Even though it printed 30 percent more copies today, the Washington Post announced that they "sold out within hours" today as DC residents rushed to pick up a copy celebrating Obama's historic victory. People were disappointed when Post circulation officials "closed the office doors and posted a sign saying 'SOLD OUT.'" Similar stories were reported in Dayton, OH; Chicago; Miami; New York City; Atlanta; and Burbank, CA.

The National Society of Newspaper Columnists is thinking about adding a blogging category to its annual awards contest.

At its recent meeting, the NSNC board of directors passed a motion to ask the contest chair to present a proposal for such a category.

Current categories cover general-interest, humor, notes/items, and online writing. Award winners are announced during the NSNC's annual June conference.

• Google's G-1 Phone ignited a tech blogstorm.
• Technorati recently acquired the BlogCritics network. This makes Technorati a search/content/ad-network hybrid sort of like Yahoo has become - but obviously on a smaller scale than Yahoo.
• Study finds more hiring managers are using social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn to evaluate potential hires.
• Twittermoms is a site where Twitter moms can connect with other Twittering moms. (via TechCrunch)
• Bits reports that Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers have started a blog about the iPhone and their $100 million iFund in mobile applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. The blog is at ifundvc.com
• Another Bits post asks how many web services one person can use. A person can update a lot of web services with tools like Ping.fm but they can't really maintain an active presence on too many websites.
• TwitterKeys will let you add some UFT8 icons to your Twitter conversations.
• Editor and Publisher launched two new blogs: Fitz & Jen and The E&P Pub.
• Giga Omni Media acquired The Apple Blog.
• A blogger was arrested for posting 9 unrelease Guns N' Roses songs.
• Boing Boing and Kevin Kelly discuss the idea of the Whole Earth Catalog as a blog from the 1970s.
• Valleywag says that 2/3 of Heavy.com's salesforce has left.
• Gwyneth Paltrow is launch a lifestyle site called Goop. Some details here.
• A blog with a long name thingswithapproximatelyasmanypeopleaswasilla.com attempts to point out that lots of places and things have as many people as Sarah Palin's hometown where she was mayor.
• Boing Boing Gadgets was not impressed with Esquire's E-Ink cover.
• 1.1 million people read the Wikipedia entry for Sarah Palin in the 36 hours following her introduction. Slate says a college sophmore gets credit for pushing Palin as the vp choice.

Mike Koehler, deputy sports editor at The Oklahoman, has started a new blog/Web project called www.prayingforpapers.com, designed to bring help through prayer where it is needed, as newspaper-industry challenges continue to mount.

"The goal of my site is to update visitors on who needs prayer in our business," Koehler tells E&P. "This will include recent layoffs, the business in general, as well as leaders and people with specific prayer requests. It's for Christians and non-Christians alike."

This is a troubling time in the newspaper business. Every day we hear stories from papers that are laying off employees and struggling to stay afloat.

Our idea at Praying for Papers is to encourage anyone who is touched by this shift in our industry to include it each day in their prayer life.

This includes:

* Praying for your brothers and sisters in the business who have lost their jobs or may be in danger of losing their jobs - as well as their families.

* Prayers for the leaders of our business to do the right thing in their decision-making, having them keep in mind what Christ would do.

* Praying for the people in our business who are far from God.

I've just debuted a new website/blog designed to be a resource for ideas, tips and advice for online news publishers. It's called GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com, and it's NOT another industry news blog. The focus is exclusively on advice. I hope you'll find it useful.

I soft-launched the site yesterday, so hardly anyone knows about it. I'd love it if a few of you checked it out and maybe commented on the early posts. My intent is to post a tip a day. There will be ideas on how to increase traffic and earn more money, primarily. I'm aiming for actionable tips and advice.

But they just make ridiculous statements on the website that I can't ignore. The home page says Newspond is "The most advanced news site on the planet." The about page has a huge yellow ball thingy and the same words in 40 point type. It also calls itself "the ultimate hub for the latest news."

What's the technology behind this stunning new startup? Well, within "the heart of Newspond lies a tireless electronic brain" with "highly-advanced machine intelligence" that analyzes news "at a faster rate of speed than any human being could ever dream of."

Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson will report to Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News and publisher of msnbc.com, but otherwise, Newsvine will continue to operate independently, Tillinghast said.

Tillinghast said msnbc.com was racing to foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news. Ideally, he said in an interview, the site would design and build its own tools, but Newsvine, a small, lean company headquartered in downtown Seattle a few minutes from msnbc.com's newsroom, "is just a great fit."

"Newsvine is local, small, nimble - they don't come with a lot of things you don't want," he said, such as complicated partnerships and contracts. "There isn't a lot to rearrange."

