This week’s edition of Advertising Age has a somewhat revealing piece concerning movements in Web media space by some old media titans. In particular, The New York Times versus The Wall Street Journal. We’ve heard the WSJ talk adventurous talk in months past about conditioning itself to compete more effectively in the general news space with the NYT. Now it’s being said that, in addition to the NYT’s attempts to draw itself further into the social realm online, the outfit is pressing to meet the WSJ in its own court: business.

Indeed, according to Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the NYT’s website, coverage will grow in the areas of “the economy, energy, small business, personal finance and enterprise technology,” all of it constructed into verticals in vein of the popular DealBook blog. This move was recently hinted at by John Markoff, a writer and reporter for the paper, while sitting as a guest on a recent episode of “Cranky Geeks,” a weekly video podcast hosted by John C. Dvorak.

I must say, this is fairly interesting information to consider. The Wall Street Journal has made known its intention to increase the value of its website’s components in the area of business, along with a general site-wide refresh scheduled for the fall season, which might help to spur its paid subscription platform further. (This despite a move by The New York Times to eliminate virtually all reader fees on the Web.)

And now that The New York Times is said to be working on delivering expanded business coverage, which one would presume will be entirely ad-supported, The New York Times is evidently leaving little to chance. Staff layoffs aside, it’s evidently working to challenge The Wall Street Journal in its primary domain. The logic seems to be, when all is said and done, to fight fire with fire.

The questions to ask now seems to be: Could this mean that WSJ.com will have to play defense against NYTimes.com? Will favored business coverage continue to fall to WSJ.com? And, reversely, will the traditional strength of varietal reporting by NYTimes.com become stretched and diminish in stature with the WSJ.com coming up closely behind?

It seems to me that both news organizations will retain some allegiance among readers. But while the generations that have lived largely with paper are replaced with the generations that rely mostly on computer-enabled information consumption, crossover will occur at an increasing rate. It’s already done so to large degree, in fact. And at this point in time, my impression is that, for WSJ.com to achieve the ends it seeks, it will have to submit to the call for free-access to its content.

That simple. On the Web it’s a numbers game. It’s a matter of who has more readers and how much they read. In that respect, NYTimes.com is the better bet right now. (Eventually, reader wealth demographics will become more and more important as well.)

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Business 2.0 May Be Getting the Axe from Time Inc.Business 2.0 Says GoodbyeBusiness 3.0 Facebook App Doesn’t Live Up to its NameGoogle Will Pay You to Add Business Info to MapsiPhone Now Wears a Suit: AT&T Unveils Business PlanZoho Business Launching At Office 2.0 ConferenceBusiness Week Online Covers Web 2.0

NEW YORK - This past spring, 10-year-old Adam Young joined other tweens on Club Penguin, playing games, throwing virtual snowballs and chatting with fellow kids who appear onscreen as plump cartoon penguins. A few weeks later, Adam asked Mom to pay $5 a month for extra features, such as decorating his online persona’s igloo.

Karen Young demanded to learn more about what some have billed as "training wheels" for the next MySpace generation. She spent time on the site with Adam and consulted with her sister, the mother of another daily visitor.

"I said, `Well, what is it? What does it involve?’" Young recalled. "I wanted him to show me what he wanted and what it was about."

Drawing preteens as young as 6 or 7, sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz are forcing parents to decide at what age they are willing to let their children roam about and interact with friends online. They, along with schools, are having to teach earlier lessons on safety, etiquette and balance with offline activities.

"It’s kind of like what happened in the real world with Cabbage Patch dolls and Beanie Babies," said Monique Nelson, executive vice president of Web Wise Kids, a nonprofit focused on Internet safety for children. "Their friends are doing it, so like kids who follow like sheep, they go online and go on these sites."

According to comScore Media Metrix, U.S. visitors to Club Penguin nearly tripled over the past year, while Webkinz’ grew 13 times.

