(Photo by Alex Torrenegra)

Summary of my view: It’s a great idea, but executing it properly will be extremely difficult.

If you didn’t hear – The New York Times is going to “meter” access to their site. Readers will be able to view a certain number of articles per month for free, after which they’ll have to pay.

I didn’t even know about the Financial Times meter before last week when I first read rumors about the NYT takes the same approach. I occasionally read articles at FT, and have occasionally linked to articles there. Their meter gives me no trouble.

That unobtrusiveness may come at a price. It took me only one Google search to find a way to circumvent their meter – this Greasemonkey script. Apparently, they just use cookies to determine the number of articles you’ve viewed. I’m not sure how many of FT’s paying customers are going to go through the trouble of installing Firefox extensions or manually deleting cookies to get access to the site, but I’d guess it would be more of a problem for the NYT’s larger and more general audience.

So that’s where execution gets tricky. Start making the meter more effective, less easy to route around, and you’re likely to end up making it a lot more intrusive to casual readers. There’s already something of a blogger backlash against the plan, and if the meter ends up being cumbersome, the Times could find their casual readership dropping off (and their advertising revenues declining).

And that’s to say nothing of people outright pirating their articles through copy and paste. If they start trying to implement means to keep people from copying and pasting the text from their articles, they risk alienating their customers even more.

So yes, it will be tricky to pull off. With a sufficiently generous meter (20 articles a month seems reasonable), affordable access rates (I’d be great if they also had some metered plans – say 50 articles a month for $5, instead of having to buy unlimited access), unobtrusive technology, and, of course, high quality content, they could have a winning business model on their hands. (I’d also encourage them to offer free unlimited access to libraries, schools, charities, etc., as well as to visitors from developing nations.) But it will be a hard balance to pull off, especially if NYT bigwigs push for tight security and restrictions.

See also: Paid content has a good look at the ends and out of it.

Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ? and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser. [...]

Consider a question like “How many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon?” Google would find the answer only if someone had previously gone through the whole list, matched the birthplace of each laureate with a table of lunar phases, and posted the results. Wolfram says his engine would have no problem doing this on the fly. “Alpha makes it easy for the typical person to answer anything quantitatively,” he asserts.

Wired: Stephen Wolfram Reveals Radical New Formula for Web Search

Aaron Swartz, one of the founders of Reddit, and Virgil Griffith, creator of WikiScanner have teamed up to provide users with a new service that gives them access to anonymized content posted through the Tor network.

Although users have always been able to publish content anonymously on Tor, the content has been available only to people who download the Tor software. Swartz wanted to free-up the content to make it available to anyone. The result is tor2web, which is essentially a kind of Google for the hidden “underweb.”

Tor is a privacy tool designed to prevent tracking of where a web user surfs on the internet and with whom a user communicates. It’s endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses.

Full Story: Threat Level