It is an impressive service. Tailor-made for the superfan, the fantasy junkie. But watching six games at once, really?

This afternoon, Major League Baseball brought in a gaggle of reporters to the headquarters of its MLB Advanced Media unit in New York's Meatpacking District to show off the souped-up version of its premium online video service, MLB Mosaic, powered by a company called Ensequence, which just reupped its contract for another three years (the news hook).

MLB.TV and the Mosaic product are not new (Mosaic's already won an Emmy!), but this year they made some significant improvements to the service -- new features, higher quality video, offering all the games in 16:9 aspect ratio, etc. The service offers live feeds from the regional broadcasts of every baseball game being played, and the different views allow users to configure the layout to show six screens, four screens, three or just one.

In addition to feeding us, the good folks at MLB hooked up the laptop to what looked to be about a 56" flat screen to show just how good the image quality is.

"What we do today is not quite live TV, but it's getting close," said Bob Bowman, president and CEO of MLB Advanced Media.

The premium subscription service ($119.95/year, or $19.95/month) archives games within hours of their conclusion, so if you missed last night's game and manage to sequester yourself to prevent learning the outcome, you can watch it on-demand at work.

Other bells and whistles include a full complement of options for tracking fantasy players, configurable alerts for when something important happens in another game and real-time scoring updates from around the league.

Last season closed with 400,000 subscribers, with an increasing proportion opting for the premium service. (MLB offers a basic service for $89.95/year with streaming limited to 400k with only one game available for viewing at a time. Premium streams come at 800k or 1.2M.)

In defending the subscription model, Bowman comes through with an interesting take on what's become a reflex in explaining the business model of just about any online venture these days:

"'Advertising-supported' seems to be the vernacular today, but that's going to run its course," he said.

So MLB Mosaic is not ad-supported. But what about the time between innings, when broadcasters cut to commercial? If the screens just went blank, that would be kind of dull, right? MLB recently inked a deal with Yahoo to serve ads on Mosaic -- just in between innings. And hey, if you don't want to watch them, there are five other games you can focus on.

For anyone still in the dark or having forgotten what's going on in the newspaper business, the Audit Bureau of Circulations offered a sobering reminder this week with its latest report on paid subscriptions.

For the six months ending March 31, the newspaper industry as a whole saw a 3.2 percent drop in weekday circulation compared with the same period a year before. Sunday circulations dipped 4.5 percent.

The New York Times, which recently announced plans to eliminate 100 newsroom jobs, took a big hit with weekday subscriptions falling 3.85 percent and Sunday subscriptions down 9.2 percent. The august Times now counts its weekday circulation at 1.08 million; Sunday circulation was 1.48 million.

The Wall Street Journal and USA Today were among the prominent gainers, posting 0.3 percent and 0.27 percent respective increases.

The numbers of many of the country's largest dailies paint a pretty grim picture. For the few modest gainers peppered in, there are some midsize papers whose circulations are off 10 percent.

The other side of the coin, of course, is the traffic to the papers' Web properties. With the Journal a notable exception, most major papers have made the entire contents of their print editions available online.

Nielsen Net Ratings offers some data to quantify the rise of online newspaper readership.

In March, the number of unique visitors to NYTimes.com, the most popular newspaper site on the Web, rose 30 percent from the same month a year ago to 18.87 million. Average time on the site increased about three-and-a-half minutes.

Curiously, as the second-most-trafficked newspaper site, USA Today saw a slight year-over-year decline.

But in general, the numbers tell what by now is a familiar story: print subscriptions are down; Web traffic is up. But in the end, the papers are losing ground. They're a long way from hemorrhaging money like many of the mortgage lenders or airlines, but the once-fat profit margins are constricting as they transition into a leaner online, ad-based model.

Of course, carrying this trend out to the extreme, we see more papers following in the footsteps of the Capital Times, the venerable Madison, Wis., afternoon daily that recently announced it was shutting down the printing presses and recasting itself as a Web-only publication. About 20 of the paper's 60 or so jobs will be lost in the process.

It's a great (if a little sad) divining exercise these days to project out where the newspaper industry will be in 10, 20, 50 years. Some look for the pulpy-paper business to die away completely, predicting that the only newspapers in the future will be read from under display glass in a museum. Maybe so. I hope not.

The Pew Internet project turns up some interesting findings. The latest: for all the texting, instant messaging, e-mailing and social networking blather that today's teenagers churn out, most of them don't think that electronic text qualifies as writing. Sure, they're the product of stringing letters together to communicate ideas, but they're not writing.

More startling? Eighty-six percent of teens surveyed said that they "believe good writing ability is an important component of guaranteeing success later in life."