1. Increased exposure for Newsvine writers. Remember when Killfile broke the news of the Virginia Tech shooting 22 minutes before the Associated Press? What about when Corey Spring got an exclusive interview with Dave Chappelle? When important moments like these occur on Newsvine, why shouldn't they also be put in front of 29 million people on msnbc.com? What about when a Newsviner builds up an audience for a weekly entertainment column like Steve Watts' Lost in the Vines? Why shouldn't great content like that be put on an even bigger stage? We think it should, and although Newsvine and msnbc.com will remain independent brands, we're going to spend the next several months figuring out ways to get the best content in front of the biggest audiences possible.
2. A bigger, more diverse community. Msnbc.com's user base is spread across the world in every age, income, and demographic group. You'd be hard pressed to find a town in the United States which doesn't count some of its residents as readers. It is our hope that eventually, readers of both Newsvine and msnbc.com will be able to jump from site to site and share in the benefits that each destination offers.
3. Speed, reliability and uptime. As a cost-conscious startup, Newsvine has made do with an efficient hardware footprint and no full- time operations staff. The upshot of this is keeping expenses down. The downside, however, is that during heavy spikes of activity and off-hour periods, the site can occasionally slow down or seem less reliable. Under this new partnership, Newsvine will move to the geographically redundant, world-class data centers that house msnbc.com. Bigger, faster machines and more of them. 24/7 monitoring. There may not be a news site in the world which scales better than msnbc.com, and we look forward to benefiting from their excellent infrastructure.
4. A slightly bigger staff, able to evolve the site and provide features and support to the community without cutting any corners. Thus far, each Newsvine employee has had to wear a great variety of hats, and in some instances we have been strung very thin. The ability to add staff members in needed areas is crucial to our success as a business, as a web site and as a community. We look forward to providing excellent support and service to our users as our community grows dramatically during the forthcoming months and years. The team that set out to create the vision from day one will be freed up to continue developing the features and tools that make the magic of Newsvine possible. We will be armed with the resources and access to bring the best content produced by Newsviners to the world at large - bridging the gap between citizen and journalist.
5. More news and images from more sources. Newsvine's mainstream news and images have always come directly from the Associated Press, and in fact, being the quickest wire-to-web news site in the world has always been something we've taken a lot of pride in. However, with the welcoming of msnbc.com into the fold, we now have the potential to bring you more of the best reporting in the world and some of the most stunning news imagery you'll ever see online.

What is MSNBC getting, other than a slick and feature-packed website? Newsvine is also a thriving Citizen Journalism community, with solid stats. In our July review of Newsvine, we noted that Newsvine gets about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and it has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter. Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month.

Well that was quick. Just a few days after Netscape's announcement that it was shelving its social news service away from the hallowed Netscape.com domain in place of what is essentially AOL's front page, the service has already been given a new name and URL. It's called Propeller.com (link dead ends right now), and that's about all Netscape's Director Tom Drapeau was willing to divulge about the rebranded site in his announcement post on the official Netscape blog.

Google is playing host to articles from four news agencies, including The Associated Press, the company said Friday, setting the stage for it to generate advertising revenue from Google News.

The news agencies - the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and The A.P. - now have their articles featured with the organizations’ own brands on Google News. The companies have agreed to license news feeds to Google.

The five-year-old Google News service previously searched the Web to uncover links to news articles from thousands of sources, and clustered links on similar subjects together.

Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, said his company would consider eventually running advertising alongside the agencies' articles.

Because of Google's campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.

MyTimes, in other words, appears to provide much of the functionality that portals like Yahoo began offering circa 1996. If the Times had rolled the feature out in 1995, therefore, who knows where its online presence would be today--probably a good deal larger than the 14 million uniques it currently has. Unfortunately, MyTimes does not seem to offer much that a committed NYTimes.com browser could already find on the site, and its feature set as a start-page almost certainly falls short of those offered by Yahoo, Google, NetVibes, and the dozens of other "My" portals out there, at which most Internet users have already established a presence.

The WSJ story says "Yahoo doesn't appear interested in a major deal with Microsoft, say people familiar with situation."

The new blog will be led by Mergers&Acquisitions reporter Dennis Berman and former Bloomberg reporter Dana Cimilluca. It will also incorporate reporting from Wall Street journal correspondents in New York, London and Hong Kong, as well as WSJ.com editors and Dow Jones Newswires private equity reporters.

The site is free for both journal subscribers and non-subscribers. In a press release, the paper billed the blog as "the centerpiece to an expanded arena of deals coverage by the Journal, with additional community tools, graphics and video to launch in coming months."

"Deal news itself is quickly commoditized on the Web," said Berman in a statement. "Where the Journal provides value is our insight, experience and intellect. Our collective observations on a given situation are what make all the difference -- and we hope to deliver a bit of humor and entertainment, too."