Attendees at the LeWeb conference held earlier this month had an extra organizational tool at their disposal: a custom iPhone app.

I cannot believe how much sense this makes. As app frameworks become more common, and development costs come down, I can see a point in the next two years when conference apps move from novelty to must-have. Sort of like Wi-Fi (but hopefully more reliable).

And let's not forget the sponsorship opportunities here, either. A smart sponsor could use the app to send a hyper-targeted message to a hyper-targeted audience. Toss in some sort of booth contest, and you've got the marketing equivalent of the Death Star's tractor beam.

Alan Mutter looks at the face-palm-inducing results from a recent newspaper publisher survey. Apparently, execs have high hopes for 2010. Very, very high hopes.

Ridiculousness aside (and these results are truly ridiculous), I found the end of Mutter's piece quite interesting. I think most survey data is crap because it has no way of incorporating the qualitative, subconscious motivations of respondents. People are emotional creatures with wacky ideas. Yet, survey companies and analysts throw projections out there under the billowy banner of Truth.

That's why I was heartened to see the underlying explanations/motivations laid out by one of the guys behind this newspaper survey. This is the type of honesty surveys need:

• "Wishful thinking."
• "Print people over-estimating the potential of online (which is the sole factor contributing positive gain)."
• "Corporate insistence to make the online look better."
• "If I don't show better numbers, they'll cut my budget.
• "Optimism is better than slitting your wrists."

Yes! A thousand times yes! This is the meaty, emotionally-honest stuff I want to see. It forces people to take surveys with a grain of salt. Surveys have some value, I'll give you that, but they're only a reference point. That's it. The end-all-be-all, we're-sure-this-will-happen authoritarian perspective is useless.

Books lock content into a container by default. There's no easy way to excerpt or share or disseminate. But digital sets that content free, and that means hardware that delivers digital content needs to facilitate that freedom. False obstacles that seek to duplicate the limitations of print are ridiculous. Hear that, Amazon?

Thankfully -- seriously, thank God for this -- it looks like magazine publishers are getting the message. From the New York Times:

Sports Illustrated's demonstration version -- developed with the Wonderfactory, a design firm -- lets readers organize the magazine by subjects like baseball or football. They can circle photographs or articles and use a toolbar to e-mail an article, print it, view comments, view related items, see relevant Twitter posts or save the article to a favorites file. They can rearrange the order of the issue, see dozens of photos that don't make it into print and pull live scores from all the teams they follow. [Link and emphasis added.]

One last thing. I try to include a source link with all of my tweets and excerpts; just a little something that allows people to go deeper if they're so inclined. That's why tablet editions need a link-to feature. It could take the form of a web-based version of the article (with advertising and marketing all around it, of course). Perhaps it's some sort of intermediate, email-to-a-friend edition. Maybe it's an iTunes-esque redirect. I really don't care what the links look like. They just need to be there.

Paramount is out with a new online service that lets customers purchase clips from films. As this New York Times article notes, it's initially aimed at advertisers and marketers who want to use the clips in campaigns. Consumers will be let in on the action later.

I have a couple thoughts on this:

1. Kudos to Paramount for giving this a shot. It certainly can't hurt, and we need all the experimentation we can get.

2. I think this is a fantastic opportunity to test good-better-best quality levels. I've long thought there's a way to service different segments of the audience through resolution, features and convenience.

For example, writers, bloggers and others who simply want to reference a clip could grab a lower-resolution version for free (as many already do through YouTube). This boosts awareness and creates branding opportunities for the content provider.

One sidenote: The Times piece suggests folks on the low end -- consumers, mostly -- may have to pay a low per-clip fee. That's the wrong move. These aren't ringtones. Ringtones are a public expression of personality linked to an always-on, always-available device. Embeddable movie clips require placement within media forms, be it a website or a DVD. The all-important personality element is muted. I'm not going to shell out cash if that so-bad-it's-good movie clip only broadcasts my ironic sense of humor to a limited audience. I need exposure, dammit!

But I digress ...

Moving up the scale, companies that want to aggregate clips or make them available as part of another content product could pay a reasonable amount (likely a flat rate for a certain number of clips) and gain access to DVD-quality content. I can see utility here for the education world. A one-stop shop for clips could take a lot of the pain out of the copyright quagmire law-abiding teachers currently face.

On the high end, marketers and advertisers who need full-resolution (1080p, if available) and the absence of co-branding would pay a premium.

What won't work is an "everyone must pay" declaration. I'm assuming that since this got written up in the Times, and given that a consumer option is part of the longer-term gameplan, Paramount wants this to be more than a back-channel marketers' tool. Otherwise, why publicize it? This is clearly a public-facing product. As such, it needs to properly service the unique needs of all audience segments.

Perhaps it's a function of the intricate tracking the Web provides, but I'm still amazed at media's inability to grasp the secondary (and often, tertiary) value of community efforts.

So let's make this as clear as clear can be: Twitter, Facebook, forums and other social media functions rarely make money directly. Their value comes from the attention they gather and the opportunities that attention creates. If you have a mass of people who have willingly opted-in to your messaging, you damn well better put useful, for-pay products in front of them. Otherwise, all you've got is a social club.

This recent piece from Forbes does a nice job tearing down the direct-revenue mindset.

