We suspect The Wall Street Journal's editors had to restrain themselves from adding a smiley face to today's headline: "New York Times Readies Pay Wall." In contrast to The Journal and its established paid model, The Times has tried several times to survive solely on advertising revenue. As The Journal boasts: "While some publications, including The Wall Street Journal, have had online subscription services for years, the industry as a whole has waded gingerly into paid content." Gingerly indeed, NYTimes.com readers will soon get free access to a certain number of pages per month before they are required to …

Foursquare is looking for another round of funding at a valuation of $250 million, the company's co-founder Naveen Selvadurai tells Bloomberg. Also, according to Selvadurai, the location-based social network will likely double its workforce to 120 employees by the end of the year. By June, Selvadurai predicts that Foursquare will have 10 million users -- up from 6 million at the moment. As Selvadurai tells Bloomberg, "Other sites want to keep you inside at the computer, while our entire goal is to get you out of the house." That's obviously discounting location-based services now offered by Facebook …

The BBC on Monday announced plans to cut 360 jobs from its online division. The Hollywood Reporter described it as "a bid to compete less with commercial news operators." BBC's director general Mark Thompson also said the company plans to scale back on entertainment news coverage. "The plans -- part of a year-long review of the BBC's entire operations -- will see the online division cut back its showbiz news and focus instead on services more in keeping with its core public service values such as the arts, culture, science and religion," writes The Hollywood Reporter. Along …

Thanks to more interest from increasingly tech-savvy marketers, eMarketer on Monday said it expects Twitter to triple revenue this year to $150 million. "One good sign ... is that ad sales on Twitter are following a pace of growth similar to that of Facebook, which is, of course, wildly profitable," writes Fast Company. "To further boost ad sales, Twitter will likely implement DIY marketing tools for small businesses ... which will be similar to offerings from Google and Facebook." "Twitter ads; which are in the form of promoted tweets and …

Every tech trend needs a few naysayers, and for fast-rising question-and-answer site Quora, Vivek Wadhwa is doing the honors. In TechCrunch over the weekend, the UC-Berkeley visiting scholar argues that the quality of Quora's community -- and the content it creates in the form of thoughtful questions and answers -- just can't scale. "The quality of answers will decline," Wadhwa believes. "The people whose opinion I value, such as Quora's #1 respondent, Robert Scoble, will simply stop posting on the site when they get drowned out by the noise from the masses. They will turn away after having their …

Sure to shake the online advertising ecosystem, Mozilla has unveiled do-not-track technology, which essentially asks Web sites not to track consumer behavior for ad-targeting purposes. According to Alex Fowler, Mozilla's global privacy and public policy leader: "We are proposing a feature that allows users to set a browser preference that will broadcast their desire to opt-out of third party, advertising-based tracking by transmitting a Do Not Track HTTP header with every click or page view in Firefox," As CNet notes, the technology follows a proposal from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and likely preempts government legislation, which will protect …

TV watching isn't as "social" an experience as you might assume. Indeed, just 25% of consumers express an interest in sharing what they're watching with friends, according to a new study from SideReel. The company, which helps users find content and TV shows online, surveyed 1,800 users and found that, among social apps, only Twitter made a significant appearance in the results, with 29% saying they used Twitter as part of sharing their TV watching socially. "None of the check-in services ... including GetGlue, Miso, Clicker or Foursquare have significant usage among SideReel's TV watchers," according to the report. Also, …

Over the past year, venture capital gushing into the market increased by 20%, according to a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Based on data from Thomson Reuters, the study also found a 12% rise in deals over the past year. Overall, that amounted to $21.8 billion being pumped into 3,277 deals in 2010, according to the so-called MoneyTree Report - levels not seen since the salad days of 2007. Investments in the fourth quarter of 2010 totaled $5 billion in 765 deals -- a 2% increase in dollars, but a 3% decrease in deals year-over-year. …

How much control should companies have over employees' social lives, and their social networking lives in particular? In the age of Facebook, that question is currently being debated in courtrooms across the county. "Job seekers and employees have long been warned that risqué revelations on Facebook can jeopardize career prospects," reports The Wall Street Journal. "But now companies are facing their own challenges for alleged blunders in dealing with social media." Next week, for example, a National Labor Relations Board judge will consider whether a medical-transportation company illegally fired a worker after she criticized her boss on Facebook. Other …

Despite -- or due to -- its rapid growth, everyone's asking how question & answer service Quora plans to scale the high quality of its content. Well, among several new projects, the startup is developing an algorithm to determine user quality, according to Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever. "The algorithm is somewhat similar to PageRank but since people are different from pages on the web and the signals that are available on Quora are different from those on the web, it's not exactly the same problem," Cheever writes in a recent post. "We'll use this to help decide what to …