Build a field of dreams, and they'll come. That much is clear. Hitwise, however, wants to know whether they'll come if and when Rupert Murdoch "de-indexes" WSJ.com from Google, and gives Microsoft's Bing exclusive "indexer" rights. Well, as of last week, WSJ.com's referred and non-referred traffic from Google and Google News amounted to 15.3% and 11.0% respectively. "Analyzing Google search terms driving traffic to the Journal, the top 100 terms accounted for over 21.6% of all Google search traffic to WSJ.com," writes Bill Tancer, general manager of Global Research at Hitwise. Of that …

We can't imagine the government staying out of this one. Microsoft has reportedly been in discussions with News Corp about "de-indexing" its news sites from Google's search engine, and going with Microsoft's Bing search engine exclusively. "It ties in with (News Corp. head Rupert) Murdoch's seeming hatred of Google and its alleged news content-stealing behavior as a news aggregator--and it would provide News Corp. with an elegant way out of the strange position it's currently in where it complains about Google but lets the engine's robots into the sites to sniff the news for listing," writes …

While iPhone apps remain a popular pastime for many developers, Apple has successfully alienated a slice of the broader community. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt, for one, said he was "philosophically opposed" to the idea of a company deciding which applications can and can't be used on its hardware. In that context, Phil Schiller, Apple's SVP for worldwide product marketing at Apple, is explaining why the company keeps such close tabs on which applications can be downloaded onto the iPhone and iPod Touch, and how it's trying to relax its approval process. "We've built a store for the most part …

BNO News, which produces the @BreakingNews Twitter feed and the BNO iPhone app, is launching its business syndication venture, named BNO News Wire, and MSNBC.com has signed on as the first client. MSNBC.com is also taking over the management of the @BreakingNews Twitter feed starting next month, while BNO and its 20-year-old Dutch founder Michael van Poppel will now focus on developing its subscription-based wire service to sell to news companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. BNO's new wire-service headlines will now be fed into the Twitter feed, along with the usual third-party headlines that it aggregates. …

LinkedIn on Monday debuted a business-focused apps platform, following a string of LinkedIn deals to integrate with IBM, Research In Motion, Microsoft Outlook and Twitter. Promised early platform developers include TweetDeck, Posterous, Box.net and Ribbit. Asks GigaOm: "With far too many platforms begging for developers' services today, why should they head to LinkedIn?" Answers Adam Nash, LinkedIn's VP of search and platform products: "Obviously LinkedIn is a pretty unique platform, but these are fundamentally standard REST APIs.... More than 50 million people have used LinkedIn to build their professional presence online, and they want to use it everywhere." The new …

Putting the sustainability of "crowdsourced" Web endeavors into question, the Wall Street Journal reports that many of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police Wikipedia.rog are quitting. As the Journal explains, the trend "could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet -- the empowerment of the amateur." Still, Wikipedia is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors, and new members continue to join the project that bills itself as a "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Also, volunteers have recently been departing …

Hulu -- the joint video venture between NBC Universal, News Corp. and Disney -- has taken a step toward crowdsourcing its classification and discovery capabilities, adding the ability for users to add tags to videos. The online video site added a "Tags" tab alongside its "Reviews" and "Discussion" sections, so users can classify video clips by checking a box next to any existing tag, or add their own tags through the "Add Tags" box. People who have added tags will be able to edit or update them at any time, through the Tags tab in their profile pages. What's more, …

About Google's highly anticipated Chrome OS operating system? Right, it's destined to be a total failure. So says InfoWorld, which, along with a gaggle of other press, were given a sneak peek of Chrome OS at Google HQ on Thursday.   Why the severe review? "Spotty" hardware compatibility; a wholly unoriginal user interface; and too narrow a vision. "The bottom line is that while there is virtually nothing that you'll be able to do with the Chrome OS that you won't be able to do equally well with Windows, there are …

Sony just announced plans to launch an online store selling music, movies, and books as well as other downloadable applications for mobile products. Sony's top execs didn't specify when the Internet store, tentatively called Sony Online Service, would go live or what it would look like. But the storefront is likely to bear some similarities to Apple's iTunes store, according to BusinessWeek, and would be Sony's most ambitious attempt to link its products to its own library of digital content. Analysts say that creating software to sell an array of online services and content is Sony's best hope of improving …

Twitter has apparently turned on its Geo-location API so users can opt-in to having their messages annotated with their exact locations. The significance of this is made clear by comparing it with last week's release of 500 million time-stamped Twitter messages for analysis. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps ... and you've got a web app," Flip Kromer of data marketplace Infochimps tells ReadWriteWeb. Today's announcement of the availability of location data means something similar, i.e., people can take this data, mash it up with any other data with …