Last week, as the media blogosphere analyzed the announcement of a paywall at the New York Times, I was more fascinated with another recent obsession of mine: Foursquare.

First Facebook pioneered the concept of a “news feed” for friends. Now, the social networking giant is about to strike again with its upcoming roll out of Facebook Credits, an online currency to purchase digital goods. 

The average American spends 66 hours a month online. While publishers can't make readers spend all of that time on their webpages, they can make sure readers are engaged with the brand, even if they are spending time on another domain.

However, it will require a few helpful tools:

The Atlantic is looking to a new commenting system to help increase reader engagement on its newly redesigned website.

The Atlantic, a 150-plus-year-old magazine that publishes in print 10 times a year, covers culture, business and politics. The website redesign, launched earlier this week, is designed to better integrate magazine content, blogs, videos and other Web content around seven topic areas.

Angel investor and serial entrepreneur David S. Rose asked the startups of the Incubator at Rose Tech Ventures, "Who owns a customer in today's world of Twitter, iTunes, Facebook and Google?" The debate that followed focused on the rise of APIs and marketplaces and their impact on business transactions. The conclusion? We are heading towards a world where no one owns a customer.

I was recently asked by an editorial team taking the social media plunge to find a service that would allow multiple editors to manage the magazine's social media presence. There are a plethora of Twitter clients out there, but the team's demands were specific. Since the majority of the editors are not active on or familiar with Twitter or Facebook, they wanted a social media management system that was extremely simple, but also had these capabilities:

Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn – the social media world is fraught with user names, passwords and cryptic symbols. Media companies have accepted that they have to get on the bus, but they'd like to limit the number of transfers (a.k.a. log-ins) that they have to make. 

Many publishers are stuck in a cycle of playing technology catch-up. They are trying to figure out how to monetize Web phenomena like Twitter and Facebook long after the need to do so has already become apparent.  Want to break that cycle? It’s simple: Make sure your mobile content is up and rolling.