If Dell turned heads last year when it claimed to have made $1 million through Twitter, its revised estimate for 2009 is going to cause nasty neck pulls: the company says Twitter revenue jumped to $6.5 million. (I'm assuming that spans multiple years.)

The Guardian has a nice bit of analysis on the announcement. It's informative and interesting. It weaves in some contextual bits. But nestled amidst the numbers is the "drop in the bucket" paragraph that always pops up in these types of stories:

Although $6.5m sounds impressive, when you compare it with the net revenue of $12.3bn Dell reported in the first quarter of fiscal year 2010 it becomes clear that this is only a drop in the ocean ...

Sorry. I guess that's a " drop in the ocean" paragraph. You get the idea.

I understand the need to insert this text. Its absence would surely raise a red flag for editors and consumers alike. But there's an underlying perspective here that I believe is damaging, and I wish more analysts would call this out.

Social media exists in a space totally different from traditional business. Activity takes place at the edges, not the center. It's ambiguous. It's fleeting. Because of all this, judging social media efforts against traditional channels obscures the real analysis and the real opportunity.

What's notable about Dell's Twitter revenue is that it went from $1 million in 2008, to $3 million in June '09, to $6.5 million now. That's an enviable trajectory in any business, but it's doubly impressive here because Dell is making actual money through a nascent system. It found a way to put social media's tricky architecture to work.

That's key. Digital disruption is wiping out the fat revenues from traditional models. Many businesses will get smaller simply because consumers have more power and more choice. The companies that find ways to make money within this new landscape -- even relatively small amounts of money -- have a better shot at adaptation.

Images courtesy Dell, Inc. and Twitter, Inc.

I was fortunate to have my ill-conceived notions about editorial/advertising segregation blown to bits early in my career. It hurt. No doubt about that. I came out of journalism school with all the requisite ethical boundaries and red flags intact. So it was tough to let that go.

But it was so useful to let that go. It made me see that most journalism organizations are businesses. That's it. All that stuff about objectivity and watchdog roles and the Fourth Estate sounds good, and it feels good, but news companies must ultimately adhere to the same criteria as every other business: does it make money or does it lose money?

That's why it's interesting for me to watch others go through the same gyrations now that the Dallas Morning News is moving editorial and sales closer together. I get it. This is hard to swallow. It goes against everything journalists know, everything we're taught in the vacuum of j-school. It seems dangerous.

But having lived through my own transition, and having traversed some tricky edit/ad terrain along the way, I can tell you the danger is minimal. Perhaps even non-existent.

First off, consumers don't care. If the content is informative and entertaining and useful, if readers can justify the time and money spent, they're good. Second, a smart news business understands that it cannot undermine the trust it's established with the community. This has nothing to do with public interest or greater good. It's about money. Trustworthy content builds an audience, and audience attracts advertisers. Kill the trust and you kill the audience; advertisers will take their business elsewhere. That's all there is to it.

Blurring the edit/ad line within a newsroom isn't a big deal. It's what happens after the blurring that matters. If the Dallas Morning News cranks out great stuff and serves/educates/helps people, this can work for everyone involved. If they do something stupid -- like violating trust by kowtowing to clients -- they're screwed. That's just business, and bad businesses die.

"Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is "closed" to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out." -- Scott Rosenberg, former managing editor of Salon.com

John A. Byrne is leaving BusinessWeek to start a new business (not exactly a newsflash, I know). I generally don't care much if a bigwig leaves a position to venture out on his or her own. That happens all the time. But Byrne is different. BusinessWeek, for all its financial trouble, has a phenomenal web presence, and much of that was built under Byrne's watch. He's also a guy who inherently understands the power of direct communication with the audience. Just take a look at his Twitter feed. How many editors engage like that?

And then there's this ...

In a blog post announcing his new venture, he articulates the beliefs that guide his thinking about digital content:

I have three fundamental beliefs that inform my thinking: 1) Print advertising will never come back. There are just too many options for advertisers today and too much pressure on rates. Sadly, success in print will be measured in single-digit declines, forever. 2) Online advertising will never offset those declines nor save print. There's far too much competition online and far too much available inventory; and 3) Users will not pay for content, unless they're convinced it has immediate and tangible value. Very little journalism meets that standard today. Do we really need 57 versions of a story on Bernie Madoff pleading guilty?

That's a beautiful paragraph. Here's why:

1. He's dead on.
2. It illustrates the type of structural thinking that turns vague ideas into real businesses. We need more editors and publishers who work this way. Big ideas and grand plans cannot stand on their own. They have to be crammed into a structure -- a mental furnace that burns away assumptions. Otherwise, all you've got is brain-based vaporware. That useless, fluffy business school nonsense that gets retweeted, and buzzed, and expanded into book form. We've got enough of that.

I speak from experience with this structure stuff. I used to wander aimlessly through the "future of content" world, distracted by shiny new things and influenced by flavor-of-the-week thinking (I once thought micropayments were totally going to happen ... ugh.) But six months ago I decided to map out my own structure for all this digital disruption business. The result is this. I have no idea if it has any value as an actual business model, but the writing process forced me to hone and articulate the thousands of rants and opinions brewing in my head. Now, when I'm confronted with a new idea or perspective, I can feed it into this structure and quickly examine the various angles. It's helped me tremendously. I've got my footing now.