The deal has been finalized for a sum of $315 million, of which $300 million will be paid in cash.

Co-founder of The Huffington Post, Ariana Huffington will be made the President and Editor-in-chief of the new company, the Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all the content on AOL properties as well as the Huffington Post.

News of this deal has caused quite a ripple in the stock market as far as newspaper publications are concerned. Stocks of Gannett Co. rose by 46 cents or 2.8% to $7.12. The New York Times rose by 29 cents or 2.7% to $10.90 and Media General Inc. rose by 58 cents to $6.01.

This could be because it is widely expected that the deal between the Huffington Post and AOL will improve the value of leading branded digital properties, according to John Eade the Chief Executive of Argus Research.

The merger is expected to generate a user base of 117 million visitors a month in the U.S. and will reach 270 million users worldwide.

However, regular readers of The Huffington Post and a number of other online blogs have not greeted the news with as much enthusiasm as Wall Street. Readers are primarily concerned that corporate ownership will mean that the blog will no longer continue to provide unbiased, liberal information, but will instead lean towards right-wing journalism to satisfy their corporate owners.

One commenter on the post announcing the merger said “With an influx of corporate money, will the bloggers now be paid? And if they are paid, will that payment affect their ablilty to write articles that able to tell the truth as they see it, or will they only be allowed to participat­­e on Huffington Post if their writing meets corporate guidelines on what is considered to be acceptable­­?”

Others have threatened to leave the site en masse on one day, even going so far as to state that loosing a few thousand dedicated readers was probably calculated into this merger decision, so the user attrition should be bigger than AOL would have anticipated.

The deal should be finalised by the end of the first quarter of the year or early in the second quarter.

The newspaper, La Repubblica says that by the end of this year, Google will start a new system, which will require users to pay to access content that is behind a publisher paywall. According to the report, the new platform, called Newspass, is already being tested by Google with a closed group of publishers.

Publishers would be the major beneficiaries of this system, as they will receive the major part of the revenue generated. Google will handle the authentication, support and billing. Publishers will also be able to use a single system to publish their content on desktops, mobiles, tablet PCs and any other platforms.

Users will have a single login across all content sites served by Newspass. Sites will be able to give users the option to pay for long term subscriptions or to make micropayments to access just one article.

Google has neither confirmed nor denied the news. A spokesperson has said, “We’ve consistently said we’re talking with news publishers about ways we can work together, including whether we can help them with technology to power any subscription services they may be thinking of building.”

What makes this development most interesting, though, is its timing. News of this initiative comes at a time when a number of major news publications, such as The New York Times and News Corp-owned The Times and The Sun have either started adopting a paywall for their online versions or intend to do so in the near future.

One does wonder how this system will affect the quality of search results, as it is reasonable to assume, that higher quality information is likely to be categorised as ‘paid content’, while the less interesting stories or second-hand news items from bloggers could be all that remains available for free.

Apart from referring to traditional news sources such as newspapers and television, people are now increasingly relying on blogs and social networks to receive news.

In fact, news is fast becoming a shared social experience. However, the type of news that is popular on these different sources varies widely.

The Pew Research Center has carried out a study on the top news stories carried by different sources and analysed the data collected. The study was carried out between 19 January 2009 and 15 January 2010 on blogs and YouTube and from 15 June 2009 to 15 January 2010 on Twitter.

The study not only found that the lead stories on social media channels varied widely from traditional news media, but it also varied substantially from one channel to another.

It was found that during the course of the study the top story on blogs, YouTube and Twitter coincided only once, during the Iranian Presidential elections held between June 15 2009, to June 19 2009.

Bloggers, in general, were found to be more interested in emotional stories or issues that related to individual or group rights or similar ideologies. Stories that could be personalised and shared attracted a lot of attention. Political news, however, tended to be both pro-liberal as well as pro-conservative.

