Micro-payments for individual articles? have they lost it? Lets be honest, does the music listening TA in Sec-A, Tier I territory still pay for their music? I think not. Those who pay are clearly a dwindling lot.

Bulk of the news or information that comes via traditional media outlets like the News Corp or any other media house is normally wire news, that is syndicated by Reuters or other agencies. This is available to other news portals as well. Therefore if News Corp is looking to go the micro-payments way, they will have to do it for 'feature' articles that are researched and written by their staff. The quality of that content will have to be better than regular news wire info.

In all this talk of Firefox and Facebook, arent we all forgetting that Opera Mini has a HUGE HUGE leap in terms of bare numbers on the mobile front. Include OpenId and 'social' relevance into this browser and suddenly it will start to see an increase in numbers for the simple reason that Opera's Presto rendering engine is one of the only pieces of software that work on a magnitude of internet enabled devices.. from WinMo phones to Sony PSPs to Nintendo Wii's. All of these devices will suddenly become 'social'.

Advantage Opera, I say.

Stick to Intense Debate.. there are rumors that there will be tighter integration with WP in a better way in the future :)