Peggy Meszaros, a professor of human development at Virginia Tech, said kids’ identities begin to blossom by 8 and they start wanting to meet other children, so these sites may become their introduction to social networking. But she said kids that age would get much more "going to the swimming pool and meeting friends face to face," making parental oversight of online usage ever-important.

Young, a first-grade teacher in Louisville, Ky., ultimately deemed the environment relatively safe and agreed to pay for a membership. Unlike News Corp.’s MySpace, the anything-goes site frequented by Young’s older son, Club Penguin limits what kids can say to one another, reducing the risks of predators and online bullying.

That sentiment was echoed by Tony Bayliss, father of 7-year-old Maisie in England. Club Penguin is the only site Bayliss lets Maisie visit unsupervised; Bayliss also has a cartoon penguin of his own and visits his daughter online while traveling.

"It’s what the future is," Bayliss said of the online environment. "It’s what she’s going to be using for the rest of her life."

Club Penguin was started more than a year ago as "an online playground for kids," said Lane Merrifield, the site’s co-founder and chief executive. "How can we take the fun pieces of these more grown-up and adult (social-networking) sites and surround them in a safe environment?"

Kids win gold coins by playing games such as sled racing and, with a paid membership, buy virtual items like furniture and clothing. Kids can attend parties and make friends by adding other penguins to their buddy lists.

The site, from Canada’s New Horizon Interactive Ltd., does not try to keep out older users — after all, anyone can lie about age. Rather, it builds in controls meant to curb outside contact and harassment. The company says it has never had a problem with predators.

Parents can choose an "ultimate safe" mode, meaning chat messages sent and received are limited to prewritten phrases, such as "How are you today?"

In the standard mode, kids can type messages like any other chat program, but only the sender sees messages containing foul language and even innocent-sounding words such as "mom" — to prevent someone from asking, "Is your mom home?" Senders would think they are being ignored and not try tricks to bypass filters.

The filters also catch numbers that might form a phone number a kid is trying to share, even if someone tries to replace "1" with "one."

Veterans can apply to become "secret agents," responsible for patrolling the site and reporting bad behavior, and violations can get a kid banned for a day or longer.

Likewise, Webkinz limits chats by permitting only prewritten phrases, and e-cards go only to those already on friends lists.

Kids take quizzes or perform chores to earn "KinzCash" to buy furniture for their virtual room and food for their virtual pet. They must return to the site regularly to keep their pets fed and healthy; otherwise, it’s a trip to Dr. Quack for medical care, though the pets themselves never die.

Unlike Club Penguin, though, access to the Canadian-based site from Ganz is restricted to those who buy a Webkinz plush toy at a retail store for about $15, many of which have been selling out because of high demand. Think Beanie Babies with an online component. A code on each toy unlocks the site for a year.

Both sites do require some reading skills, though younger kids can participate with older siblings or parents.

Other popular tween online hangouts include Millsberry, a General Mills Inc. site that promotes good eating but features product placements for its cereals, and Numedeon Inc.’s Whyville, where tweens play games and earn clams.

Although these social-networking precursors for tweens tend to incorporate more safety measures than MySpace, Facebook and other sites geared toward teenagers and adults, experts warn that parents can’t simply sign their kids on and leave them there, especially during the summer months when kids have more time to spend online.

"We want them to develop and grow physically, spiritually and emotionally," Meszaros said. "If they are on the computer three or four hours a day, that’s time they could be doing other things. Parents need to be monitoring."

Step one is to decide whether kids should be there at all.

Jane Healy, author of "Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds — for Better and Worse," said kids may feel they are "going to be a hopeless social failure" if they can’t participate.

Advocates say the controlled environment can teach kids important lessons about typing, communicating, caring for pets and budgeting — they must learn to work and save for the trampoline they want for their virtual room.

But Healy said these sites also teach kids to be "a good consuming member of the consuming culture (and) to need stuff to be considered successful or good."

She urges caution in opening the door to "powerful forces out there trying to intrude into your family life and personal relations with your child." Not only do these sites introduce commercialism, she said, but they also can take kids away from offline environments where they can learn to pick up body language and facial expressions.

