paying users. Niseholtz doesn’t exactly say this out loud, but if you piece together his commentary, that’s what he’s saying. He doesn’t expect the “vast majority” of readers to ever see the paywall, so what he’s really trying to do is convert a percentage of the remaining minority. But if you’ve read Doctor’s piece, then you already know this.
• The Times isn’t trying to price its digital subscriptions in a way that protects its print subscription business. On the one hand, this makes sense–after all, the subscription plans are aimed at converting heavy users of its Web site who aren’t already print subscribers. On the other hand, given that print subscribers remain the Times’ most valuable asset, this one seems hard to reconcile.

Peter Kafka: Just to be clear, when the Times says non-subscribers can read stories above their 20-per-month limit if they come from referring links, you’re not just talking about Twitter and Facebook, but any link from any site, right?

Martin Nisenholtz: That’s correct.

Kafka: It could be the Journal. It could be a blog, it could be the Financial Times, anything on the Web, right?

Nisenholtz: Yes. The only other thing is that Google has a methodology where they can limit the number of inbound links per day, and we intend to take them up on it.

Kafka: So that’s Google doing the actual gating, not you?

Nisenholtz: Right. They had made this feature available prior to us going pay, so it’s not like it was inspired by us per se. We’re just taking advantage of it.

Kafka: Why limit Google’s links, but not any other site’s?

Nisenholtz: I think the majority of people are honest and care about great journalism and the New York Times. When you look at the research that we’ve done, tons of people actually say, “Jeez, we’ve felt sort of guilty getting this for free all these years. We actually want to step up and pay, because we know we’re supporting a valuable institution.” At the same time we want to make sure that we’re not being gamed, to the extent that we can be.

Kafka: But if you really do want to game the wall, you’ll be able to do it. You could could go through Microsoft’s Bing, for instance.

Nisenholtz: We’re obviously going to be vigilant over the next couple of months, in looking at the ways that people are doing that.

Kafka: I’m surprised to hear you say you’re going to spend calories trying to make sure that people don’t abuse the system. I would think you have other things to do.

Nisenholtz: I don’t think we’re going to spend enormous resources to go tracking people down. But at the same time, we’re going to obviously work to see where the source of these workarounds are, and work to close them off, if they become substantive enough.

But in looking at the research that we did, we expect [paywall jumpers] to be a very significant minority, a small, small number of people. When you look at your Twitter feed, based on the people you follow, it probably seems like it’s looming very large. But in the scheme of things, among people who don’t live in Silicon Valley or don’t cover it, the vast majority of people do not have this on their minds.

Kafka: What does research say about the total number of subscribers you can expect?

Nisenholtz: Obviously we haven’t released that. We are very, very confident, based on three rounds of research with three separate groups of loyalists, three separate vendors, over three separate time periods, that the conversion rates among that group are going to be sufficiently high to layer in the second revenue stream.

But I’d just remind you that we’re still very much in the advertising busienss. It’s our core business. We don’t expect the vast majority of our users to see the paywall, and we expect to remain a very very large player on the web. The conversion rates are built off of folks who are fairly heavy users.

Kafka: Why charge different prices depending on the screen–laptop, smartphone, iPad, etc–your subscribers use to read the Times? Netflix charges one price and that seems to work well for them.

Nisenholtz: We built the pricing architecture off of the research as well. We basically found a greater willingness to pay among iPad users. We see iPad app users spending much much more time with our brand than either Web users or smartphone users. So the more you use it, the more you value it.

This pricing research was very clear from a consumer perspective. It was not built off of what we charge for the paper, or what we think we desrve, or anything like that. It’s what our loyal users said they would be willing to pay.

Kafka: For first-time subscribers, at least, you can get more for your money by buying a print subscription than a digital-only offer. I assume that’s intentional.

Nisenholtz: Not really, no. I don’t think anybody ever had a discussion of favoring print over the Web. This research was done on digital loyalists. Obviously, the print subscribers are very, very valuable to the franchise, but I can’t remember a single disucssion where we linked the digital price point to our print subscriptions.

Kafka: You announced this in January of 2010, and now you’re going to launch it in March 2011. I know you spent time researching your customers, but what else have you been doing?

Nisenholtz: If we were just rolling out a web-only digital subscription to the Times website it would have been a 3-month project. But you have to remember that we were very intent on trying to create the kind of customer view that took customers in one setting–for whatever they had–across platforms.

What that means is we had to tie in a legacy circulation management system, as well as a digital system, as well as our legacy customer systems. You have these big iron legacy systems that have to be joined with web systems.

For us, the 14 months didn’t feel like a particularly long time. We were starting from a standing start.

