I repeatedly hear from people with information overload disorder. From news and information sites to blogs, social networks, tweeters, emails, and on and on, the blizzard of information has easily surpassed category 5 levels.

To understand how much content effluvia we’re subjected to, I wanted to see how many links are on the homepage of popular websites. For example, if I go to the homepage of the Huffington Post, I see 720 links, in one shot. Then click inside to a story and you’ve nearly doubled that number—it ads up pretty quickly. What about the tech blogs? BoingBoing Gadgets, 514. Gizmodo, 468. Engadget 432, all on one page. And on average, fewer than 1% of the links on news sites and blogs actually point to rich content, 99% are navigation and other article headlines. Aggregation site Techmeme has a whopping 1081 links.

This visualization takes 98 of the top websites, from different genres, and organizes them alphabetically, with varying circle sizes to represent the number of links on their respective homepage. That’s 36,128 total links from these 98 sites. You can easily see how a day spent online navigating your favorite news, blogs, and information sites, checking in with your Google Reader feeds, following a twitter stream of a couple of hundred people, and clicking on your email a few dozen times (likely an understatement for most of us) can expose you to well over 100,000 links in a single day.

Granted, we probably don’t see all these links, but they’re being pushed at us in the hopes that we do. And maybe this isn’t such a bad thing? The beauty of the internet is the ability to link. To thread through the content flow and create our own narrative. Or, is today’s internet akin to the wild west of the early days of newspapers, where there were 80 to 100 headlines on a single front page?

It’s been a busy week for the “death of newspapers” camp. We’ve had Michael Hirschorn’s Atlantic Monthly piece forecasting the demise of The New York Times by May, Jack Shafer weighs in at Slate, James Surowiecki in The New Yorker, Clay Shirky raises some very interesting points, and today Fred Wilson joins the chorus with My Focus Group of One.

A simple Google search for terms like “death of newspapers” or “end of print” will yield millions of results. Some media websites and blogs have “death watch” sections of their sites, ready to ring the bell and announce a new heavyweight champion. Yet we’ve been doing this since the early 1800s–dishing condemnations of past technologies and rushing to announce the incarnation of the next big thing.

Let’s travel back to a brisk morning on March 22nd, 1876. New Yorkers picked up their morning newspapers (yes, print) to discover news of a new form of communication currently being demonstrated in Boston and New York, a novel device that was destined to change the way humans interacted.

On page 4 of The New York Times, the article begins by describing this new device, currently being called the “Telephone,” and the exploring the possibilities “The Telephone could afford humanity.” The writer quickly jumps into a description of the device, which “…somewhat resembles a Morse instrument…with an ear-trumpet and a curious collection of miscellaneous machinery.” As the article continues, we are offered a variety of potential uses for this “instrument,” including the possibility of listening to music or hearing the “cooing voice of a female lecturer,” but as we read on, the writer makes the not-so-obvious point about what people will say about this new technology: “The universal use of the telephone will, of course, be viewed with disapprobation by the sound-producing part of the community, just as the introduction of labor-saving machines was met by the hostility of the laboring classes.” We are warned that “no man will leave his own study” or “will care to go to Fourteenth street and to spend the evening in a hot and crowded building. In like manner, many persons will prefer to hear lectures and sermons in the comfort and privacy of their own rooms, rather than go to the church or the lecture-room.” As these warnings continue, we are told that “…the telephone, by bringing music and ministries into every home, will empty the concert-halls and the churches.”

Pretty dramatic. No?

A little over a year later, on November 7, 1877, on page 4 of The New York Times sits an article entitled “The Phonograph,” which opens with a very familiar vision: “The telephone was justly regarded as an ingenious invention when it was first brought before the public, but it is destined to be entirely eclipsed by the new invention of the phonograph. The former transmitted sound. The latter bottles it up for future use….With the aid of the phonograph, sermons can be stored away in the cellar, to be brought out years hence with their tones unimpaired by age.”

The writer makes a noble attempt to explain the technology behind the this new invention, and then goes on to state the obvious, again: “It is evident that this invention will lead to important changes in our social customs. The lecturer will no longer require his audience to meet him in a public hall, but will sell his lectures in quart bottles, at fifty cents each.” The writer continues, with the claim that “…there is good reason to believe that if the phonograph proves to be what its inventor claims that, both book-making and reading will fall into disuse. Why should we print a speech when it can be bottled, and why would [the next generation] learn to read when some skillful elocutionist merely repeats a novel aloud in the presence of a phonograph. Instead of libraries filled with combustible books, we shall have vast storehouses of bottled authors.”

Accusations of people “never leaving their house again” or books and the written word “ceasing to exist” didn’t start with the telephone or the phonograph. These assumptions come with each new invention or technology. Printing presses, telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, radios, moving images–are all born into a world where their antiquated predecessors are soon-to-be deceased forms of information delivery. They are the new, and the old will have no place in this novel world. That is, until the next thing comes along.

The way we tell stories and consume content inevitably changes with the birth of these new technologies. The voice of the predecessor doesn’t instantly die when a new form of communication arrives, it begins to morph and adapt to the changing climate, or as the current pundits aptly predict, it won’t survive. But take a 10,000 foot view–we’re just in the infancy of this wonderful melded form of journalism and media, where each form of broadcast borrows from the other as a method of storytelling. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find out that newspapers no longer exist. Yes, in the long run, a large contingent won’t survive, and the ones that do will tell stories very differently than they do today, carving out a new, ever-changing narrative. But this evolutionary process is going to take time. History tells us so.