Software tools are available to help parents control Internet activities, including use of these sites. Monitoring software can record a kid’s chat conversations and whereabouts — secretly if the parent wishes. Other tools, some available for free, aim to block porn or limit when or how long a child can be online.

Parents should at least keep computers in an open room and surf the Web side-by-side with their kids now and then. A discussion on time limits is important because rules are far easier to impose from the beginning, and Club Penguin will soon introduce a feature for parents to set such limits on the site.

"As soon as the egg timer comes up, we’re going to have a list of activities they can do outside," Merrifield said.

Parents should also start addressing safety and online etiquette.

"They can’t be there every time they go online …. so it’s even more important to spend more time up front teaching them how to be safe and smart," said Susan Sachs, chief operating officer with the nonprofit Common Sense Media.

It helps that many parents are now using the Internet not just for work but also for recreation, information sharing and other social interaction.

"When kids start to use technology, (parents) can be much more part of the process, as opposed to, `Gee, this is all new and strange to me. I don’t want you using it,’" said Peter Grunwald, a researcher who specializes in kids and technology.

Nonetheless, Grunwald said, "kids are using online services at an earlier age, and that means parents do have to exercise their role as parents and be mindful of it at an earlier age than, say, seven, eight or nine years ago."

DALLAS - The chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. wrote anonymous online attacks against a smaller rival and questioned why anyone would buy its stock, before Whole Foods announced an offer to buy the other company this year.

The postings on Internet financial forums, made under the name "rahodeb," said Wild Oats Markets Inc. stock was overpriced. The statements predicted the company would fall into bankruptcy and then be sold after its stock fell below $5 per share.

In February, Whole Foods announced it would buy Wild Oats for about $565 million, or $18.50 per share.

The company acknowledged that the postings by "rahodeb" were written by CEO John Mackey.

They were made public this week as part of a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission to block Whole Foods from buying Wild Oats on antitrust grounds. Regulators say the sale would combine the two largest organic and natural foods retailers and raise prices for consumers by concentrating too much power in one company.

Austin-based Whole Foods defended Mackey’s postings, saying they were being taken out of context years later.

"Mr. Mackey made those postings from 1999 to 2006 under an alias to avoid having his comments associated with the company and to avoid others placing too much emphasis on his remarks," Whole Foods said.

The company added that many of Mackey’s opinions in the postings "now have far less relevance than when they were written. In addition, like most people, Mr. Mackey’s opinion about some things has changed over time."

Whole Foods concluded by saying the comments were Mackey’s, not those of the company.

One posting, from January 2005, questioned why anyone would buy shares of Wild Oats at their price then of about $8 each, The Wall Street Journal reported.

"Would Whole Foods buy (Wild Oats)? Almost surely not at current prices," rahodeb wrote. "What would they gain? (Their) locations are too small."

Rahodeb also said Boulder, Colo.-based Wild Oats’ management "clearly doesn’t know what it is doing." The company, he wrote, "has no value and no future."

Mackey has led an unusually public countercharge to the FTC’s attempt to block his company’s purchase of Wild Oats. He has said both companies compete in a much larger market because many traditional grocers now sell organic and natural foods.

Mackey used the blog on his company’s Web site recently to bash the FTC. He ridiculed the FTC’s reasoning that it needed to stop Whole Foods from eliminating a competitor. If that were the case, he said, the FTC should never permit any mergers because they necessarily remove a rival from the marketplace.

The blog broadside by Mackey came after the FTC moved to release sealed documents which quoted the CEO telling Whole Foods directors that buying Wild Oats would help the company "avoid nasty price wars" and block a bigger retailer from building a national natural-foods chain.

The FTC lawsuit is pending in U.S. District Court in Washington.S. District Court in Washington.

Listen to an iPod during a storm and you may get more than electrifying tunes. A Canadian jogger suffered wishbone-shaped chest and neck burns, ruptured eardrums and a broken jaw when lightning traveled through his music player’s wires.

