Search giant Google, Inc. announced that it has added 200 years' worth of newspaper archives to its Google News search feature. The Google News Archives Search feature takes keywords as well as dates and creates "a timeline of stories on a particular subject over the years."

Thus, if one searches for "1969" and "moon launch" Archives will generate a page that lists a full range of stories from major news publications pertaining to the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 moon mission. Regarding advertising, another important aspect of Google, Inc, at this point there are no plans to place advertising links alongside archive search results, but sites that feature historical news may feature advertising alongside articles or choose to charge a fee for content.

What Google suggests is a great new tool for both history buffs and academic researchers, Terry Heaton calls "a major effort by the company to organize the world's information." The move not only positions Google as the prime search engine for historical information, but also "gives them the ability to make money off other people's content." Terry also sees how Google's innovation should be a lesson for local newspapers and broadcasters: "Don't get me wrong. Mainstream media companies have no choice but to make these deals (with the devil?), but we need to be learning at the same time that Google's mission is our mission -- especially at the local level -- and that the creation of local databases ought to be our first priority."

This is not the only new inroad Google is creating. Mark Ramsey finds a Google advertisment radio sales execs. The ad may say "radio" but Ramsey sees it as a reach into a broader range of audio broadcasting: "It's worth noting that while the ad emphasizes "radio" the true nature of the effort is guaranteed to cross distribution channel boundaries - to be truly "audio": Online, satellite, radio, you name it."

Steve Yelvington, shares some advice on building successful online communities in response to Rob Miller's OJR essay Five rules for building a successful online community.

Steve is cautious on Rob's interest in

A community is where people get to know one another and develop interpersonal relationships. Cities aren't communities, but they can contain communities -- at the neighborhood, church and social organization level. Communities are small and strong."

Mark Hamilton finds he is more convinced that "something real" is happening in the Second Life virtual online community after reading about Rebecca MacKinnon's reason for joining Second Life . Rebecca plans to take a course, Law in the Court of Public Opinion that will be taught both in Second Life and in real life by Harvard law school professor Charles Nesson. Rebecca also notes some of Second Life's limitations for social interactions in Chinese, as well as Ethan Zuckerman's observations on its limits for raising "awareness about the plight of people living in conflict-torn and impoverished parts of the world."

A preliminary injunction issued Friday against Dave Mitchell, former publisher of the Point Reyes (CA) Light, bars the Pulitzer Prize winner from posting a weekly column to the web-based Bodega Bay Navigator. Marin County Superior Court Judge John A. Sutro's indictment also bars Mitchell from assisting the Navigator in its coverage of West Marin County.

The Light's new owner, Robert Plotkin, who purchased the paper from Mitchell five months ago for $500,000, claims that publication of Michell's "Sparsely, Sage & Timely" column violates a non-competition clause in the sale agreement. According to Mitchell's attorney Ladd Bedford, the agreement prevents Mitchell from writing for another Marin County newspaper, but "does not prevent (Mitchell) from maintaining his own Web site as long as the Web site is not set up in competition with the corporation's (the Light's) Web site."

The Navigator website is owned by Joel Hack, who decided to publish online only after it became too costly to continue to publish in print. Hack invited Mitchell to write for the Navigator after a heated dispute between Mitchell and Plotkin resulted in legal action against Mitchell.

Mitchell had no part in the development nor in the ownership of the Navigator.

On the non-competition clause, Peter Scheer, executive director of the San Rafael-based California First Amendment Coalition, believes the non-competition clause would need to be specific on the matter of online news outlets. For the clause to hold up in court, Mitchell would have to specifically and willingly give up his rights to write for the web. "Major ambiguities would be interpreted in favor of the party that wants to continue writing," Scheer said. "Otherwise, it would be hard to enforce such a restriction because of First Amendment concerns."

The super-popular video sharing site reports that one of the first advertisers, Warner Bros Records, has planned a channel devoted to Paris Hilton's new album. One of its first advertisers, Fox Broadcasting has bought spots on the Paris Hilton Channel to promote the second season of Prison Break.

