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Nearly four-in-ten people (37%) regularly use at least one type of internet news source, either the news pages of major search engines such as Google or Yahoo (25%), the websites of the television news organizations (22%), or the websites of major national newspapers such as the New York Times or USA Today (12%). Additionally, about one-in-ten (11%) read online blogs where people discuss events in the news.

Which Audiences Know the Most?

People who read the newspaper online have a far less favorable opinion of network and local TV news programming than do people who read the print version, and also have a somewhat less favorable view of the daily newspaper they are most familiar with. But consumers of online newspapers feel far more favorably toward large nationally influential newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

And by more than three-to-one (73%-21%), the public feels that news organizations are "often influenced by powerful people and organizations," rather than "pretty independent."

However, even two-thirds of liberal Democrats (67%) say the news media is more motivated by a desire to expand audience than informing the public. People who have attended college are more likely than high school graduates to say that the press mostly seeks to attract the biggest audience. And 85% of those who cite the internet as a main source believe that news organizations are mostly motivated by a desire to expand their audience, rather than to inform the public.

My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA function getSharePasskey() { return 'ex=1353214800&en=835081fc6a0a7ff1&ei=5124';} function getShareURL() { return encodeURIComponent('http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17dna.html'); } function getShareHeadline() { return encodeURIComponent('My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA'); } function getShareDescription() { return encodeURIComponent('For as little as $1,000 and a saliva sample, customers of an infant industry will be able to learn what is known about how their biological code shapes who they are.'); } function getShareKeywords() { return encodeURIComponent('Genetics and Heredity,DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid),Medicine and Health,Genetic Engineering,Computers and the Internet,23andMe'); } function getShareSection() { return encodeURIComponent('us'); } function getShareSectionDisplay() { return encodeURIComponent('The DNA Age'); } function getShareSubSection() { return encodeURIComponent(''); } function getShareByline() { return encodeURIComponent('By AMY HARMON'); } function getSharePubdate() { return encodeURIComponent('November 17, 2007'); } Sign In to E-Mail or Save This Print Single Page Reprints ShareDel.icio.usDiggFacebookNewsvinePermalink writePost(); By AMY HARMON Published: November 17, 2007 The exploration of the human genome has long been relegated to elite scientists in research laboratories. But that is about to change. An infant industry is capitalizing on the plunging cost of genetic testing technology to offer any individual unprecedented — and unmediated — entree to their own DNA.

Facebook Users Complain of New Tracking By ANICK JESDANUN and RACHEL METZ – 4 days ago NEW YORK (AP) — Some users of the online hangout Facebook are complaining that its two-week-old marketing program is publicizing their purchases for friends to see.Those users say they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers following transactions at Fandango, Overstock and other online retailers. The box alerts users that information is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on "No Thanks." It disappears after about 20 seconds, after which consent is assumed.

In Nature’s Casino

I met up with Robert Scoble last night at an Orange party in San Francisco (my photos from the party are here). He brought along his Amazon Kindle and let me and others test it out. It was the first time I’d held one - the Kindle I bought hasn’t arrived yet and my co-editor Erick covered the New York launch. Anyway, he took video of me giving my opinion of the Kindle (thumbs down). The problem is the UI is completely non-intuitive and the screen is unreadable in medium light (it was much brighter in the room than the video suggests and it was easily bright enough to read a normal book). I was trying to simply pull up the browser and go to a web page and I couldn’t figure it out. The scroll wheel on the side is obviously designed only to frustrate users. And without any sort of mouse, I kept touching the screen to try to get it to do what I wanted (which of course doesn’t work). I also compare it in the video unfavorably to the etch-a-sketch. I asked Robert to pull up a web browser and load TechCrunch. He did it once and it took so long I asked him if I could video it. He agreed, and did it again. It took him 55 seconds to pull up the browser and enter the TechCrunch URL. I then pulled out my iPhone and did the same thing in 14 seconds. The Kindle can be given some slack since web browsing isn’t its core function. But web browsing on the iPhone isn’t the key feature of that device, either. Amazon just didn’t design a good device (the user interface, keyboard and screen are all very flawed), and they had all the time in the world to get it right. Hopefully v.2 will be an improvement. Of course this is just my opinion after trying it out for a few minutes, and I’d had a couple of beers. Don MacAskill wrote up his own review after a day with the device and says its wonderful.

Little of what we see on television, however, is quite what it seems. Williams had an incentive—the usual one in our republic, money—for overmastering his bashfulness on that occasion. The pharmaceutical corporation GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), through its public relations firm, Cohn & Wolfe, was paying him a still undisclosed sum, not to tout its antidepressant Paxil but simply to declare, to both Oprah and the press, "I've always been a shy person."

April 4, 2007