There is much potential in the newly announced MediaCloud project from ThomsonReuters and Harvard's Berkman Center for Media and Society. It will track the flow of online media.

Among other things, the tool will examine which stories are created by whom, what attracts attention, how user comments affect coverage, and how mainstream and blogosphere coverage differs and resembles. It will produce visual results that identify patterns in coverage and their origins.

Among its driving questions in the early going:
Do bloggers introduce storylines into mainstream media or the other way around?
What parts of the world are being covered or ignored by different media sources?
Where do stories begin?
How are competing terms for the same event used in different publications?
Can we characterize the overall mix of coverage for a given source?
How do patterns differ between local and national news coverage?
Can we track news cycles for specific issues?
Do online comments shape the news?

MediaCloud is still in a formative stage at the moment but is soliciting research ideas as it develops.

Brian Solis writes a very-social-media-unlike-long essay for Techcrunch on the rise of other formats relative to the blog. His suggestion is that the blog is losing its status, that micro-blogging through Twitter, activity through Facebook and MySpace, and shared experience through FriendFeed, there is a new powerhouse out there.

It's not as if the blogosphere isn't galloping forward, just that blogs aren't necessarily the pace-setters of the latest race. Solis suggests there is a need for new measurements of the trendier techniques within micromedia.

The Pew Research Center has had a more detailed look at the rise of Twitter as a communications tool in the United States.

Its conclusions are interesting: Twitter is fast-growing (up to 11 per cent now), popular among younger people (average age 31) but not the youngest of the young, bloggers are more likely to Twitter, and Tweeps are more likely to read blogs. What's most interesting is the mobile-friendly preferences of the user base.

"In conclusion, Twitter users engage with news and own technology at the same rates as other internet users, but the ways in which they use the technology -- to communicate, gather and share information -- reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered and social opportunities for interaction."

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has started to chronicle the coverage of bloggers and the mainstream media  --- I suspect it's in order to determine the differences.

The second edition finds quite the variance. The mainstream focused on the economy, while the blogosphere had three principal stories --- the economy, President Obama's criticism of Rush Limbaugh, and a road sign that had been redone to suggest a zombie attack was coming.

The New Media Index promises to be a highlight of media assessment.

Dan Gillmor, writing in his Center for Citizen Media blog, is a dissenter in the new chorus for the endowed, non-profit newsroom.

The New York TImes and New Yorker this week commissioned work that examined the idea of a foundation-driven non-profit newsroom to shield it from economic pressures and encourage editorial independence.

Gillmor is having none of it. He views the idea as without economic and creative merit and believes time could be better spent on other matters. The role of non-profits could very well be in financing enterprise and investigative work, but not the whole entity of a news operation.

Nice idea to discuss, "but please, let’s move onto realistic possibilities."

A few weeks ago The Printed Blog surfaced as an aggregator of posts.

Unsurprisingly not far behind is the All Tweet Journal, published this week for the first time, featuring  information gathered and submitted from Twitter.

The PDF download is only a page in its first week, but promises more. Given the amount of information --- links to longer text, photos and graphics --- it's hard to believe it won't be difficult to create a full-fledged publication online (and printable).

What isn't all that clear yet is what it wants to be. Its Edinburgh founders leave the door open to anything --- including frequency of publication and size, not just the content.

Steve Outing, the respected and venerable columnist for Editor & Publisher, has taken the step of scoping out the all-digital newsroom remnant of the newspaper.

He takes a good whirl at the attributes of the digital newsroom and arrives at these:

1. Fewer journalists.
2. Fewer stories, more blogs.
3. Every journalist gets a community.
4. Fewer long stories, regular blog updates, more regular instant updates.

"The great hope will be that these digital-only newspaper descendants will learn and grow, and once again provide more jobs for journalists."

The Philly.com newsroom has been using a breaking-news blog for a couple of months now and it's yielding great results. Chris Kewson, the executive editor, explains how in a post for Online Journalism Review.

Kewson says his newsroom stockpiles some advance items the night before to seed the blog, then piles on all day long, in some cases with stories still under development. On occasion it'll move blogs into stories. It's finding the blog an audience-grabber and a Web way of doing news.

An interesting idea.

It had to happen sooner or later: A best of the blogosphere in print.

Joshua Karp has launched The Printed Blog, a twice-daily free paper in of material culled from local blogs. Its revenue stream will be display and classified advertising. First stop is Chicago and San Francisco on January 27, with a New York edition next in line.

Karp says that, for the foreseeable future, a number of people will continue to use newsprint for their source of information.

Tim Windsor, in his Zero Percent Idle blog, has a look at the ethical issue involving a blogger who wrote a story about his shopping experience. The difference in this case: he was "paid" to write the piece by K-Mart, which gave him a $500 gift card, and his story was largely about how the store isn't the horrible place you might think.
The issue in this instance is the new line that seems inevitable as more writers/journalists are also their sale chiefs/publishers in the digital age. Where traditional media shield their newsrooms from such story-for-an-ad practices, is it becoming harder to do in the new media environment? And if it's harder to do, what to do about it?
Windsor declares the best approach is to declare the conflict. I'd be interested in what others feel.