Last summer, a Colorado teen ended up with similar injuries when lightning struck nearby as he was listening to his iPod while mowing the lawn.

Emergency physicians report treating other patients with burns from freak accidents while using personal electronic devices such as beepers, Walkman players and laptop computers outdoors during storms.

Michael Utley, a former stockbroker from West Yarmouth, Mass., who survived being struck by lightning while golfing, has tracked 13 cases since 2004 of people hit while talking on cell phones. They are described on his Web site, http://www.struckbylightning.org.

Contrary to some urban legends and media reports, electronic devices don’t attract lightning the way a tall tree or a lightning rod does.

"It’s going to hit where it’s going to hit, but once it contacts metal, the metal conducts the electricity," said Dr. Mary Ann Cooper of the American College of Emergency Physicians and an ER doctor at University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago.

When lightning jumps from a nearby object to a person, it often flashes over the skin. But metal in electronic devices — or metal jewelry or coins in a pocket — can cause contact burns and exacerbate the damage.

A spokeswoman for Apple Inc., the maker of iPods, declined to comment. Packaging for iPods and some other music players do include warnings against using them in the rain.

Lightning strikes can occur even if a storm is many miles away, so lightning safety experts have been pushing the slogan "When thunder roars, go indoors," said Cooper.

Jason Bunch, 18, says it wasn’t even raining last July, but there was a storm off in the distance. Lightning struck a nearby tree, shot off and hit him.

Bunch, who was listening to Metallica while mowing the grass at his home in Castle Rock, Colo., still has mild hearing damage in both ears, despite two reconstructive surgeries to repair ruptured eardrums. He had burns from the earphone wires on the sides of his face, a nasty burn on his hip where the iPod had been in a pocket and "a bad line up the side of my body," even though the iPod cord was outside his shirt.

"It was a real miracle" he survived, said his mother, Kelly Risheill.

The Canadian jogger suffered worse injuries, according to a report in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

The man, a 39-year-old dentist from the Vancouver area, was listening to an iPod while jogging in a thunderstorm when, according to witnesses, lightning hit a tree a couple of feet away and jumped to his body. The strike threw the man about eight feet and caused second-degree burns on his chest and left leg.

The electric current left red burn lines running from where the iPod had been strapped to his chest up the sides of his neck. It ruptured both ear drums, dislocated tiny ear bones that transmit sound waves, and broke the man’s jaw in four places, said Dr. Eric Heffernan, an imaging specialist at Vancouver General Hospital.

The injury happened two summers ago and despite treatment, the man still has less than 50 percent of normal hearing on each side, must wear hearing aids and can’t hear high-pitched sounds.

"He’s a part-time musician, so that’s kind of messed up his hobby as well," Heffernan said.

Like the Colorado teen, the Canadian patient, who declined to be interviewed or identified, has no memory of the lightning strike.

In another case a few years ago, electric current from a lightning strike ran through a man’s pager, burning both him and his girlfriend who was leaning against him, said Dr. Vince Mosesso, an emergency doctor at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Eardrum ruptures are considered the most common ear injury in lightning-strike victims, occurring in 5 percent to 50 percent of patients, according to various estimates — whether or not an electronic device is involved. A broken jaw is rare, doctors say.

Watch the Mariners on your DS while you watch them in real life.

Though the pilot program has been going on for some number of months now, Nintendo is finally promoting the testing of their "Nintendo Fan Network" at Safeco Field, home of the Nintendo-owned Seattle Mariners Major League Baseball team.

After downloading a small application from a kiosk, the network lets baseball fans use their Nintendo DS to get a feed of real-time stats on the game. Additionally, fans can stream replays of the game off of television feeds that are not available on the stadium’s own replay screen. A trivia-game keeps fans entertained when the baseball game isn’t. Finally, the network also gives users the ability to order food and drinks, and have them delivered directly to their seat.

