Don't ask Rupert Murdoch to care, but a new Harris poll finds that, among more than 2,000 online adults surveyed, 77% said they wouldn't pay a dime to read a newspaper's stories online. Among those willing to pay, meanwhile, 19% said they could only imagine parting with between $1 and $10 a month, while only 5% would shell out more than $10 each month. The poll also showed what many newspapers have already seem first hand: that readership of traditional news is steadily dropping. Indeed, just 43% of the people surveyed said they read a newspaper each day, …

Calling into question the gravity of Google's affront to Chinese law, the county's government and business community don't seem particularly concerned about the prospect of a Google-less China. Chinese officials brushed off Google's threat, telling Bloomerberg: "effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information" Speaking with a group of Chinese entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler got a similar response. "Most thought that the Chinese government wouldn't budge on censorship and that Google's threat wouldn't have much of …

The numbers are in, and Google's greatly-hyped Nexus One smartphone didn't sell too well during its first week on the market. That, according to mobile app analytics firm Flurry, which is predicting that Google sold just 20,000 of its Nexus One smart phone in its first week. By contrast, Apple moved 1.6 million iPhone 3GS's in one week last June, while the Motorola Droid sold 250,000 and the T-Mobile MyTouch sold 60,000 in their respective first weeks. "For a phone that is supposed to represent the greatest threat to the iPhone, this is pretty uninspiring stuff," concludes BusinessWeek. What explains …

Mashable looks into a new report claiming that the iPhone App Store has lost a whopping $450 million to piracy and "cracked downloads." No doubt, cracked software and piracy -- problems that have plagued the desktop software market for years -- have become more prevalent in the mobile application space. Yet, the report conducted by a Web site named 24/7 Wall St. might have relied on some questionable methodology, according to Mashable. Chiefly, the report assumes that paid iPhone applications have a piracy rate of 75%. "How did they come to this conclusion? "Using some past piracy usage examples from …

Google has hired ad industry veteran Torrence Boone as managing director for agency development in North America. The search giant's relationships with top agencies have suffered since its lost its last Madison Ave. connection, Erin Clift to AOL last year. Boone most recently served as the head of Enfatico, the highly-experimental agency co-created by WPP and client Dell. Boone is expected to officially join Google next week, reporting to Penry Price, VP-global agency and industry development. Enfatico was conceived in early 2008 when Dell consolidated its massive advertising account at WPP on the premise that they would jointly develop a …

In the age of Twitter, how does Google rank real-time tweets? In the social context, the number of people following someone is similar to the number of links pointing to a page, according to Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who has led the development of Google's real-time search efforts. It is not just about the number of Twitter followers, he adds, but also figuring out who the most "reputed followers" are. "You earn reputation, and then you give reputation," says Amit. "If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone-then even though this [new person] does not have …

Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman has revealed what he says is a new form of click fraud that accomplishes what watchdogs once thought impossible: "A scam that not only simulates valid clicks on a Google ad sold to an advertiser, but seems to result in a real customer who spends money on the advertiser's site," writes Forbes. Says Edelman: "This is a particularly insidious kind of click fraud ... It takes more effort to organize, but it gives the perpetrator the capacity to impose charges in a way that's much harder for the advertiser to notice." Edelman goes on …

That Google could exit China -- following security attacks on the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents and human rights activists -- is obviously big world news, but what are its implications for the search giant's U.S. business operations, and overall health? Well, contrary to comments made by Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, eWeek suggests that the attacks could call into question the reliability of cloud computing -- which, for Google, has emerged as a key battleground against rival Microsoft, and will represent a $14 billion industry by 2013, according to research firm Gartner.

What does Google have planned for social media in 2010? First off, across a variety of products, the search giant wants to make it valuable and easy to harness social information, according to the company's engineering director David Glazer. As such, the company plans to expose and elicit more of the social network built into the tools that many consumers already use like, say, Gmail and Google Talk. As GigaOm writes: "If you use Google products, the company already knows who your most important contacts are, what your core interests are, and where your default locations are." With that …

Before noting that Wal-Mart has twice attempted to deliver movies and TV shows online, MediaMemo's Peter Kafka suggests that the retail giant is at it again -- this time with the help of Web video start-up Vudu. "Sources tell me Web video start-up Vudu is in 'meaningful' acquisition discussions, and industry executives believe Wal-Mart is the likely buyer," Kafka writes. Making it an easy target, Vudu is apparently struggling to differentiate itself amid numerous other services that let consumers rent or buy movies online. For a time, Wal-Mart tried to compete with Netflix's DVD-by-mail business, but it threw in the …