In a world where Instagram is worth more than the New York Times, old media is no longer dying, it’s dead. Instead, in its wake, we’ve got the Wild West: A chaotic morass of never-ending slideshows, puny WordPress blogs breaking big time news (and selling for tens of millions) and the merger of lolcats and politics on a site which focuses just as much on content sharing as content. Although we all agree that new media is just media now, there are many perspectives battling it out for the future of the medium and whatever form it will take — Aggregation vs.

Just yesterday, I finally moved the Google+ iPhone app atrocity to the back screen of my iPhone, and then the company goes out and does this .

We’re sitting in a conference at Sequoia Capital in Menlo Park watching Disrupt companies rehearse and it’s reminding me, Disrupt NYC is almost here! (Also, I think I just stole somebody’s food.) Other than the fact that I love and miss New York, I am really psyched about this the third annual NYC Disrupt; We’ve already announced many amazing speakers and judges , and today we are announcing a few more rock stars on our speaker lineup. We are pleased to announce Tumblr’s David Karp, Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti, and Churchkey’s Adrian Grenier (yes the Entourage guy), Justin Hawkins and Ryan Soward.

It’s not often that you look at a Twitter stream and think, “This is really Pulitzer material.” But if you happen to be looking at the Twitter accounts of the Tuscaloosa News and its reporting staff, that would actually be the case. This week, Western Alabama’s Tuscaloosa News was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting based on its coverage of the massive tornado outbreak that hit the region in late April 2011. The paper extensively covered the storm and its aftermath in its print and online versions , but that wasn’t all — its staff also used Twitter to report the latest on-the-ground details about the tornado, its damages, and rescue and cleanup efforts.

Storify , the startup that lets anyone “curate” stories from around the web by collecting posts from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, is today announcing its first-ever syndication deal. Through a new partnership with popular news reader Pulse , Storify’s curated feeds will now appear within Pulse’s app, allowing readers to subscribe to curated stories from a number of sources across tech, politics, social media and more. For those unfamiliar with Storify , the service offers a different way to tell stories for the digital age

After years, yes years , in various states of stealth mode, Seattle-based personalized news aggregation startup Wavii is finally launching to wide scale public consumption.

DataSift , a data analysis company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter , Facebook and other social data sources, is teaming up with NewsCred to allow clients to perform deep data analysis and monitoring of social media and news sources. For background, developers, businesses, media companies and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data, as well as Facebook and other sources. But what makes DataSift special is that it can then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative.

Google today announced another step in the build-out of its Google TV service: it is adding several new international channels in the form of apps to the Google TV platform, aimed at those who live in the U.S.

As South by Southwest transforms from a massive tech party to a massive music festival, Twitter has unveiled Twitter for Musicians and Artists , a page offering tips on how musicians can use the service to connect with their fans. Even if you’re not a world-famous musician, many of the suggestions will be pretty familiar

Appealing to power users and Twitter loyalists, Facebook today lets users start creating and subscribing to “Interest Lists” . You can view updates from these collections of Pages and public figures in a dedicated news feed.