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One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”.

Two thoughts -

1 - Good/quality/valuable Information doesn't have to be free.
2 - Didn't the Wall Street Journal have subscribers BG? (Before Google)

By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg

Gary Vaynerchuk’s new self-help book “Crush It!” is a national best-seller, with 95,000 copies in print after seven printings.

HarperStudio

Gary Vaynerchuk

The book, which explains how to transform personal passion into a successful business using the free tools of the Internet, is No. 5 on the Wall Street Journal business best-seller list.

And yes, he practices what he preaches. Mr. Vaynerchuk has 851,000 followers on Twitter and 33,000 fans on Facebook. “Crush It!” is published by HarperStudio, an imprint of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers. News Corp. also publishes The Wall Street Journal.

Gary V’s Five Commandments of Social Networking

1. Treat it like a cocktail party.

You have to get involved in different conversations. We don’t start selling the minute we meet people. It’s not a coupon outlet. It’s a real opportunity to connect with consumers.

HarperCollins

2. Don’t draw lines in the sand.

Way too many business people say Twitter is stupid. Any product like Facebook is something you need to pay attention to in the business world. Some people don’t like to change. Instead, they feel they’re right, and say something is silly. Also, there are people who have vested interests in having these platforms fail because their understudies understand it so much better than they do. They are afraid they’ll be pushed out the door.

3. Humanize yourself or your brand.

It is OK to say, going to a soccer game. Or, having a hot dog. Humanization is quite powerful in this space. To be successful, this is the kind of thing you say 2% of the time.

4. Understand the authenticity.

Each consumer’s voice is dramatically more powerful today. This is word of mouth on steroids. The individual consumer has much more weight with corporate America. Most corporate brands will be wrapping their heads around the power of the individual consumer next year.

5. Interacting with potential clients and becoming part of the community is a real job.

You can’t spend ten minutes a day on this and think the social genie will save you. Most of all, you have to care. And you have to listen. That’s my overall arching thesis on this entire space. People think it’s about talking. What you say is irrelevant. The friend that listens is better than the friend who talks.

By NICK TIMIRAOS

New data suggest that foreclosures are rising in more expensive housing markets.

About 30% of foreclosures in June involved homes in the top third of local housing values, up from 16% when the foreclosure crisis began three years ago, according to new data from real-estate Web site Zillow.com. The bottom one-third of housing markets, by home value, now account for 35% of foreclosures, down from 55% in 2006.

The report shows that foreclosures, after declining earlier this year, began to accelerate in the late spring and that more expensive homes have more recently accounted for a growing share of all foreclosures. "The slope of that curve in recent months is much sharper than it was recently," said Stan Humphries, chief economist for Zillow. Rising foreclosures among more-expensive homes could create added pressure for a housing market that has shown signs of stabilizing in recent months as sales of lower-priced homes pick up.

The Zillow research compared homes against the median values for their local market and broke each market into three tiers by value. Zillow then looked at the share of monthly foreclosures in each tier over the past decade.

Foreclosures are rising in more expensive markets as home values in those areas fall, leaving more homeowners with mortgages that exceed the value of their properties. Prime loans accounted for 58% of foreclosure starts in the second quarter, up from 44% last year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Subprime mortgages accounted for one-third of foreclosure starts, down from one-half last year.

The prime category includes so-called exotic mortgages that were increasingly used to buy more expensive homes, including interest-only mortgages that allowed borrowers to defer principal payments during an initial period. Borrowers often aren't able to refinance out of these products because the drop in home values has left them with little equity in their homes.

Default rates are particularly high and expected to rise on option adjustable-rate mortgages, which allow borrowers to make minimum payments that may not cover the interest due. Monthly payments can increase to sharply higher levels after five years or when the outstanding balance reaches a certain level. A study by Fitch Ratings found that 46% of option ARMs were 30 days past due last month, even though just 12% of such loans have reset to higher monthly payments.

Zillow estimated that nearly one in four homes with mortgages was worth less than the value of the property at the end of June. Mr. Humphries said he didn't expect to see foreclosure volumes level off until later in 2010.

Write to Nick Timiraos at nick.timiraos@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A2

By PHIL IZZO

The worst recession since the Great Depression has left a scorched landscape that will weigh on the labor market and the broader economy for years to come, according to economists in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey.

The 48 surveyed economists expect the economy to bounce back from four quarters of contraction with 3.1% growth in gross domestic product at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in the just-ended third quarter.

Charts and Full Results

• See forecasts for growth, unemployment, housing and more. Plus, views on the auto industry, ranking Fed chairmen, grading policymakers and more. Survey conducted Oct. 2-6. (Or download all data as .xls)
• Econ: Gap Between Available-Desired Job Skills
• Complete Coverage: Forecasting Survey

Economists expect a full jobs recovery may take years. Phil Izzo talks with Kelsey Hubbard and Simon Constable in the News Hub.

Expansion is seen continuing through the first half of 2010, though at a slower rate. But the massive downturn means the labor market will take years to heal. On average, the economists don't expect unemployment to fall below 6% until 2013; unemployment hit 9.8% in September.

"Never before has business shed so many workers so fast, so many people failed to find work who are looking for work, and so many dropped out of the labor force as in the current circumstance," said Allen Sinai at Decision Economics.

