Yet another stage of the New York Times’s (NYT) exploration of paid content options has come to light via Gawker, which has posted the text of two potential content packages, labeled “Silver” and “Gold.” It’s clear these are hypothetical options; Gawker quotes a Times spokesperson as writing them that “It’s very early in the process. We are still in the data collection phase.”

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We all know that The New York Times (NYT) and other papers have been thinking hard about finding ways to charge readers for the news on their web sites, and there’s evidence that the decision-making process is moving along. Bloomberg has reported that a survey of print subscribers included this sentence:

The New York Times website, nytimes.com, is considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia.

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Two years ago, Asustek wowed the world with the hottest selling computing product to arrive in recent memory: the Eee PC netbook. But even that blockbuster device has failed to do much to boost the company’s brand in the United States, a situation the Taiwanese computer maker intends to correct.

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An alarm went off on some desk at The New York Times business section: Oh-oh, time to slam blogs again. But the latest assault reveals as much about The Times and the culture of classical journalism as it does about bloggers.

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Silicon Valley was abuzz Wednesday with news that the Justice Department had begun an antitrust investigation into the hiring practices of some of the best-known companies in the technology and biotech industries, including Google, Apple, Yahoo and Genentech.

The question being asked most frequently was how the word “anticompetitive” could possibly be applied to the industry’s perpetual fight over talent.

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The Observer’s John Koblin reports that the NY Times is considering putting a meter on usage of its site and charging once you’ve read too much.

Incredible.

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If you have spent any time on the Internet in the last few months, chances are you have clicked on a shortened link Web address.

URL shorteners, which abbreviate unwieldy Web addresses into bite-size links, have been around for years. The most popular service, TinyURL.com, was started in 2002 by a unicyclist named Kevin Gilbertson.

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The Knot is launching 75 new localized sites in the hopes of reaching brides-to-be from Tampa to Tucson.

David Liu, CEO of the wedding Web site, said the idea is to provide the “ingredients” that people planning weddings seek out. Brides are best served by content available in their specific location, he said. Likewise, wedding vendors want to advertise in bridal outlets that target a region.

The new sites, which range from the Ozarks to Oahu, Orange County to Orlando, are catalogued under weddings.com. The local sites bring the total number of niche Web sites under the Knot umbrella to 85. Mr. Liu says the company plans to have more than 200 such sites by the end of the year.

Hyperlocal content is increasingly popular with media outlets, especially among news organizations. The New York Times (NYT) recently launched a pair of sites called “The Local” to cover communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey. Patch, a startup Web company backed by new AOL (TWX) CEO Tim Armstrong, covers community news in a handful of neighborhoods in New Jersey. Topix aggregates content by zip code.

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Vivek Kundra, who was on leave from his new appointment by President Obama as the federal government’s chief information officer, has been reinstated, the White House said today.

White House officials confirmed to The New York Times (NYT) that Mr. Kundra had been reinstated today; it was first reported this afternoon by Techpresident.com without confirmation.

The reinstatement comes a few days after F.B.I. agents had raided his former office at the District of Columbia’s technology department. Mr. Kundra was not a target of the raid. A former employee of his, Yusuf Acar, has been charged with bribery. The F.B.I. said that Mr. Kundra was not implicated in the bribery case, but he took a leave from his new federal job anyway.

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The hurricane is coming. You have 20 minutes to grab the objects in your house that are most important to you. What do you reach for first?

That’s a question asked by Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for The New York Times (NYT), at the very end of Objectified, director Gary Hustwit’s brilliant documentary about industrial design. The film, which premiered here at South by Southwest to a packed house Saturday, is an examination of the objects that surround us — the gadgets, furniture, cars, appliances and everyday things that we collect, consume and, ultimately, throw away.

You may not ever think about what kind of planning goes into designing simple, everyday things like toothbrushes, wastebaskets or hedge trimmers, but after seeing this movie, you will never look at any one of those objects the same way again.

Consider the lowly vegetable peeler — in the film, we hear a story of the designer’s wife who was complaining that the handle of her metal potato skinner was hurting her hands as she struggled to grip it tightly. He saw this as a golden opportunity to redesign the kitchen tool, and he set about designing dozens of handles of different sizes using different materials. In the end, a bicycle handlebar grip provided a flash of brilliance — he slid the rubber grip onto the peeler’s metal frame and he had his new, ergonomic design.

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The idea that people won’t pay for content online has become such a part of the Web orthodoxy that New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller risked getting lynched earlier this month for merely musing about paid models for the online editions of his paper. Not helping Keller’s cogitation was a contemporaneous “secret memo” from Steve Brill and a Time article by Walter Isaacson, both which advocated variations on the micropayment model. Neither advances the topic much beyond what most Web entrepreneurs understood long ago.

Paid content’s failures are well-documented. Slate gave up on the subscriber model in early 1999. The New York Times folded its TimesSelect product of columnists and archives in 2007, concluding a two-year run, even though it was taking in $10 million a year. The latimes.com set free its CalendarLive section of arts, reviews, and listings in May 2005 after a 21-month paid experiment. To name another ambitious venture among the many, the 2000 start-up Inside.com, which charged several hundred dollars a year, failed to attract its 30,000 desired subscribers and expired.

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In 2007, a college student explained to me that he preferred Facebook to MySpace because MySpace (in his view) was for emo kids who liked Death Cab for Cutie and Facebook was for clever kids who liked words. “The Facebook interface is minimalist and not stupid or smeared with fingerpaint like MySpace,” he said, if I remember right. “It leaves room for wit.”

I, too, had been put off by the fingerpaint factor on MySpace and was eager for another kind of network, so I tried Facebook, which by then was open to nonstudents. The interface was indeed more restrained, but I didn’t see much wit until I came upon the site’s status updates. Status updates are part of a Twitter-like feature that induces­ members to publish their answers to the question “What are you doing right now?” Responses, which are confined to 160 characters, then show up on the Facebook homepages of the updater’s friends. My Facebook page went from a solemn chronicle–a record of who had changed their profile photos or listed a new hometown–to a collaborative epic in the style of Frank O’Hara:

Micheline is off in search of sneakers. Kristin is getting that pedicure, but they didn’t have I’m Not Really a Waitress. Had to go with In the Mood. Sean 1:20 and stumbling home. Thanks 2 all that came, especially those that contributed jager or tequila. Jenny is keeping Beelzebub at the stave’s end.

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The Xbox 360’s exclusive Grand Theft Auto IV add-on, “The Lost and Damned,” debuted yesterday to generally positive reviews. That’s good news for Microsoft–especially considering how much the company paid for rights to the extra downloadable episode.

Seth Schiesel’s New York Times review gives you a good sense for what $25 million buys a console company these days.

“’The Lost and Damned’ suffers from a few curious and unfortunate design decisions–players often have less freedom than in the original–that will probably prompt most to return to the original game after completing the new episode’s main story. But there is no question that it is the most fully realized, thoroughly produced and substantial downloadable add-on yet released for a console game. Anyone who enjoys Grand Theft Auto IV should get it.”

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Five major U.K. carriers are banding together to pool customer data so that it can be put into a giant database and then be used to sell advertising, The Register reports today. How long do you think it will take before this “database” idea lands on American shores? First they charge you hundreds of dollars for calls, then they sell you for pennies.

This is no different than, say, Phorm, NebuAd or any of the other tricks being cooked up by service providers in a desperate attempt to recreate Google’s business model. In the process, they are playing loose and fast with people’s privacy. Jeez, no wonder people hate their phone companies.

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The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.

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