On Twitter, there was a very different tendency – stories concerning technology, in general, and Twitter, in particular, gained more prominence. However, even here, the Iran elections were the most popular lead story and topped the charts for 7 weeks in a row.

In contrast, on YouTube, the news is usually shared through videos and often does not even contain any added comments. There is also a tendency to pay more attention to international news.

One common factor among all the social platforms studied, was that the stories did not stay on top of the charts for long.

Also it was not uncommon to find that the news stories on all these sources, differred considerably from the top stories on the traditional news channels.

Blogs are more likely to borrow information from the traditional media, but the reverse trend rarely occurs. Bloggers might face a tough time once their main sources, such as The New York Times and The Times go behind pay walls. It has already been announced that the New York Times will start charging for the use of some of their news content from January 2011.

Users access various social activities such as social networks, blogs reading a message board etcetera at least once a week. However the site which has really done very well for itself, is without a doubt Facebook.

According to the Nielsen report, commissioned by women-focused blog network BlogHer and NBCU’s iVillage, Facebook is now catching up with TV in terms of popularity in the U.S.

While 55% of the population is believed to watch TV daily, 47% of the population visits Facebook daily. In fact, Facebook is now much more popular than other channels of information and entertainment such as radio and newspapers, which are accessed by 37% and 22% of the population respectively.

One of the major factors which draws people to Facebook, could be social gaming. Nielsen reports that 32.7 million people are now playing social games like Farmville daily. This figure is equal to the number of daily newspaper readers and double the number of magazine readers.

Other forms of social media such as blogs are not so popular, however, and attract only 11% of web users daily.

The decision to truncate Lifehacker’s news feed has not gone down well with its former editorial head, Lockhart Steele, who has always been a very active defendant of full RSS feeds. He questioned the owner of Gawker Media, Nick Denton about the logic behind this decision.

Nick Denton responded by saying, “this was a commercial decision”. He further added, “Gawker Media is an ad supported company. RSS ads have never realized their potential. At the same time we sell plenty of ads on our website so, yes, it is in our interest for people to click through if enticed by an excerpt.”

Denton’s statement regarding the lack of profits coming out of RSS ads is particularly interesting. The effectiveness of RSS news feeds as an advertising medium becomes seriously questionable when a popular blog publisher openly denounces them.

Felix Salmon from Reuters seems to have a different opinion, though. He points out, on his blog, that while it might be true that click throughs from the RSS feed to the website generate more revenue, there is no evidence that truncating all RSS feeds would result in higher traffic. In fact, things could work in just the reverse manner and changing from full to truncated RSS feeds may result in a loss in traffic and hence lead to lower revenues.

According to the findings of the survey, a large number of Americans (92%) make use of various platforms to collect their daily news.

The most popular sources of daily news are local and national TV channels, followed in third place by the Internet. National and local newspapers and radio have not surprisingly fallen behind.

On an average day, almost 60% of Americans will access various online and offline sources of news.

Thanks to the proliferation of the Internet and mobile technology, the new multi-platform media environment is now portable, personalised and participatory.

33% of mobile phone users access the news through their mobile phones, thus making it portable. 28% of Internet users access news on topics that interest them personally via news feeds on their homepage, while 37% of Internet users participate in the act of dissemination of news by posting it on sites like Facebook and Twitter, with or without their personal comments.

People are also using their social networks to filter and assess the news. They also exchange stories through email. 75% of online news receivers, do so via email or social networking and 52% of them share the news with others in the same manner.

Most online news consumers do not have a particular favourite news site, and access a variety of sites to collect their daily news.

While 55% of Americans say that it is easier to stay up-to-date about news and information than it was 5 years ago, 70% of those surveyed feel overwhelmed by the number of news sources now available to them.

Twitter Tab on Yahoo! Search for Hot News items

Yahoo! now incorporates information from tweets, photos and videos posted on Twitter. They have revamped the Yahoo! News Shortcut result, that shows at the top of the organic results for queries on breaking news topics, into a horizontal tabbed form, which links to three or four news categories.