Kafka: When Apple announced its subscription plans last month, you guys said, essentially, that it wasn’t going to affect your plans. And now you’re working within Apple’s new rules. Did you know about them in advance?

Nisenholtz: No. We had heard the same rumors that you had, so we knew what the rumors were. But we heard about Apple’s plans pretty much at the same time as everyone else.

———-

Again, the Q&A above is an edited excerpt of our chat. As an experiment, I’m embedding our entire 21-minute conversation here, just to see if anyone derives any value out of it. I can’t advise listening to it, as the sound quality is sub-optimal (it’s recorded via a BlackBerry’s speaker phone onto a digital recorder) and it’s also, um, rambling. But if you’ve got a weird desire to see/hear some Web content sausage being made, have at it.

[UPDATE: The Times argues, gently and politely, that it would have been nice had I told Nisenholtz in advance that I intended to publish the audio of our conversation. I think they're right, so I've taken down the track.]

That’s because–even though what he wrote put the knickers of the Hollywood/New York media bigwigs who own the premium video service into a series of ever more painful knots–it is a variation of things Kilar (pictured here) has been saying for quite awhile now.

Including in homespun videos by me!*

As you will see below, though Kilar’s essay was designed to tweak, it was by no means a geek version of a Howard Beale “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” moment either.

Here is a quintet of video interviews in which Kilar talks about the end of linear television watching, the need for browser-based TV sets, how hard it is to build paywalls (and real ones, too) and more.

As you will see, it would be a shame if the clearly talented Kilar can’t eat lunch in this town for restating what he has long maintained, even though a happy ending here does seem unlikely.

Until we find out how the story ends, here’s Kilar talking, from 2008 to last summer:

April, 2008 at Hulu HQ in Santa Monica, Calif.:

December, 2008 at Hulu HQ:

January, 2009 at Sundance Film Festival (Kilar is at 8:00 mark):

July, 2010 at Hulu HQ:

December, 2010 at Hulu’s New York office:

*And one by Peter Kafka.

News International Ltd., said Tuesday that around half of the 105,000 paying readers are monthly subscribers, including those to the digital sites and to the Times iPad app and Kindle edition. The others are either single copy or pay-as-you-go customers. There are also about 100,000 joint digital and print subscribers who have activated their digital accounts to the Web sites, the iPad app, or both, since launch, the company said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The two companies say they will make ESPN’s flagship channel available online for TV subscribers of Time Warner Cable. Those who can confirm their TV subscription through an online registration process can watch live programming on the Web just as it appears on TV for no additional charge—a model known as “TV Everywhere.”

Most of the industry’s forays in TV Everywhere so far have put scripted shows online in an on-demand format—usually sometime after they air on TV. For the most part, TV networks have yet to put their channels on the Web in real time, and doing so with one of the most popular cable networks and live sports programming—the best source of high audience ratings for TV—offers a high-profile stage for a risky experiment.

“We think this can be a catalyst to drive the industry towards broader adoption of the authentication model,” said Sean Bratches, executive vice president of sales with ESPN. “We anticipate doing this with a number of other affiliates.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In August, the Worcester, Mass., paper put up a Times-style pay wall: Visitors can read 10 “local” articles a month for free, but after that they need to pay up. It’s not a coincidence that the Telegram is using the same idea that the Times will try in a few months–the paper is one of several local titles owned by the Times itself.

So. How’s that Telegram doing since the wall went up?

Just great, Times CEO Janet Robinson said during the paper’s earnings call today: The Telegram’s metrics are “on plan,” and traffic hasn’t suffered.

In fact, Robinson said, the Times was pleasantly surprised to see that the Telegram’s unique visitors number had increased since the wall went up.

What’s that? I asked the Times for numbers to flesh that one out, but it declined. ComScore, though, does back Robinson up: The Web traffic counter says 281,000 U.S. unique visitors came by the Telegram in August, and that number crept up to 294,000 in September.

That’s a tiny bump, though comScore often has a difficult time measuring smaller sites. For comparison’s sake, note that the Telegram tells advertisers it reaches 700,000 uniques a month.

Still, a bump is a bump. And it’s certainly not the plummet that many people would expect. When the London Times put up a pay wall this summer, for instance, it saw traffic drop a reported 90 percent. (News Corp. owns both the London Times and this site.)

