Google’s Instant is very fast, but the digerati are almost as quick: The search giant just rolled out its new real time search feature (see John Paczkowski’s excellent liveblog) but Twitter’s shoutier members have already assessed it.

Conclusions: It’s really cool! And also, it’s totally, definitely, going to kill someone!

Exactly who that will be is unclear: Maybe it will be Microsoft’s Bing (MSFT) ! Maybe it will be Twitter, which is supposed to be “real time”, too! Or maybe it will be the dark arts of search engine optimization!

Maybe! Or maybe it will be more like Apple’s Ping (AAPL), which was declared a MySpace Music killer before Steve Jobs finished presenting it last week. Now that people have actually used Ping, though, it seems less homicidal and more benign/inept.

In any case, one thing Google Instant won’t do is make any significant impact on Google’s P&L. So says JP Morgan’s Imran Khan (JPM), in a note he just published (almost instantly!). His big takeaways:

It won’t make Google (GOOG)  any more money, in the near-term:

We think this new product will have little to no impact on monetization rates. We see this product as an improvement to user functionality and think that its impact on advertisers will be limited. All of the ads typically associated with the suggested search appear as normal as the query is being entered. No changes have been made to serving or ranking. Although the constant updates to the results page may result in more ads served as a person types a query, this should only impact CTRs not the number of clicks as a user will not likely click on an ad until the appropriate results appear.

But it won’t cost Google anything, either:

Management expects the impact on costs to be in line with their existing search cost growth curve. Engineers adjusted the product to have as minimal an impact on servers and data centers as possible. Management expects the impact to be in line with the existing search cost growth curve.

But! If people like it (it really is cool), and that prompts them to search more, then that’s a good thing for Google, long-term.

OK! Back to the killing fields!

Secrecy News
A memo put out last week asks heads of the Military Services, the Joint Staff and the Combatant Commands "to reinforce to all of their employees to work closely and effectively with their public affairs offices to ensure full situational awareness."

Reuters.com
Once again, there's speculation that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is planning to acquire a bigger stake in the Times. || Slim's spokesman in March: "These rumors are going to be coming and going all the time."

The Upshot
"I found a determined seriousness in ABC and Diane Sawyer on all subjects, particularly the war in Afghanistan," says Bob Woodward. His interview with the "World News" anchor airs Sept. 27.

Lawmakers talking about U.S. policy issues are the bread and butter of the Sunday morning news shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday. An Extra! study of the lawmakers who appear on these shows finds they have voting records that tilt to the right.

By Liz Cox Barrett Back in May, when the words "Ground Zero mosque" began making headlines, CNN wanted to know: "As a family member of someone who was killed in the attacks on 9/11, what do you think about the decision to construct a mosque this close to Ground Zero?" Today in a column at Salon, Alissa Torres, a "9/11 widow," offers an...

By Joel Meares The Baltimore Sun reports today that a front page headline featuring the word “limn” drew some rather confounded feedback from readers. From Jill Rosen’s report: The offending word was "limn" (pronounced like "limb"). It appeared over a story about the leading contenders vying to become Baltimore County's next executive. The headline read: "Opposing votes limn difference in...

By Holly Yeager The National Journal Group has been generating a lot of buzz lately with big-name hires like Major Garrett, Matt Cooper, Marc Ambinder and Michael Hirsh. The latest addition to the team is Beth Reinhard, who’s leaving her job at The Miami Herald to become chief political correspondent. It’s nice to see National Journal look outside the Beltway, as...

Robert Kosara wonders why there are so many data visualizations on sites like Many Eyes but so little deep analysis and discussion:

There are dozens of visualization websites now that let you upload your data, but they all provide the same few visualization techniques and practically no analysis tools. While visualization for the masses may be here, we're not actually seeing much analysis from those same masses.

... While it's fairly easy to get people to whip up websites to collect data, there's practically no analysis of the material that gets collected.

