In the time before President Obama made his address, I mostly watched NBC News and CNN. Nobody who wasn’t involved in the operation knew much about it at this point, so the anchors on these channels mostly tapdanced to fill time. They told us, over and over again, that this was huge news. (Really?) But they didn’t even ask many of the questions I was asking–such as “how about al-Zawahiri?”–let alone attempt to answer them. The screen was full of talking heads, but they were saying very little.

Even after the president spoke, the analysis seemed thin–I didn’t hear anything as smart as, say, James Fallows’ impressions over at the Atlantic.

TV coverage thrives when it can show something, and this news was about an event it couldn’t show. The one thing that it showed that was worth seeing were the crowds at Ground Zero, the White House, and elsewhere.

The TV analysis got better as the night went on, but it took surprisingly long for that to happen. By the time it did, some of the continuous coverage wasn’t so continuous anymore. (NBC, for instance, went back to the more weighty matters of Celebrity Apprentice.)

Between blogs and news sites, the Web was far more adept at reacting to yesterday’s developments. And some of the TV coverage that’s worth watching is traveling from TV to Web: for instance, I just watched ABC News’s footage inside the compound, but I did so in embedded form on a blog.

(I also used Twitter and Facebook last night; in fact, I learned about the news from Twitter, before CNN.com mentioned it on its home page.)

TV does retain some advantages over the Web for these kinds of events:

• It’s effortless. You can turn on a channel and just consume information. The Web’s far richer, but it involves bopping about, finding items, and processing information–the opposite of sitting back and being a News Potato.
• It can be communal. Multiple people can sit in front of a TV together, watching and discussing what they see. You aren’t going to crowd around a blog post with your loved ones.

Virtues like that are one reason why I’m still dithering about whether to cut the cord or not. But from now on, I won’t reflexively argue that TV does continuous breaking news better than the Web; I’ll remember yesterday night, when it didn’t.

(Full disclosure: as part of Technologizer’s business relationship with TIME.com, we’re technically part of the CNN.com network.)

Yahoo’s search users would in essence become the assignment editor. Whatever topics appear frequently in those queries would then be passed on to the company’s team of editors and bloggers, and stories would be written based on those findings.

The blog will be called The Upshot, and would be launched Tuesday (editors note: the previous link won’t work until then). According to the New York Times, Yahoo hopes this would result in a news blog that would be catered to what their users want to read.

Is it a risky experiment? I’d say yes. Depending on the hot news of the day, you could be seeing news on the oil spill one day, and the latest on Lindsay Lohan’s never dull social life the next. I’m hoping however that those mining the Yahoo search queries will help to smooth out the obvious shifts in our collective mindset to provide a less schizophrenic look at the news.

At the same time, that data could also give Yahoo a leg up on the competition in seeing trends on what potential readers may look for which isn’t being covered in the media. I’m curious to see if it works. If it does, and other news outlets pick up on the idea, are the days of the assignment editor numbered?

Only one of these games, DC Universe Online, was actually playable on the PS3. It’s a third-person beat-em-up that lets players build their own super powers and interact with famous DC heroes and villains, and it’ll be out November 2. The Agency, a first-person shooter with an open world for players to interact , also arrives this year, but only the PC version was on the show floor. Free Realms, out now as a free-to-play PC game for kids, is scheduled for next year.

Separately, Square Enix is working on Final Fantasy XIV, a subscription-based MMO under the brand of its most popular role-playing game franchise.

If you want to play MMOs on a game console now, the options are limited. Square released Final Fantasy XI to North America in 2004 for Playstation 2 and 2006 for Xbox 360. Everquest Online Adventures for PS2, a watered-down version of its PC counterpart, launched in 2003. Then there was 2006′s Phantasy Star Universe for PS2 and Xbox 360. And I suppose you grant MMO status to MAG, a large-scale shooter with ever-evolving factions that launched for PS3 this year.

But the games Sony Online Entertainment is working on now break the tired fantasy genre mold, and they should all be up and running in 2011. Console MMOs have their naysayers, but the PS3 may find success by seeking a broader audience than the World of Warcraft crowd.

The big question going forward is pricing. SOE spokeswoman Taina Rodriguez wasn’t ready to give specifics, saying that microtransactions, monthly subscriptions and tie-ins to the Playstation Plus online service are all on the table. But if Sony brought the popular free-to-play model of Free Realms to the Playstation 3? I could become an MMO fan in a hurry.