So how do we explain the Telegram’s increase? In the absence of input from the Times or the Telegram (I’ve asked both for comment), we have to speculate. Feel free to add your own in, but I can start with a few theories:

• Maybe the Telegram had some particularly blog-friendly, Facebook-friendly or Google-friendly stories in September. If that’s the case, the metered model would work well for the site, since it encourages casual visitors to show up via referral, without having to pay up. For a relatively modest site like the Telegram, you wouldn’t need many high-traffic stories to push up its base number.
• Or maybe it’s just as simple as a seasonal spike: Traffic numbers often droop in the summer, when people have better things to do than sit in front of their browsers, and then spike back up in the fall.

In any case, this should give the Times a bit of confidence about its strategy for the flagship paper, which it promises to tell us more about soon.

UPDATE: Some readers are having a hard time accepting Robinson’s assertions and comScore’s numbers.

I have no reason to think that Robinson, the Times or the Telegram made the data up. If you’re a conspiracist who thinks otherwise, you should note that the NYT wasn’t boasting about the data during the call, though Robinson did take time to read off a whole laundry list of digital accomplishments. It only came up in response to a question about the Telegram’s performance.

But different third-party analytics companies often reach different conclusions. So if you do want to look at a different data set, here’s one from Compete, via Jonathan Mendez. As you can see, it tells a very different story–a 20 percent drop from August to September (click to enlarge):

Three months ago, the New York Times seemed to have halted its advertising skid after a very long slide.

Perhaps it has started up again. Ad revenue dropped one percent during Q3: Digital revenue jumped 14.6 percent, but that wasn’t enough to counter a 5.8 percent drop in print ads–which CEO Janet Robinson had thought would move up again this quarter. This morning, though, she cited “uneven economic conditions” and “marketplace volatility.”

Meanwhile, circulation revenue dropped 4.8 percent, and the company’s overall revenue sank by 2.7 percent.

The Times isn’t terribly optimistic about the fourth quarter: It thinks prints ads may improve “modestly,” while digital will grow by 10 percent, which is a deceleration from both this quarter as well as the previous quarter’s 21 percent growth rate.

Here’s the full breakout for the Times’ digital properties (NYT.com, About.com, etc), which appear to be doing pretty well:

• Total Internet revenues increased 13.3 percent to $89.4 million from $78.9 million.
• Internet advertising revenues increased 14.6 percent to $78.3 million from $68.3 million.
• Internet advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 21.6 percent to $47.4 million from $39.0 million, mainly due to strong growth in national display advertising.
• Internet businesses accounted for 16.1 percent of the company’s revenues for the third quarter of 2010 versus 13.9 percent for the third quarter of 2009.

Meanwhile, the Times doesn’t have anything new to say about its plan to move its main Web site to a “metered model” pay wall next year. Perhaps we’ll hear something about it during the 11 am earnings call.

Beyond that, though, it hasn’t said much. But now we’re getting a little peek at the Times’ thinking about the paywall’s particulars, via online surveys it is conducting.

Bits and pieces of surveys have appeared in online reports in the last few day; a source familiar with the company tells me the paper is specifically targeting home delivery subscribers with this round of questions. NYT spokesman Bob Christie allows only that “research … is being conducted as part of the paid model.  We will have more to discuss later in the year. “

In any case, the survey excerpts don’t tell us what the Times intends to do — they only tell us what the paper is thinking about. Still, they’re informative.

Here’s a screenshot, via Lenovo marketing executive David Churbuck, which runs through a menu of different bundle options — home delivery plus website access for $64 a month, online plus access to mobile devices like Apple’s iPad (AAPL) for $40 a month, etc:

And here’s a query the Wall Street Journal’s Zach Seward saw, which throws out a $1/month price for online access:

And finally, another price point, via Churbuck. The wording is confusing here but I think the paper is asking about Web access at $2/month for home delivery subscribers:

Again, the obvious caveat here is that none of the above screenshots tell us where the paper will end up when it rolls out its paywall. But they do show us that paper is thinking hard about giving home delivery subscribers — who are incredibly valuable — a reason to remain home delivery subscribers. And that the paper is considering a model in which access to the site via iPad and other mobile devices is a privilege you have to pay for — consistent with the approach we’ve seen from Hulu, Time Warner’s Time Inc (TWX) and other big media companies.

As an aside, I think that mobile = money approach isn’t going to pan out for most folks. But more on that later. Meantime, if any other NYT subs want to send along snapshots of their surveys, I’d be much obliged: Peter AT AllthingsD DOT com. Thanks in advance!

We’ve said for awhile that increasingly we’ll move content from the print (and now iPad) versions of our titles off of the web. With People, we haven’t had hardly any content from the magazine on the web for a long time. Our strategy is to use the web for breaking news and ‘commodity’ type of news; (news events of any type, stock prices, sports scores) and keep (most of) the features and longer analysis for the print publication and iPad versions.

So there you go.