A lot of open data is also like this: people go to great lengths to scrape data from websites and PDFs, but they don't seem to do anything with the results. The mechanical side of this is getting a lot more attention than the creative, analytical side.

He says few seem willing to to invest time in "open-ended, ill-defined tasks that require a lot more creativity and independent thinking."

I’ve been updating the blog including a change of theme. It needed some spring cleaning which includes an update of my blog roll. It’s now down at the footer of the page.

The blog roll is generated automatically from my google reader subscriptions (it is now I set it up). These are by no means complete. So, if you have vanished from my blogroll, sorry! You’ll be back as long as you are still posting to your blog or have an active feed via twitter or posterous etc.

In the process of cleaning up I got rid of some draft posts that have been kicking around. I thought I would share this one with you. It’s from 2008 and I’m pondering what I still ponder a lot on these days: Integration and how journalists work with communities:

American Behavioral Scientist, a quarterly peer reviewed journal published by Sage Publications, announces a paper call with a prospective publication date for the fall of 2011 for a special edition on innovative ideas about the role of sampling in social and psychological theory development. ABS is multi-disciplinary and is a Journal Citation Reports impact factor [...]

Contemporary Media Ethics: A Practical Guide for Students, Scholars and Professionals in the Globalized World (2nd ed.), edited by Mitchell Land, Koji Fuse and Bill W. Hornaday Chapter proposals are sought (the maximum of 1,000 words with endnotes) for the second edition of Contemporary Media Ethics, which will be published by Marquette Books. This is [...]

Here is an unusual approach for a newspaper: Urge state officials to defend a voter-created law that they do not like and that the paper does not like.

That seems to be the view taken by the Los Angeles Times in an Proposition 8, and neither does California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown or Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But there's a difference between opinion journalists and the state's constitutional officers. California's top public lawyer and its chief executive have an obligation to defend the laws of the state whether they like them or not -- and that should include the ban on same-sex marriage.

Their refusal to defend the voter initiative against a federal lawsuit wasn't an issue earlier because ProtectMarriage.com, a key group behind Proposition 8, was allowed to take the role of legal defense in the trial phase. But now that the case is heading to an appeals court, it's doubtful that the group can continue in that role. In general, the parties appealing a court decision must be directly affected by it to have legal standing. Schwarzenegger was sued, not ProtectMarriage.com or other supporters of Proposition 8, and the trial judge's decision clearly stated that the resumption of same-sex marriages would not harm heterosexual unions in any meaningful way.

It later adds:

Last week, a state court turned down a request by the Pacific Justice Institute to force Schwarzenegger and Brown to defend Proposition 8. Its decision was understandable; the governor and attorney general have a fair amount of discretion when it comes to determining their actions in particular cases. But just because the governor and attorney general made a legally defensible choice, that doesn't mean they made the ethical one. Proposition 8 was passed by voters and became California law. Voters have a right to expect the state to defend its laws.

This may make the paper's upcoming editorial endorsements that much more interesting to watch.

Business Insider

Tiger Woods' threat to serious journalism
The Week Magazine
Google has revolutionized the way we read the news, says Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. But it's up to journalists to keep the keywords from taking ...

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2010 AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellowships
HealthNewsDigest.com
By Association of Health Care Journalists (HealthNewsDigest.com) - The Association of Health Care Journalists has teamed up with Centers for Disease Control ...

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How Tiger Woods has edged out serious journalism
The Week Magazine
Google has revolutionized the way we read the news, says Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. But it's up to journalists to keep the keywords from taking ...

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Columbia Journalism Review

Tow Center Report

For this week's Trendrr charticle -- a collaboration between Advertising Age and social-media tracking service -- I decided to flash back to that distant, hazy time in early September, before the Labor Day weekend. Specifically, last Wednesday, when Apple's CEO made all kinds of new-product announcements, including the launch of Ping, its iTunes-based social network.