The idea that placing ads within ads "further blurs the traditional lines between entertainment and its sponsors," does not seem to be an issue with YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley: "This is a way for advertisers and brands to participate in our community, to allow them more ability to customize the look and feel for the channel, to build an audience through subscription and allow user interaction with the content they created."

Julie Supan, senior marketing director at YouTube, does not believe that young people mind the ads: "Great ads are in essence great content. We're kind of blurring the lines."

The incentive to further explore ads within ads was spurred on by the success of the ad campaign for the movie "Pulse." Deep Focus, the agency directing advertising for "Pulse," ran trailers on YouTube, but wanted another way to reach YouTube's viewing crowd. Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer proposed running ads on YouTube's homepage for five days prior to the film's Aug. 11 release. The ads offered the trailer along with exclusive clips from "Pulse." Schafer found that audiences watched the trailer, opted to comment, and to spread the word about the film by sending the trailer to friends."For advertisers that are looking to promote their content, " he said, "this is an extremely effective way to get the word out."

While linking and sharing might spread the word on corporate-generated content, the issue remains on how to capitalize on consumer-generated content. "This gets them money in the short term," Allen Weiner, an analyst with Gartner Inc said. "It doesn't solve the bigger issue, which is monetizing consumer-created content. They're not doing that. And they're in the same boat as everybody else. It's trying to come up with mechanisms that can put the content into various buckets so that the good stuff can be parsed out and monetized."

Jon Dube distills some stats from a new report by the Bivings Group on American newspapers and the Internet:

*80 of the nation's top 100 newspapers offered reporter blogs. On 63 of these blogs, readers could comment on posts written by reporters.
* 76 of the nation's top 100 newspapers offer RSS feeds on their websites. All of these feeds are partial feeds, and none included ads.
* Video is offered by 61 of the newspapers.

Newspapers Internet efforts, however, could be undermined further if more advertising is lured in a different direction. Terry Heaton explains a new scheme where Google has teamed up with direct-mail coupon distributor Valpak that will allow local merchants to distribute printable coupons via Google maps. Google says the aim of the initiative is "to improve the user experience and increase traffic at the Maps site." Terry, however, sees it a bit differently: "Of course the real aim is, again, to pull money from local advertisers into the Google coffers, and this is another slap in the face of local media companies and local ad agencies who continue to try and force their reach/frequency model on everybody (and insist that the earth is flat). Google continues to prove that they don't need the blessing of the status-quo to suck cash out of local markets, and this will be the downfall of those who view Internet pure play companies as a nuisance instead of a threat. "

After reading author John Naughton's editorial on the changes wrought by Gutenberg's movable type and Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, Steve Yelvington sharedsome succinct observations about the incredible changes brought on by the Internet: "We are in the midst of a social change so vast it is beyond our comprehension."

Steve, on the impact a lightning storm which struck his home and knoced out his Internet connection had on his family: " My kids would have been happier if they'd been tossed overboard mid-Atlantic. The telephone and television are trivial by comparison. Panic set in. McLuhan was right when he said invention is the mother of necessities."

The ubiquity of the Internet, Steve concludes, has caused it to "become an extension of our minds, and we take it for granted, until it suddenly disappears."

When an old friend from television told Terry Heaton that he did not understand the attraction of social media sites like MySpace, Terry saw it as an opportunity to illuminate what it is that "post-modern" people find satisfying about social media.

As Terry explains: "It is nearly impossible for the enfranchised to understand what motivates the disenfranchised, because -- and I'm writing from a social perspective -- the lenses of the enfranchised are fixed on that which furthers their citizenship, not on the efforts of those trying to gain entry into the club. And this is nothing new, but what is new is the shifting of power through knowledge made possible by technology. This is the 'new thing under the sun' that our generation is witnessing -- the revolution of those who'd rather create their own citizenship than follow the traditional path guarded by the elite.

