As Malcolm Gladwell sees it, the revolution will not be Tweeted.

The social commentator and bestselling author has been skeptical of the claims about social media. He recognizes the technological ability to reach people through Twitter, Facebook and social networks, but he takes issue with its larger claims of prowess.

He stops short in his piece for The New Yorker of accepting social media as activism. He points out that many recent examples of political activism cited by proponents of social media were not actual social media events --- the Iranian calls for democracy were western-based, while the Moldovan expressions of opposition to Communism were without the benefit of Twitter.

Gladwell believes these phenomena bear little resemblance to what is required of real activism. It is participation while lessening the motivation that participation requires, he argues.

"In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice," he writes.

Gladwell believes social networks are a "weak-tie" form of communication, in which your Facebook Friends are not really friends and your Twitter followers are not truly following, not comparable to the strong-tie allegiances that require persistence and selflessness.

"The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient," he concludes. "They are not a natural enemy of the status quo."

Social media are not merely static attachments to today's news organizations --- not merely a nice box to tick and note you've entered that field. The Wall Street Journal observes that newsrooms are studying social media's traits to understand, for example, when best to Tweet and how best to share content on Facebook.

Impact is being tracked, referrals watched --- all in the hope that there is learning inside the patterns that will generate business ideas.

In the same way readership metrics affected news strategy, so now are social media trends prompting differences in approaches to content generation and sharing. The analysis of demographic trends ought to build a more empirical approach.

When, a few years ago, it was possible to generate an RSS feed to a blog and alert those who wanted to follow your content avidly when you published, it seemed a big problem was solved about finding an audience.

But technology shifts shapes and is non-linear, and along the way other ways for people to read what they wanted emerged --- Twitter, for example, is a good curation of content via people or organizations worth following, in a kind of grander RSS. Facebook, too, is a personal reader.

So it came as no real surprise this week that Bloglines shuttered. Is it, as others like Pluck have found, not a core business any longer to be in the RSS field. Data indicates Bloglines had declined in traffic by nearly three-quarters this year; interestingly, too, Google Reader is down by more than one-quarter (but it has been adding features and shifting focus away from RSS).

What it indicates, though, is how technology is superseded rapidly by new functions and techniques. People find something new and discard what was once seemingly novel.

If one of the great benefits today of digital journalism is the technological ability to understand much more about the audience consuming, sharing and helping to create content, then Facebook Insights is one of the basic tools.

In her post for Mashable, Intel social media strategist Ekaterina Walter examines how Insights can be employed to comprehend much more about the audience for pages. Good metrics equals better business, the argument goes.

Walter walks through the measurements Facebook provides on engagement, audience growth, likes and dislikes, pages, mentions, referrals and the like. It's an impressive dashboard.

"Some of these metrics require constant manual tracking and analysis, which is a big downside, " she writes. But the metrics "will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy that would allow more effective interactions with your customers."

When you activate something for 500 million accounts, it automatically takes on significance. The move by Facebook to add location-based service to its network is a sign the concept has arrived to the mainstream.

Facebook calls its service Places and it permits check-ins at a variety of, well, places. It strives to help you understand more about your Facebook friends' preferences and traits of consumption and activity.

It complements, rather than competes with, existing services like Foursquare and Gowalla, and its implications for journalism are not revolutionary as much as they're further impetus to get in the game.

While check-ins are bound to become a commodity in the time ahead --- particularly as services provide it more readily --- the rich stream of data that comes from them will be very useful for all companies in the information business.

Journalism will benefit in understanding more about events and places from the user base willing to give access to their locations. But the stream of behavioural data will be even more important.

The shift of searching to getting is at the heart of the Wired.com pair of pieces that identify the decline of the World Wide Web and the rise of the application in our digital lives.

Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, one a prominent editor and the other a prominent columnist, have produced companion arguments that the Web is no longer what we use --- that the Internet is a mere conduit for the apps that dominate our time online.

"It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule," Anderson writes. "And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen)."

That it's also a more optimal environment for monetization only strengthens the situation, he says.

Wolff, meanwhile, examines how the open Web is closing and reestablishing a corporate hierarchy --- the "collectivist utopianism" is disappearing and a top-down theme is reemerging. The alternative to the Web came as some entrepreneurs sought to have the clout of Google, only without the open-source approach.

Wolff's piece is far more critical of the developments --- of the value of advertising, of the value of the audience, because of search engine optimization. He says we flirted briefly with the "transformative effects" of the Web but now are "returning home" to Apple, Facebook, Spotify and Netflix, all systems that are closed and traditional.

Anderson's conclusion: Blame Us. Wolff's: Blame Them.

Social media's growth in the last year --- a whopping 43% rise in time spent --- has placed it atop the list of online activities among Americans, the Nielsen media research firm suggests.

Americans now spend nearly one-quarter (22.7%) of all their online time on such activities as Facebook, Twitter and other social networks and such media. That is well ahead of such activities as gaming (10.2%) and email (8.3%). Videos and movies were the only other activity to witness strong growth in the year, Nielsen says.

Having noted that, the mobile sector has witnessed a real surge in email activity. It comprises more than 41% of mobile time. Spending time on portals ranked second.