If the conventional wisdom is that whatever we place on the Internet is there for public consumption, researcher Danah Boyd has a different idea. She believes that it's an abuse of privacy when Internet services take content meant for smaller audiences and make them more widely public.

Boyd, who works for Microsoft Research and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was the keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. She made a pretty aggressive point in her call-out of Google and Facebook for making some provisions public unless you opt out and for making many changes without adequately informing users.

In recent months Facebook has had to respond to concerns --- the most strenuous ones here in Canada --- that it was sharing too much information with third parties and gathering too much without the clear consent of users. Google, meanwhile, took enormous criticism for its roll-out of Google Buzz; it has since tapered some provisions.

But Boyd said privacy and publicity are not binary, that there are things you say in a room that you don't want repeated --- there needs to be a digital equivalent of that respect for privacy, she argued.

Many professing to understand media seem to believe in the zero-sum game --- that one platform takes away from another, that a winner also results in a loser.

Time Magazine points out that television appears to be benefiting from the relatively new platform of Twitter. In particular, big TV is made bigger by the Twittercooler.

The 2010 Winter Games, Oscars and Super Bowl are all good examples of how Twitter moved into action and either moved audiences to television or entertained those already watching --- and likely secured them in place as part of a conversation.

"Social media have turned the world into one big living room. The future belongs to those who pull up a chair," writes Jamie Poniewozik.

Earlier this week Marc Andreessen was encouraging old media publishers to burn the boats, to just move into digital and leave the printing presses behind. Commentators like Alan Mutter weighed in and said the idea was ill-informed.

But the debate isn't going away. Today Erick Schoenfeld of TechCrunch has added his voice, but it's more of an emotional than rational pitch. He asserts that it's necessary for media companies to get on the new wave before it's too late.

What he uses as evidence isn't all that meaty. He somehow thinks the $30-billion business will diminish to $20 billion and then to zero and that newspaper companies will wind up without a leg to stand on. The sooner they jump, the better they'll be at the new business.

It's easy to understand what he's trying to say: Don't wait too long. It's not easy to understand why he's saying the jump should be made now, when the business isn't done.

It's difficult to accept that somehow the business just keeps steadily evaporating. While it seems assured to be smaller, there will be declines and periods of flat or even nominal growth at times along the way. The decision may never be made to simply abandon a print edition; it may never make business sense to do so. We don't know yet.

What Mutter and others (I would include myself) have asserted all along is that it's helpful to keep one foot in the camp that is driving revenue as you try to drive change.

By all means devote energy and attention to the new platform, but don't throw away an operationally profitable business, community connection and loyal market.

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.