The labor market's tough road was underscored by Thursday's report on weekly applications for unemployment insurance. The Labor Department reported that initial claims fell 33,000 to 521,000 in the week ended Oct. 3. The number of people collecting unemployment insurance also fell, but remained above six million.

About the Survey

The Wall Street Journal surveys a group of 52 economists throughout the year. Broad surveys on more than 10 major economic indicators are conducted every month. Once a year, economists are ranked on how well their forecasts have fared. For prior installments of the surveys, see: WSJ.com/Economist .

Some economists worry the economy will turn down again over the next 12 months, leading to a so-called double-dip recession.

—Conor Dougherty contributed to this article.

Read entire article here.

Write to Phil Izzo at philip.izzo@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A3

The article featured the top 30 newspaper sites in August, and coupled them to their relative social standing one year ago.

2/3 of the top 30 newspaper websites reported gains over the past year.

Below is a portion of the list (Please note that several factors including news events can cause swings in traffic)

• MiamiHerald.com -- 2,502,000 -- 89%
• NYTimes.com -- 17,183,000 -- (-13%)
• Washington Post -- 11,681,000 -- 4%
• Wall Street Journal Online -- 10,867,000 -- 42%
• USATODAY.com -- 9,787,000 -- (-6%)
• LA Times -- 9,245,000 -- 3%
• New York Post -- 4,843,000 -- 46%
• Chicago Tribune -- 3,910,000 -- (-17%)
• The News & Observer -- 1,892,000 -- 110%
• Sun-Sentinel -- 1,771,000 -- 6%

The real dividend, he says, is diversity: In an era of industrial agriculture, where millions of acres are planted with the same variety of corn and millions of pigs are bred to be genetically similar, small local farms are the ultimate hedge fund. They preserve heirloom seeds and quirky breeds; strengthen the soil with organic nutrients; create local markets that connect producer directly to consumer.

Mr. Jobs's focus on the tablet has been jarring for some Apple employees, who had grown accustomed to a level of freedom over strategy and products while the CEO was on leave, said a person familiar with the matter. "People have had to readjust" to Mr. Jobs being back, this person said.

As for all the rest of you, listen up. I'm back in charge, and I'm not going to ship this tablet unless it's perfect. Remember when I told you to make me a phone with only one button, and you said it couldn't be done? But then we did it. Sure, you all complained about me being a dick about the user interface, and making you redo the buttons and reshape the back and make the corners a tiny bit smoother. But in case you hadn't noticed, that product has done pretty well out there in the marketplace.

So listen up. The tablet, as it stands today, is a piece of shit. It's got Tim Cook's stink all over it. Tim's a great supply chain guy, I'll give him that. But when I was away he kind of went crazy and started wearing a beret and holding design meetings in his office. Jonny Ive would complain to me about it, but I was like, Jonny, dude, I'm lying here with a bunch of machines like from the Matrix all hooked up inside my guts, okay? Just deal with it till I get back.

So Jonny dealt with it the way designers deal with these things -- he stalled. He delayed. He took Tim's stupid ideas and used them to make one bad prototype after another. He was like, Steve, please, I'm begging you, you have to get back here, soon, okay?

Well, I came back and I'm like, Okay, what do the ads look like? Tim says they don't have any ads yet, they're still working on the product itself. I'm like, Dude, have you not read the memo about how things get done around here? Now stop all the work on the product and start working on the ad campaign. I want mock-ups by tomorrow morning. I want cute songs. Pastel colors. Ethnic-looking people. Get on it, asshats!

I didn't bother looking at Tim's prototypes. I just tossed them all out. Tim threw one of his little Tim snits and stopped talking to me. Fine by me, since I could clear him out of my consciousness and apply myself to some serious non-thinking. I started with the big questions. What is a tablet? Who will use it? And for what? If the tablet were a tree, what kind of tree would it be? And what of the word tablet itself? Ta is a Sanskrit root, for "gift." Blet is Proto-Indo-European meaning "to be perfect while lacking usefulness." Will you write on a tablet, or just read from it? Or will you just buy it and put it on your desk and look at it a lot and never use it at all? Or will you maybe carry it around and put on the table in restaurants to show the other humanoids in your tribe that you are more advanced and wealthy than they are, and they should fear you because you have powerful magic that they do not understand? You see what I mean? What is the anthropology here? And what about the ergonomics? Can you mount it on a wall? Will it have a shiny surface so that Macolytes can adore themselves as they use it in public? (Yes. It must.) The tablet must look and feel not like something that was made by man -- it must feel otherworldly, as if God himself made it and handed it to you.

Well, we got the ads worked out, and they're amazing. We've also got the tutorial videos and how-tos, and what's really cool is they show the Internet running at like a hundred times faster than in real life. The engineer dudes are like, Steve, you realize we can't actually make a computer that goes this fast, right? Nonsense, I told them. You can and you will. They said, No, like, there are laws of physics involved here. So I sat there for a minute. I waited. They looked at me. Then I said, Okay, fine. You're fired. So is your boss. They're like, Our boss isn't even here. I said, I don't care, you're all fired, now go back and fill out your paperwork and tell Papermaster to hire some engineers who can make my vision a reality.

We'll get there, friends. Might not be ready in September. But we'll get there. Peace.