Here’s today’s weekly email from Car Magazine (probably the most respected of the ‘serious’ monthly automotive titles in the UK).

You can’t miss the Facebook and Twitter logos; hell, they’re bigger than the editor! 

The promotion of a Twitter channel in this way is a significant step, and one that is probably ready to be called a twend (ha!).  The ‘kerb appeal’ of Facebook is much more obvious than Twitter whose brilliance only becomes apparent through use.  So it might be that 2009 will be the ‘twyear’ (geddit), as those driven to twial Twitter (sorry, I’ll stop now) by Obama, motoring videos and whatever other bait politicians and publishers are dangling at the time, become regular users and advocates.

How many UK Twitter users are there?  Well it seems there are approx. 4 million globally, and that 10% of these are UK based.  So about 400,000 compared to 12 million Facebookers in the UK.  A minnow a present, but undoubedly already a dream audience if you’re interested in early adopters and influencers.

Car has been one of the most adventurous titles in the UK in its attempts to reinvent content distribution and business models for the digital news age.

A couple of years ago they took the step of turning the print publication into a long article only, comment, analysis and ‘home of good writing’ in a distinctive size format: meanwhile the news, data tables and other types of content that is rendered out-of-date too quickly now by the print lead-times of a monthly, was migrated online.

It was a brave step that I really admired at the time (though there was a bit too much advertorial in the magazine itself), but which, presumably, didn’t work that well, as the approach now seems to be a hybrid strategy, where some content is online only (video, obviously!), and some print only, with a certain amount in common to the two main channels.

Anti-social networking? Aussie courts OK use of Facebook to serv lien. You’ve been repo’d! : http://bit.ly/jP8Q

The news is everywhere, 2009 will be the year of mobile… zzzzzzzzzzz http://bit.ly/xqZM

Woolworth’s marketing team of 4 face the axe. 4! Perhaps if they’d invested a bit more in marketing there’d still be a Woolies. http://poprl.com/8lb

There’s a piece on Brand Republic published yesterday:

“NEW YORK - Google has denied that it is working on a plan to speed up the delivery of its own content, which could end the way that all traffic on the internet is treated the same.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal Google has approached cable and phone companies in the US with a proposal to create a fast lane — for its own content.”

The subject of ‘net neutrality’ (as far as I understand it, the principle that all the lanes of the information superhighway travel at the same speed, without a class system) is complex, and potentially a very big issue indeed for the future online landscape.

But as for the general principle of Google’s ‘neutrality’ as far as the services it delivers to consumers, excuse me while I utter a hollow laugh of epic proportions.

I’m old and ugly enough to remember the prognoses for the internet in 1995, when search engines like Alta Vista and Lycos were the new stars (alongside AOL). The soothsayers and prophesy merchants were keen to tell us all that the search engines would inherit the earth (and, for once, the seers were right).

The burning question was this: how can you monetize the traffic on your search engine without losing objectivity; because surely the traffic and the objectivity of search results were inextricably geared to each other. With hindsight it seems that these qualms were overestimating the intelligence of the US (and perhaps global) public…

So, a few years later, in the late ‘90s, GoTo/Overture invented key-phrase driven paid search, Google ‘borrowed’ the idea a year or so after that, and the rest is corporate history.

Did the masses desert Google once a commercial auction started to determine the content of the results pages? Did they hell! Quality Score be damned, the reality is that – for a lot of key vertical sectors like finance in particular - the paid results often delivered (thanks to the realities of the digitally-enabled open market) more relevant results than the affiliate dominated ‘natural’ search results on the left hand site of the page.

So, would Google ‘ditching neutrality’ be a worthy news story? Do me a favour, the concept of neutrality being the life blood of a search engine died in about 2000.

And as a footnote: I’m struggling to marry up the word “Google” and the phrase “its own content”… Not last time I looked it isn’t. Any of it.