The first tab in the new Yahoo! News Shortcut result shows news sites with snippets from articles. The next tabs link to photos and / or to videos and the last one to Twitter.

Searches on certain popular news stories currently bring up the Twitter tab, which then takes users to the Twitter search results page for that query. Screenshots provided by Yahoo!, though, show the Twitter tab loading with a couple of selected tweets and associated videos.

According to Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf on Yahoo! Search blog, “Starting today, you can see relevant photos, videos and tweets about a breaking news story on the Yahoo! News Shortcut. Many of you are already familiar with the existing Yahoo! News Shortcut, which displays headlines on our Web search results when you look for news stories. The enhanced shortcut with these new tabs will now display for many breaking or major news searches.”

Although both Google and Bing have already started incorporating Twitter feeds into their search results, Yahoo! claims that they are the first to integrate Twitter with news, which actually makes a lot of sense since Twitter is growing into a rather popular source of breaking news round the world.

They are hopeful that this will make Yahoo! News the first choice of users looking for current information on any breaking news stories. Yahoo! will also run a separate algorithm to filter out any irrelevant information that is present on Twitter.

Yahoo!’s Larry Cornett said that they were very pleased with user reactions they saw during initial user testing of this feature.

If one is left wondering as to how a new homepage will help to entice more users, let us clarify by saying that it is not just a new colour scheme or design that they have changed. The change in focus of the network is now clearly evident through this new homepage.

The old homepage introduced the site as a ‘service for friends, family and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you doing?”

The new homepage, on the other hand, invites users to “share and discover what’s happening right now anywhere in the world”.

The logo and tagline and now followed by a search box and a list of trending topics, clearly pointing users towards popular discussion topics. The trending topics and their associated search results are displayed in real time.

Emphasis has been removed from the community messaging aspect of Twitter and instead placed on the news delivery and discussion aspect, which is what has put Twitter in the spotlight repeatedly in the past year.

Trends shown at any given time are divided into popular topics at the time, on that particular day or during that week. Twitter pulls some of the popular discussion topics from What The Trend.

Now it looks as though Twitter is all set to kill several birds with one stone…

They hope to be able to expand their user base by involving even those people who are not interested in idle chit-chat with friends, or those who have nothing to say for themselves but who would like to know what is going on in the world.

They will also now have the opportunity to monetize their site by introducing relevant ads alongside the search results and the trending topic details.

Their search results will be in real time, so they will be one up on search giant Google on that score.

Studies conducted by The Pew Internet and American Life Project have found that only 65% of teens use social websites nowadays, as opposed to 78% who play online games.

Not too long ago, social networks were the hot favorite among this age group, along with email, which was used by 89% of teennagers at that time.

The latest trend, however, is to use text messaging and instant messaging instead of email, which is now used by only 73% of teenagers.

Significantly, young adults between the ages of 18 and 32 seem to be following the reverse trend, with only 50% of them playing games online while 67% access social networks.

Surprisingly though, it was found that only 10% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 years spend time in virtual worlds, which is almost the same percentage as was found a few years ago, and hardly 2-3% of the older generation do so.

Deloitte’s State of the Media Democracy Survey found that another victim of the changing times was the good old television. Studies reveal that those between 14 and 25 years of age are far more likely to use their PC for entertainment through games, music and social networks, than to sit and watch TV. This study was conducted across U.K., U.S.A., Germany, Japan and Brazil.

Searching and downloading music was the most accessed facility on the internet with 80% of youngsters using it while 73% access chat rooms social networks and message boards. It was also found that 59% of the youth use their mobile phones for entertainment, and the amount of time spent watching television is about one-third less than that spent by other age groups.

As far as advertising power goes, however, it was found that TV is the most influential for youth, followed by magazines, online ads and newspaper ads, while radio ads are fifth in line.

• Pew Internet Report: Adults & Social Network Websites
• Pew Internet Report: Adults & Video Games