Pulse, a new RSS reader for the iPad, isn’t perfect. (It supports a maximum of twenty feeds, and I added a bunch of feeds which then mysteriously disappeared.) But I’m still as excited about it as I am about any of the iPad apps that are tied to a specific magazine or newspaper. It’s got a highly visual, touch-driven interface that was born to live on a device like this–and if you’ve got an iPad and consume content, it’s $4 well spent.

What strikes me about Living Stories isn’t what’s new about the idea, but what’s (relatively) old about it: It takes reverse-chronological display and other presentation concepts from the world of blogs, and applies them to a specific ongoing news story. Here are the Living Stories currently available in Google Labs.

Makes perfect sense to me: Every news story worth paying attention to is an ongoing news story, and putting everything in one place with the newest stuff up top and older items summarized below makes enormous sense.

It’s jarring when you think about it: We’re a decade and a half into the online news era, and most online news sites still feel more like newspapers than unlike them–they’ve got a home page that feels like a front page, and sections that feels like…sections. Projects such as Living Stories (and the NYT’s Skimmer view, which officially debuted last week) are interesting takes on one of the many challenges that faces news organizations: Bringing all the goodness of newspapers online, then remixing it in ways to go far beyond what dead trees could ever do.

The Times says that the survey’s respondents would pay $3 a month for online news, which means they’re tied for Australians for that place. (Italians, by contrast, would for over $7 a month.) It’s not clear just what Americans would expect for their three bucks, or whether we’re talking about a scenario in which there’s still plentiful news available for free, or one in which freebies suddenly go away and your choice is between paying or getting no online news at all.

Anyhow, let’s try a mini-replication of the survey right here. For the sake of the following question, assume that every general-interest news site in the nation suddenly builds a pay wall, and that what you’d be paying for is some sort of pass that would give you access to multiple news sources for one monthly fee.

The app pulls together stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, USA Today, TweetMeme, BBC News, CNN, and Al Jazeera, and displays them in tag clouds that attempt to indicate the relative importance of the news items they link to, both in a general view and individual ones for each news source:

You can also browse in a simpler, more straightforward list view, with summaries:

Once you choose a story, ZenNews uses an embedded version of the iPhone’s Safari browser to let you read it in the originating site. You can also share stories via Twitter and e-mail.

I like the idea of an iPhone app that aggregates important global news sources and lets you browse through them in different ways. And ZenNews is fast and fun to use. But I found that it’s most striking feature–the tag cloud-style view–didn’t do a great job of helping me figure out what was in the news, and that ZenNews’s pool of stories failed to keep up with the day’s events in a super-timely fashion.

Of course, today isn’t an ordinary news day–in the U.S., at least, the story of the boy who (turned out not to have) gone up in his parents’ experimental balloon is everywhere, and is still a developing story. There are links to it in ZenNews, but it doesn’t dominate, and you might miss it altogether. As I write this, for instance, it’s the lead item on USA Today (and every other U.S. general-interest news site). But ZenNews’s page for USA Today doesn’t include any keywords obviously related to the story:

And if you do go to the keyword “balloon” on ZenNews’s general page and press it to drill down, you get a bunch of keywords that don’t do a particularly logical job of divvying up the story. It’s not clear why you’d want to drill down further via “runaway” vs. “colorado” vs. “child” vs. “homemade”–they all lead to stories on exactly the same topic. (The “dutch” and “china” links lead to stories on a different balloon accident.)

ZenNews updates itself automatically with new stories, but doesn’t seem to do so in a particularly instantaneous manner: I’m still not seeing any of the articles reporting that balloon boy turned out not to be balloon boy after all.

Ultimately, I like ZenNews’s more straightforward list view more than the cloud, and I want to try it on a less eventful day to see if it does a better job of keeping up with the world. If you give it a try, let us know what you think…

Fast Flip is based on Google News, and Google says it came up with it to address the fact that browsing through news sites is usually a slow process–not at all like the effortless instant gratification of flipping through a magazine or newspaper. Google has partnered with several dozen news sources–including the BBC, BusinessWeek, the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Beast, Esquire, the New York Times, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, and TechCrunch–to create previews of their stories that live on Fast Flip but which display the first several paragraphs of the article in a form that looks like the originating site. You rifle through these previews by clicking left and right arrows, and the pages zip on and off-screen in high-speed, fluid animation–hence the “Fast Flip” name.