Two quick notes:

• For now, you can still get all of Sports Illustrated, Time Warner’s (TWX) other iPad title to date, for free on the Web. But you’re going to have to work very hard to find it. (Give up? Over here. UPDATE: Time Inc. folks tell me, through clenched teeth, that you weren’t supposed to get this week’s issue of SI on the Web for free yet. The publisher puts only back issues up on the Web, via SI’s “Vault” feature; someone put the wrong link up. They’ve since taken down the July 12 issue, and replaced it with an iTunes link to the SI app.
• As Apple (AAPL) notes, Time’s free Web site works really well on the iPad’s Safari browser. So do almost all print publisher’s sites. Which means getting consumers to shell out for a paid app instead of the free Web will require more than exclusive content–you’re going to have to offer them a radically different product. We’re not close yet.

We’ve said for awhile that increasingly we’ll move content from the print (and now iPad) versions of our titles off of the web. With People, we haven’t had hardly any content from the magazine on the web for a long time. Our strategy is to use the web for breaking news and ‘commodity’ type of news; (news events of any type, stock prices, sports scores) and keep (most of) the features and longer analysis for the print publication and iPad versions.

So there you go.

Two quick notes:

• For now, you can still get all of Sports Illustrated, Time Warner’s (TWX) other iPad title to date, for free on the Web. But you’re going to have to work very hard to find it. (Give up? Over here. UPDATE: Time Inc. folks tell me, through clenched teeth, that you weren’t supposed to get this week’s issue of SI on the Web for free yet. The publisher puts only back issues up on the Web, via SI’s “Vault” feature; someone put the wrong link up. They’ve since taken down the July 12 issue, and replaced it with an iTunes link to the SI app.
• As Apple (AAPL) notes, Time’s free Web site works really well on the iPad’s Safari browser. So do almost all print publisher’s sites. Which means getting consumers to shell out for a paid app instead of the free Web will require more than exclusive content–you’re going to have to offer them a radically different product. We’re not close yet.

BoomTown just made it through the snow-choked Donner Pass in the Sierras of Northern California, so excuse my laxity in posting this episode of “This Week in Tech,” the very fine Leo Laporte-helmed online chitchat show done on Sundays.

I appeared in this one, which, though posted in the middle of last week, was from the Sunday before, and included fellow guests John C. Dvorak, Ryan Block and Owen Stone.

It has a lot going on, including predictions about the Apple (AAPL) iPad launch, online content paywalls by News Corp. (NWS) and a lively debate related to the Twitter fracas I was involved in over inaccurate tweets about embargo-breaking, which turned into an interesting discussion on media in the blogging age.

Here’s the full video:

We’ve all seen it, that spiro-graphed, color-splotched invitation to Apple’s Jan. 27 event at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Weekend Update isn’t on the inside, but we hear rumors that Jobs will storm the stage dressed as Moses, carrying the new tablet, which will be made of stone, under his robes. Apparently, that’s where it’s been hiding all along. Either that, or Weekend Update is going a little nuts from “tablet fatigue.”

Before we got to rumors, plans and all important educated guesses, AllThingsD spent the week doing reporting about real companies with products you can actually buy.

Walt’s column wasn’t exactly its normal, gadgety self this week. Maybe he’s saving his strength. Instead of the newest thing that won’t be leaving your pocket, he covered a service that claims to help you remember everything. Evernote, with its adorable little elephant logo, aims to be a sort of digital filing cabinet in the cloud, allowing you to save information, images, notes and just about anything else that can be digitized. Walt had good things to say all around, even if the available apps didn’t give every device the same functionality. Weekend Update liked the auto text-recognition feature that makes pictures of text searchable. We’ll never carry a business card home again. Neither rain nor snow nor tablet rumors can keep Walt from his appointed rounds at Mossberg’s Mailbox, and this week he grabbed a couple questions about e-readers, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer 8 and the right laptop for the young and litigious. Walt cleared up the myth that e-books can’t highlight text (even if they don’t do it in color yet), and then moved on to a question about what IE8 refers to as “accelerators.” Before tying up the mailbag strings for anther week, he also gave counsel to a future counselor. He recommended a moderately priced Windows 7 laptop or a Macbook for the incoming law student, though he suggested it would be a good idea to check with the school and current students for specific needs. Weekend Update thinks that last bit is extra good advice. Katie was busy this week testing the latest Bluetooth earpiece from Aliph’s Jawbone line. The Jawbone Icon is the first earpiece to run with a software package that allows the addition of apps just for the earpiece. Overall Katie thought the Icon represented a step forward for Bluetooth earpieces but hopes for upgrades to the app suite will bring more robust features. Oh yeah, and she was glad that they finally got rid of those tricky hidden control buttons.

