The Web security firm Barracuda Networks has surveyed Twitter use and determined that only about one-quarter of registered users are active. The suggestion is that Twitter is more of a news feed than a social network.

The study found that 73 per cent of users had Tweeted fewer than 10 times. And only 21 per cent had Tweeted 10 times, followed 10 and been followed by 10.

The study's author concludes that many on Twitter simply signed up to follow their favourite celebrities. Now that most celebrities have started Tweeting, the service doesn't have the same growth potential.

The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles has an exhaustive list of advice for today's newsroom managers. It largely amounts to: Get with the program.

Niles continues to see a lag between the technology and the media leader. He believes it's only a matter of time before newspapers outside the U.S. suffer what they have inside the country, so he has delivered a speech in Singapore and delivered notes from it online.

Among his prescriptions:

1. Management should consume technology.
2. Require everyone to blog and have social media accounts.
3. Managers should Skype and chat instead of sending memos or talking on the phone.
4. Managers should build their communities by blogging.

Niles concludes: "Ultimately, however, the larger goal here is to get managers comfortable with, and conversant in, online communications technology.

"This comfort can't be outsourced or delegated. As news communication businesses shift from print to online, their managers must become as comfortable and conversant in online communication as they were with the printed word. Otherwise, their leaders are reduced to followers, and their businesses run adrift."

Jonathan Miller, the chief digital news executive for Rupert Murdoch's press empire at News Corp., believes the time has come to recapture what was lost: Two revenue streams for news sites from the Internet.

He doesn't see any other way. The opportunity to drive revenue was lost some time ago by free offerings.

“The choice between paywall or free is not mutually exclusive. They can co-exist based on quality of content and geography,” he told an elite media conference in Abu Dhabi.

Hal Varian, the chief economist for the world's largest search engine, doesn't believe Google has the answer to what ails newspapers. But he notes the decline began long before the Internet.

What he outlines in his post to the Google Public Policy Blog is an even-handed overview of the debate over paywalls, of shifting to an exclusive online operation, and on the uncoupling of editorial and advertising and its consequences for the economics of news.

He notes that news hasn't made much money historically; rather, it's the access advertisers have to audiences.

"In my view, the best thing that newspapers can do now is experiment, experiment, experiment," he writes.

The driving force behind Netscape, Ning and many other Web brands has some advice for old media: Just "burn the boats." In other words, spend time discovering and sever the link with the past.

Marc Andreessen sees little point in sustaining newspapers, for instance. Newsrooms should simply shift to digital delivery, he asserts, even if it means leaving behind 80% (that is an underestimate on his part) of the revenue and headcount.

There is little reason to expend effort on paywalls or delivery of the same look and feel to such devices as the iPad for a fee. It's time to realize the Web is free and that content shouldn't be anything other than that, he argues.

If old media won't burn the boats, someone else will, he says.

The founder of Hunch.com, veteran Web developer Chris Dixon, weighs in on a controversial issue involving Google and the news business. The latter, in some cases, suggests the former is harming them by serving up search results of their content with ads adjoining --- basically, making money while someone else does the heavy lifting.

What Dixon suggests, though, is that hard news is hardly Google's preference. He notes that, with some tough subjects, Google takes a pass in serving up ads --- it just doesn't think the content is going to help an advertiser reach a customer with an ambition to buy anything.

In effect, Dixon says, hard news is lousy business. Its newsroom cross-subsidy is being eroded in the digital age of one reader to one story, and the largest search engine doesn't seem sufficiently attracted to it to add an advertisement to the mix. As he sees it, it's just a terrible stand-alone business, in need of a cross-subsi

The 140 characters of a Tweet have served users well to date. This week Twitter surpassed the 10-billion-Tweet mark.

But from the outset there has been frustration that it's just not enough room to express --- and, for some, express in such a way as to monetize.

Now Cascaad has come along with an API that it says will permit third-party Twitter applications to add context and monetization to the mix. ReadWriteWeb has had a look at the plan, and without blessing it, largely believes it's on to something.

Cascaad's API lets someone parse a Tweet, focus in on entities within it and contextualize (or link to monetizing services, it seems) them. Twitter has been promising for months now services that would help users --- and themselves --- use the platform to make money.

In the Silicon Valley Insider, Steve Rosenblaum identifies an emerging trend of consumers as accomplices in the curation of information, particularly geo-locational data that reveals our patterns of consumption.

Cumulatively, this is journalism. Perhaps not the journalism we knew, but the journalism we are bound to know in the time ahead. It collects our behaviour --- without relying on us to gush about a product or service --- and produces the notion of value and relevance.

Even tagging photographs on Facebook essentially builds someone else's Web brand. Rosenblaum calls it "passive endorsement" or a crowd-based curation.

He sees it as an alternative to the professional, expensive curation.

The still-hiliarious-after-all-these-years team at The Onion has identified the societal loss if newspapers die.
The video isn't necessarily drop-down-funny, but it's so realistic as a news show that some might need to be warned it's a satire.

The editor of the year in the United States, Steve Buttry, has been a solid advocate of pragmatic innovation --- small, realistic steps to change the culture and practice.

In a new post for the American Society of News Editors, Buttry outlines five simple measures to use social media to alter the culture of a newsroom.

His five:

1. Ask staff to tell you in a Tweet-sized statement how social media helps.
2. Load applications to use Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Use your spare time waiting for meetings and appointments to use them.
3. Tweet at least five times daily. Make at least one conversational, one recommend someone outside your organization, and one a Retweet.
4. Follow at least ten new people daily for a week.
5. Check hashtags and search on Twitter about local events.