The decline of newspapers is a tragedy for democracy. How can it be stopped?

Imagine yourself the proprietor of a venerable and profitable business whose success is based on the quality of your distinctive product, the brand loyalty of your customers, and the fair price they are willing to pay for the value you provide.

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In a nod toward usability, Google increased the size of its home page’s search box and typeface Wednesday, making it easier for users to see long queries. “Over the past 11 years, we’ve made a number of changes to our homepage,” Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of search products and user experience, said in a blog post. “Some are small and some are large. In this case, it’s a small change that makes search more prominent.”

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The U.S. Marines Corps, citing security concerns, has banned Facebook, MySpace and Twitter on its network, and the Pentagon said it is reviewing social-networking sites as it considers setting broader policies on their use. The Marine ban formalizes an existing block on social-networking sites on its government computers, and it does not affect members’ personal use of the sites.

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The carnage in the auto industry may be about to hit Silicon Valley.

Toyota (TM) is considering close NUMMI, a Fremont, California vehicle-assembly plant that it has been operating jointly with General Motors. The revamped GM has decided to pull out of the venture, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (ergo, NUMMI) and now Toyota may close the doors on the operation, which employs 4,600 people.

“We need to determine whether it can be economically feasible to contract with NUMMI without GM,” Toyota said in a statement, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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The Obama administration has called for a $7.1 billion upgrade of the nation’s broadband Internet system as part of the Recovery Act, but it will be a tall order for the FCC to create a plan that satisfies both telecom companies and broadband advocacy groups.

That was the takeaway message at a panel discussion of the broadband initiative at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Monday afternoon. While more and more Americans may be getting broadband Internet service in their homes, monthly service prices are shooting up, leaving broadband advocates worried that low-income users could be left in the virtual dust.

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Speed is critical for the growing number of traders who rely on algorithms to detect market shifts. So NYSE Euronext is building two new data centers that the exchange hopes will allow it to process trades faster than its rivals.

The new data centers are being built outside of London and New York City, and are scheduled to open in 2010. When they do, the NYSE will have an advantage with “the most obsessive traders,” says Steve Rubinow, NYSE’s chief information officer.

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The historic election of President Barack Obama marked a high point for youth involvement in elections. Now, activists are trying to figure out how to bottle youthful Obamania and transport it to other elections. At a panel discussion of the Personal Democracy Forum, author and youth vote activist Mike Conner said that young voter turnout (18-29 year olds) has increased the last three election cycles – marking the first rise in youth voter turnout since the Reagan era.

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As Mark Gimein noted last week in The Big Money, the media giants have put the Web’s journalistic “parasites”–blogs, aggregators, Google (GOOG)–on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement. The Associated Press has threatened legal action against thieves of its intellectual property, MediaNews executive (and AP Chairman) Dean Singleton has seconded that threat, and News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson, the top editor of News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, growl in harmony.

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Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a “parasite” or “tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet.”

The Web site aggregates links to stories. Along with the links is a short description of the news. Thomson and others in the newspaper industry say it’s unfair and unlawful for Web sites to profit from their content without compensating them. On the same day that Thomson made his comments, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the The Associated Press, sized up how many in print journalism feel about sites that aggregate news: “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

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“Controlling the stream” is not just one of the major life-challenges facing elderly gentlemen; it is the center of industrial competition on the realtime social network that we once termed “Web 2.0.” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, gave a speech yesterday before a group of advertising executives in New York in which she argued, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that “banner and text ads are old news.”

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Amazon still hasn’t said how many of its Kindle e-book readers have sold. But here’s one true sign of the gadget’s growing popularity: People are protesting it on several fronts.

On Tuesday, a group representing members of the National Federation of the Blind and the American Association of People with Disabilities staged a protest over limitations in the Kindle’s read-aloud feature. Last month, Amazon (AMZN) said it would amend the feature to give publishers and authors the ability restrict it at the request of the Authors Guild, which says voice performances of books require separate contracts. During the protest outside the New York headquarters of Authors Guild, protesters chanted, “Stop the greed, we want to read.”

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When Apple (AAPL) first started promoting applications for the iPhone, CEO Steve Jobs touted physician reference guides and other medical programs as an important category of software for the device. At least a tenth of the doctors in the U.S. concur with that view. Epocrates Inc., one of the big publishers of mobile electronic medical guides, estimates that 10 percent of physicians in the U.S. are actively using some version of Epocrates software for the iPhone. The company says there are 75,000 doctors that have installed an Epocrates application on their iPhone or iPod touch and synchronized it to get fresh medical content within the last six months.

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After an earthquake in the Abruzzo region of Italy killed at least 100 people, a local scientist is demanding an apology from authorities and saying that he was forced to take his warnings off the Internet. A week ago, Gioacchino Giuliani, a seismologist at the nearby Gran Sasso National Laboratory, predicted that a large quake could occur soon after several small tremors. According to Reuters, his warning prompted vans with loudspeakers telling residents to leave their homes.

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U.S. telecom executives are cautious about speaking their minds when it comes to tech heavyweights like Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG), but not Mikhail Shamolin, president of MTS, Russia’s largest cellphone company.

In an interview with Wall Street Journal editorial staff, he said the negotiations to bring the iPhone to Russia last fall were like “the negotiations of a junkie and a narcotics salesman,” because of the pent-up demand for the device.

But “Apple was operating on a take-it-or-leave-it strategy,” he said, resulting in a high price–about $1,000–that puts it out of reach for many Russians, since operators in the country don’t subsidize handsets.

The largest wireless operators in Russia all offer the iPhone 3G now, but they’ve only sold “a few hundred thousand” units, Mr. Shamolin said, because of the price tag and the dwindling supply of consumer financing amid the global financial crisis. Such credit “was one way to sell iPhones and that went away with the crisis,” Mr. Shamolin said.

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Sohu.com, one of China’s largest Internet companies, hopes U.S. investors like its hack-and-slash videogames enough to give it as much as $120 million.

The Beijing-based company filed this week for an initial public offering of American depositary shares for its online game subsidiary, Changyou.com, on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The company started its road show presentations for investors in Hong Kong Wednesday, and will issue the price of the deal in the coming week, said company executives.

Changyou.com has developed the popular multiplayer online role-playing games Tian Long Ba Bu and Blade Online. Both feature sword-and-sorcery action, though they draw from China’s kung fu legends.

If it happens, the listing will be the first on Nasdaq since last November, according to Reuters. And it would be the first Chinese company to do an IPO in the U.S. since television advertising company China Mass Media International Advertising Corp. launched in August. This will also make Sohu the first Internet service company in China to have its Web portal service and online game division listed in the stock market.

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