The cost of using the network is $5 per game, or $30 for ten games. Nintendo is hoping to expand the network to other MLB stadiums in the future.

Apple Inc. may introduce new models of its iPod media player by January that have the iPhone’s touch-screen display, Piper Jaffray & Co. said.

Shares of Apple fell $1.90 to $130.40 in early afternoon trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. They had gained 56 percent this year before today.

NEW YORK - A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.

The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.

Currently, sites and advertisers often use page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site.

However, Yahoo Inc. and others are increasingly using a software trick called Ajax to improve the user experience. It allows sites to update data automatically and continually, without users needing to pull up new pages. Page views decline as a result.

Page views also drop as people spend more time watching online video at sites like Google Inc.’s YouTube.

"Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic," said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen. "We’re changing our stance on how the data should be" used.

Nielsen will still provide page view figures but won’t formally rank them. Ross said page view remains a valid gauge of a site’s ad inventory, but time spent is better for capturing the level of engagement users have with a site.

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.’s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo’s 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third.

In both page views and time spent, Yahoo is ahead of News Corp.’s MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media sites, according to the Nielsen measures.

Yahoo has more than twice the time spent as Fox, but has less than a 10 percent edge in page views. That is because MySpace requires users to pull up a new page anytime they make a change or view a new profile, while Yahoo increasingly uses Ajax to continually pull new data, even if a user stays on the same page all day.

Nielsen’s rival, comScore Media Metrix, also has addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site "visits" — defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour.

Sony Corp. slashed the price of its current PlayStation 3 by $100, or 16.7 percent, and introduced a high-capacity model in an effort to spur sales of the struggling video game console. Starting Monday, the current 60 gigabyte model will cost $499, down from $599.

The Japanese electronics maker also said it is introducing a new version of the PlayStation 3 with a bigger hard drive for storing downloaded content such as video games and high-definition movies.

The new PS3 increases the system’s storage capacity to 80 gigabytes from 60 gigabytes and also includes a retail copy of the online racing title "MotorStorm," a company spokesman said. It will be priced at $599.

The larger capacity machine won’t be available in the United States and Canada until August.

It plays into the company’s upcoming strategy of eventually offering downloaded high-definition movies, video games, movie trailers and demos, Sony spokesman David Karraker said.

Karraker said further details on high-def movies for download would be released at a later date.

The announcement comes two days before the E3 Media & Business Summit in Santa Monica, Calif., where dozens of industry heavyweights including Sony rivals Microsoft Corp. and Nintendo Co. are expected to show off their latest games and related products.

Sony has said it sold 3.6 million PS3s in the fiscal year ending March 31 and expects to sell another 11 million in the current fiscal year. Microsoft said in its most recent quarterly earnings report filed in April that it had shipped 11 million Xbox 360s.

Nintendo, meanwhile, claims it has sold nearly 6 million Wiis worldwide as of March 31, and more than 40 million Nintendo DS handhelds. The company has predicted it will sell another 14 million Wiis and 22 million additional DS systems by the end of the current fiscal year.

The Wii and PS3 were released within days of each other late last year. Microsoft had a head start in the current generation of consoles, having launched its Xbox 360 in 2005. Last week, the software company announced an extension of the warranty due to the high number of systems suffering from hardware failure, also called the "red ring of death."

In April, Microsoft began selling a version of its Xbox 360 with a 120-gigabyte hard drive and a souped up high-definition video connection. Called Xbox 360 Elite, the black-colored system sells for $479.99.

Xbox gamers who already own the $399.99 20-gigabyte model can buy a snap-on 120-gigabyte hard drive for $179.99.

Karraker said Sony would use the E3 show to focus on two areas: ways to increase the number of consumers who own PS3s and other products such as the PlayStation Portable handheld system, and expanding the system’s library of available games.

He said Sony would be releasing 100 new video games during the current fiscal year, including 15 titles that are exclusive to the PS3 such as the hack-and-slash action title "Heavenly Sword."