At MediaMemo, Peter gave us the continued saga of e-magazines and the world’s slowest moving electronic construction project. It looks like the Time Inc. e-mag prototypes won’t be part of Wednesday’s Apple (AAPL) event even though there was a lot of hullabaloo over the company’s Sports Illustrated prototype. Condé Nast, on the other hand, has declared its GQ mag-as-app tests a success. No word yet on who will be three-quarters naked on the first 10-inch screen edition. Completing the out-with-the-print, in-with-the-electronic trifecta was Peter’s post about the New York Times pay-wall announcement. The Times claims it will erect a metered wall in 2011, which seems like an awfully long time in the shifting sands of the Web. Outside partners may be playing a factor, and some speculate that the 2011 date is just a declaration that New York Times Company (NYT) will be waiting-and-seeing. Peter doesn’t see what that would accomplish and cites experts who assert that a year isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to build a complex pay wall with necessary features.

Digital Daily was on the ball this week with John’s signature hard-hitting hilarity. His early report proved correct when sources suggested that the EU’s approval of the pending Oracle (ORCL)-Sun (JAVA) acquisition was nigh. Not to leave the tablet news out in the cold, John asked some important questions about a future tablet’s data consumption habits, and thinks it might end up in a class of its own. A big, beautiful screen means big, beautiful images and video, which mean gloriously huge file sizes. Hooray for Wi-Fi. To round out the week, John covered a story about Google (GOOG) co-founders Larry and Sergey planning to sell about $5.5 billion in stock over five years. We’re not sure whether the proper term is “cashing out” or “cashing in,” but they are going to be doing a lot of one or the other. The stock sale will remove them as a two-man majority voting block, but their remaining 47 percent will assure that their velvety duet will continue to ring clearly at board meetings.

Boomtown led off with some viral video for the ages. Jimmy Fallon one-upped the “pants on the ground” video by performing the sarcastic ballad as Neil Young. We’re not sure the audience caught that it was Jimmy right way, in part, because Young was making the TV rounds about that time, and in part, because Fallon does a surprisingly good Neal impression. Kara asked her readers to vote on the new tablet’s name, making “iPad” her own prediction. Kara has an eerie way of getting this stuff right so Weekend Update is gonna go ahead and get that tattoo this weekend. Kara finished the week with a quick post about her trip to Sundance and all the geektastic happenings there. Kara’s Winnebago, which we call “Operation Rolling Thunder,” was crammed full of wife, kids, mom, dog, and maybe a few stowaway Bay Area indie filmmakers who tied themselves to the undercarriage. Read the post; there’s never a dull moment on a Swisher expedition.

AllTingsD is back on Monday with some great new stuff to feed that techie habit. And don’t forget to set your homepages here Tuesday (as if they weren’t already) to see live photos and blogging from Apple’s big unveiling. We’ll see you there, and will be sure to let you know if Jobs does, in fact, part the Bay in his walk from Marin to San Francisco that morning.

If you follow the media-versus-Google meme, you know this instinctively. But here are some numbers that spell it out: Of the 25,000-plus sources cataloged by Google News, “less than 100″ have opted out of the index, says Google’s Josh Cohen, who runs the service.

It is theoretically possible, of course, that more publications have opted out of Google’s main search results than out of the narrower Google News product. But I doubt it.

I also doubt that we’re going to see a significant number of publishers opt out of Google (GOOG) in the future, despite noisy saber-rattling from media outlets–most notably the Associated Press and News Corp. (NWS), which owns this site.

That said, if we are going to see some movement, it will be in the next few months. The AP, for instance, has a licensing deal with Google that runs out in the very near future.

I chatted Friday with Cohen (see video interview below) about the negotiations, and he gave me the polite equivalent of a “no comment.” But from what I can tell, the two sides remain pretty far apart on just about every point of contention.

Some other items of note from my conversation with Cohen:

• A reminder that even publishers that put their stuff behind a paywall don’t want to cut themselves off from Google, which is absolutely true. Just ask News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, which has gone through considerable effort and expense to boost its presence in search results.
• Even though Google is already integrating “real-time” search results from Twitter (with Facebook and MySpace on the way), those results have not worked their way into Google News, and Cohen and his team are still trying to figure out the best way to do that.
• I got an English-language explanation of the “Living Stories” project Google is working on with the Washington Post (WPO) and the New York Times (NYT).

Apologies: I still have not mastered vagaries of audio for Web video, or at least for our Web video publishing system. You’re probably going to want to turn the volume down during the introduction in this clip and then turn it back up once the interview starts.