There’s always been jabs at Twitter for not having a viable business model and the chatter has increased in the current economic climate. In a recent interview Evan Williams, Twitter CEO, said “We had planned to focus on revenue in 2010 but that’s no longer the case, so we changed the plan quite a bit… We’ve moved revenue higher on our list of priorities…”.

I believe Twitter, potentially, has an incredible business model.

In The New York Times R&D Labs, where I work, we’ve been talking a lot about ‘smart content’, both in relation to advertising, search and news delivery. For the past 157 years (that’s how old the newspaper is) we’ve essentially delivered ‘dumb content’ to people’s doorsteps. You and I, irrespective of interests, location etc. have received the same newspaper on our doorsteps every morning. We’re beginning to explore ways to make content smarter, to understand what you’ve read, which device you’ve read it on and your micro level interests—making the most important news find you, instead of you having to find it.

This also changes the advertising model where ads become even smarter. Sure, ads are at about a 1st grade reading level now; with adsense and cookies, the ad networks have half an idea of what I’m interested in, but they aren’t exactly smart about it. Just because a friend sends me an email about a baseball game doesn’t mean I want to see ESPN ads in my Gmail.

So what does this have to do with a Twitter business model? Twitter, potentially, has the ability to deliver unbelievably smart advertising; advertising that I actually want to see, and they have the ability to deliver search results far superior and more accurate to Google, putting Twitter in the running to beat Google in the latent quest to the semantic web. With some really intelligent data mining and cross pollination, they could give me ads that makes sense not for something I looked at 3 weeks ago, or a link my wife clicked on when she borrowed my laptop, but ads that are extremely relevant to ‘what I’m doing right now’.

A quick perusal of my Tweets shows that I live in Brooklyn, NY, I work for The New York Times, teach at NYU/ITP, I travel somewhere once a month for work, I love gardening, cappuccinos, my Vespa , U.I./Design and hardware hacking, I’m a political news junkie, I read Gizmodo & NYTimes.com and I was looking for a new car for a while, but now have a MINI and I’m also friends with these people. That’s a treasure trove of data about me, and it’s semantic on a granular level about only my interests.

If I send a tweet saying “I’m looking for a new car does anyone have any recommendations”, I would be more than happy to see ‘smart’ user generated advertising recommendations based on my past tweets, mine the data of other people living Brooklyn who have tweeted about their car and deliver a tweet/ad based on those result leaving spammers lost in the noise. I’d also expect when I send a tweet saying ‘I got a new car and love it!’ that those car ads stop appearing and something else, relevant to only me, takes its place.

And it doesn’t have to be advertising delivered on their site alone. One of the great successes of Twitter has been their APIs and the wonderful applications and sites that users have built with them. Why not build out an advertising or search API that delivers the latest micro level tags or ad links of users interests? There’s a plethora of opportunities with this data, and if it’s done right it becomes enticing and engaging, not annoying, irrelevant and outdated.

Working in the R&D Labs at The New York Times, I’m constantly asked, “How long will paper be around?” or more to the point, “When will paper really die?” It’s a valid concern, and a question no one can answer with a timetable. But there will be a point–and I believe in our lifetime–when we’ll see the demise of the traditional print newspaper. After all, paper is just a device. It provides a way to communicate information, just as a TV, radio, cell phone, and billboard do. This isn’t to say that newspapers will go away. The way they are delivered will just change, and in turn, the narrative as we know it will have to adapt–more on this in a later post. But paper can easily be replaced–and the factor that will drive this is simple economics.

Let’s put books and magazines aside for a moment, and focus on newsprint. The cost of printing a national newspaper like the Wall Street Journal is close to $150k a day. That’s just for the newsprint. When you factor in printing plant rental or ownership fees, machine maintenance, shipping, and wages for plant employees, drivers, and packers, the final cost is hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Now if you have an average of 1,000,000 subscribers to the newspaper on a daily basis (this is a rounded-down average of a few top papers) and you stopped printing the paper, but instead gave your readers an eReader at $200 apiece, it would take fewer than six months for you to recoup your costs. If you factor back in books and magazines, people who read more than one newspaper a day, and throw in the odd journal or two, you’ve got a multi-billion dollar industry that could collectively save billions of dollars a year by moving away from ink on paper.

But there are problems associated with this model. There’s the environmental effect–devices may not be as benign as they seem, after the impact of manufacturing, materials, and shipping is considered. There’s a human cost–people who print and deliver the paper would lose their jobs. There are the immense difficulties of advertising on small, different-sized devices–do advertisers create one ad at one size, or many different ones, do they animate, etc. And then there’s the issue that you have to treat the device with care, something you don’t need to do with paper.

But for every argument against digital paper, eInk or whatever you want to call it, there is a rebuttal, or at least there will be over time. The simple fact that an eInk device today can carry a thousand books and that it only needs recharging once a month speaks paramount. The ability to download content over the air instantly–something that the “digital native” generation fully expects–is compelling. And as far as cost goes, this will be a non-issue in the coming years. Look at the cost of a 15 Megabyte hard drive 20-plus years ago, it was $2495! Today, you couldn’t buy or find that size hard drive anywhere, and if you could it would cost mere pennies to create. I’m willing to bet that the cost of an eInk device will be negligible in 20 years.

A common response to the prospect of an eReader is, “But I love the feel of paper, I love a good book in my hands.” I can empathize with that sentiment, but I don’t think the digital generation can. If it’s not a touch screen, or hyperlinked, or instantly available at the press of a button, then it’s not worth their time. And as soon as a reasonable iPod-like replacement comes along, paper won’t be worth the publishing industry’s time either.

Update: The title was updated.