Fast Flip has a Like button that lets you express your approval of stories you like, and Google says that the more you use the service, the smarter it will get about presenting you with stuff you’re likely to be interested in. (It lets you browse in multiple ways–by subject, by provider, and by author.) Oh, and there are mobile versions for iPhone and Android.

It’s quite neat–pretty addictive, actually. But it’s also…kind of odd. For several reasons:

It doesn’t necessarily make browsing for news faster. The flipping interface shows one story at a time in legible form–versus the dozens that plain ol’ Google News puts on one screen–along with thumbnails in which the headlines are tiny and the articles themselves are too tiny to read. Once you click on a preview, you go to the originating site–which is no faster than usual–and getting back to Fast Flip may be kinda cumbersome, especially if you’ve clicked through to a multi-page article.

The previews break some conventions of the Web. They may have what seem to be hyperlinks, and tools like icons for printing the page, but none of this stuff works–the preview is a giant hyperlink to the article on the originating site.

The ads are un-Google-esque. Google is putting ads in Fast Flip and sharing the revenues with its content partners. Unlike classic Google text ads, these are display ads–tall, skinny ones–and while they’re context sensitive, some of the ones I’m seeing so far are a tad on the cheesy side:

It doesn’t always work. Fast Flip doesn’t carry a beta tag, but it’s a Google Labs project, so it’s experimental by definition. I found it a bit quirky–one Slate page was so wide it didn’t fit in the preview, for instance. And this one-line Atlantic blog post doesn’t really need a preview, except that Fast Flip fails to display the embedded video that makes the text make sense:

I don’t mean to be overly nitpicky–Fast Flip is clever, and I hope it sticks around and evolves. If you check it out, let us know what you think.

Schultz’s piece speaks of “parasitic aggregators reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can’t match.” If Schultz is concerned about sites republishing copyrighted news stories in their entirety without permission, I agree; that’s theft of intellectual property and should be stopped. But existing laws can do the job.

Schultz doesn’t define the sort of sites she’s talking about very clearly, and the only two examples mentioned are in a quote she uses: Newser and Tina Brown’s Daily Beast. In a follow-comment, she does say she has “no problem with an aggregator who provides only a headline, perhaps a summary sentence and a link that drives readers to this site,” which presumably lets Google News off the hook. But there are countless sites that summarize other sites’ stories in the process of commenting on them, sometimes providing additional information, and otherwise continuing the conversation (and, of course, linking back to the originating site).

I’m not sure where Schultz draws the line as to what forms of aggregation are acceptable and which ones aren’t. But I do know this: A world without aggregation and summarization would be one in which sites like Technologizer couldn’t exist. Schultz’s proposed law, if it applied to Technologizer and there wasn’t a way to opt out, would kill this site almost immediately. A huge percentage of our traffic comes from other sites that quote us (often in large chunks), summarize us (often in an admirable concise fashion), and send readers our way. If the law forbid them from doing so, our traffic would nosedive instantly, and we wouldn’t be able to make enough from advertising revenue to continue.

In other words: Please, world, aggregate Technologizer all you want as long as you link to us. It’s how we get noticed. It’s how we make the money that lets us do this.. It’s the surest proof that we matter, and best path to a healthy future.

The forced revenue sharing and 24-hour embargo that Schultz approves of wouldn’t help. If sites had to pay to riff on Technologizer’s stories and link to us, most wouldn’t, and after 24 hours have passed, news usually isn’t news–a vast percentage of all links to our stuff come in the first day.

Schultz brings up a 1918 court case to buttress her argument. She might be happy if the media biz and its economics were the same as they were back then. But the Web utterly changes how news is created, distributed, and consumed, and precedent from almost a century ago just isn’t very useful.

Now, I’m not presumptuous enough to argue that Technologizer has given the world more than the Cleveland Plain Dealer has, or that its continued existence is more essential. But I’m utterly convinced that Schultz’s proposal would hurt the Plain Dealer as much as it would a teensy site like Technologizer: If it were the law of the land, the paper’s content would be less relevant, less discussed, less read.

Change can be painful. It has plenty of downsides. It may result in worthy enterprises going away. But how many examples are there of change being successfully outlawed? A lot fewer than instances in which venerable institutions adeptly adjusted as the world changed around them.