"Postmodern 'citizens' view the institutions of our world as self-serving and favoring the enfranchised. They see through the command and control mechanisms of the culture, and technology is giving them the opportunity to create their own. The seeming random nature of this blinds modernist thinkers into the belief that it is small and irrelevant, but in the postmodern world, that which seems chaotic is often not, and this is why I think the next four years will be VERY interesting politically in this country."

Further along, Terry discusses how the Internet forces people into the "post-modern exercise of deconstruction" -- people follow links and "bullshit is revealed through the process of deconstruction, so it's harder for the ruling elite to make self-serving statements seem applicable to the general welfare of everybody."

As a result, the average "PoMo"--post-modern person--learns to trust his/her social network more than the experts "because the experts, it turns out, are only in it for themselves -- and they're quite often wrong." PoMos trust their tribe, yet the "postmodern tribe doesn't necessarily identify itself as such, because each tribe exists to serve the individual who determines the make-up of his or her tribe. You may know you're a part of someone's tribe, but you may not. This drives the logical mind insane."

Heaton's advice to all befuddled moderns: "Get involved. What looks like a waste of time today might be the center of our media strategy in the future. "

A short time ago, Nicholas Lemann wrote in the New Yorker "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away." Now, the dean of Columbia's graduate school of journalism appears to be reconsidering his position with the announcement that he was cutting the budget of CJRDaily.org "nearly in half."

The announcement prompted the site's managing editor Steve Lovelady and assistant managing editor Brian Keefer to resign in protest of the cuts. “It’s a fundamental policy dispute about the allocation of resources,” Mr. Lovelady said. “Nick has decided to spend the money on a direct-mail campaign for the magazine, in hopes of saving subscription revenue. To me, that sounds like something out of the 19th century. He’s taking the one, fresh, smart thing he has and gutting it.”

The apparent main reason for the cuts: an inability to raise sufficient funds to keep the site running at full-strength. He told the New York Times that this is "the same quandary confronting most news organizations today — how to pay for an online staff when the site is free to readers." As a result, the popular media-watchdog site will soon start selling advertising, sell its archival material, and hold conferences. A direct-mail campaign will also be launched to increase subscriptions to the print version of the magazine.

Reactions by the journalism community to Lemann's decision were not favorable. Paul Conley believes the move is wrongheaded for many reasons. Conley preferred CJRDaily to the magazine because it "feels as if it's written by people who work in journalism rather than by folks who used to work in journalism...." Bruce Nussbaum of Businessweek calls the decision to cut its "fast-growing" online operation an extraordinary mistake."

Dan Gillmor understands the financial concerns but doesn't believe the move will help CJR's financial position: "You can appreciate the position he faces. This was about money, and he doesn’t think he has enough to operate the magazine and put sufficient resources into the website, too. But this is a move squarely in the wrong direction for the long term, however much short-term sense it may seem to make financially. . . This is a move by an Old Media person, not someone truly looking to the audience and participants of the future. Not surprising, but disappointing."

Jay Rosen in the New York Times: “I’m sure their current subscribers want it in print, but you have to look at your potential subscribers. “Since the profession is going toward the Web, in the long run, that’s the smarter move.”

Jim Romenesko, meanwhile, posts Nicholas Lemann's formal statement on the cuts: "...We have had considerable success in fundraising for Columbia Journalism Review, but not so much that we can keep CJRDaily at the same editorial budget it has had, so we are going to reduce that budget, with regret. But even after the reduction, CJR will have the most substantial Web reporting and writing staff of any publication its size that I know of. We are making that commitment because we believe so deeply in the journalistic promise of the Web, even though, as everybody in journalism knows, it does not yet produce revenues commensurate with its quality. Our goal for Columbia Journalism Review, under the leadership of Victor Navasky, it that it be, in print and on the Web, as strong a media monitor as we can make it on the resources we have."