Then again, surveys can produce false positives. Much of the research was done through focus groups, and I wonder about how many teenagers would sit in a sterile conference room and tell the earnest Pew researcher that "No, writing doesn't matter to my future. I'll be fine without it." Perhaps some, but people have a tendency to answer survey takers with what they think they're supposed to say.

Nevertheless, it is interesting that for all the hand-wringing about the ruinous effect that cheap, electronic communication is having on the English language, there remains in teens' minds a distinction between formal writing and casual Internet chitchat.

Of course, one inevitably bleeds into the other: 25 percent surveyed said they have included an emoticon in school writing; 38 percent said they have resorted to IM shortcuts ("LOL"). Ugh. Then, 50 percent said they have incorporated informal punctuation and grammar.

Square that with the 73 percent who said that their personal electronic communications don't have an impact on the quality of their writing for school.

A disconnect? Seems to be. That a majority of teens consider electronic communication unrelated to formal writing -- while half admit to letting the loose structures common to rapid-fire Internet exchanges slide in their schoolwork -- suggests that the survey's statistical margin of error might not be enough to account for the mixed messages we expect from a sample population whose self-awareness is very much a work in progress. They are, after all, teenagers.

Google is the target of a federal class-action lawsuit alleging deceptive practices in how the search giant manages its AdWords program.

The case, filed yesterday by the firm Kabateck Brown Kellner in U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, alleges that marketers using AdWords who stipulate that they do not wish for their ads to appear on third-party sites nonetheless finds their placements on Web properties outside the Google.com domain. Marketers still pay for clicks on those ads which they did not intend to place, the suit charges.

"This debunks Google's carefully cultivated image," said Brian Kabateck, lead counsel on the case and managing partner of the firm. "Google is hurting its customers on two fronts. Google is not only taking money out of customers' pockets, it's derailing their advertising strategies as well."

Kabateck is national consumer law firm that works on a plaintiffs-only basis.

The firm previously has won large settlements from Coca Cola and Yahoo, and took part in a settlement won from Google for a suit concerning click fraud.

There's no mystery about it anymore -- the wisdom of Web 2.0 tells us that the modes of packaging news are changing. People, particularly those who flock around the social networks, increasingly expect to be able to interact with the people who deliver their news -- or any other type of information, for that matter.

So, across the board, traditional news outlets are integrating social features into their Web sites, and most have formulated a strategy to give them a branded presence on the major social networks. For some, that simply means a profile page; for others, it's a real content deal.

NBC News is rolling out its Decision 08 page on MySpace, offering links to the profile pages of luminaries such as Brian Williams, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews. The section will also feature news blogs, RSS feeds delivering updated news items and other interactive features.

The deal is very similar to the one ABC News struck with Facebook last fall, before election fatigue set in for so many and they just stopped paying attention.

Of course, it is curious that News Corp would look outside the family for a news partner for its social media property. Cynically, perhaps, I would have expected a MySpace news partner to carry a Fox brand, but maybe the Fox News voice was determined not to be the best match for such a youthful community -- one smitten by the promise of change, hope and a wholesale overturning of the status quo that will never be.

We all love lists, right? They're a quick read. Nice and digestible. Quick flashpoints that make for marvelous conversation fodder, if not much else.

So here's this from over the transom, courtesy of BusinessWeek. For the last four years, the publication has offered a listing of the world's most innovative companies. Returning to the apex of the list are two of the ones we here write about with metronomic regularity. That seems a fair reward for pretty well reinventing their industries and making a mint doing it.

The whole list is heavy on tech companies. Check out Microsoft at No. 5, Amazon at No. 11, and __ at No. 25?

• 1 Apple
• 2 Google
• 3 Toyota Motor
• 4 General Electr
• 5 Microsoft
• 6 Tata Group
• 7 Nintendo
• 8 Procter & Gamble
• 9 Sony
• 10 Nokia
• 11 Amazon.com
• 12 IBM
• 13 Research in Motion
• 14 BMW
• 15 Hewlett-Packard
• 16 Honda Motor
• 17 Walt Disney
• 18 General Motors
• 19 Reliance Industries
• 20 Boeing
• 21 Goldman Sachs
• 22 3M
• 23 Wal-Mart
• 24 Target
• 25 Facebook

Wow. In the world! Well, nicely done Facebook. No top-25 love for Yahoo, MySpace, alas.

And how about stodgy old IBM, checking in at No. 12. Maybe they're onto something with this whole "Enterprise 2.0" press, after all.

A new report from research firm In-Stat predicts that online music sales will account for 40 percent of all music sold by 2012.

For perspective, digital music was 6 percent of the world wide market in 2006, and just 10 percent in last year. So per In-Stat's estimate, the proportional market will increase 30 percentage points in five years.

A dramatic illustration of this trend can be found in the industry's shifting leader board. NPD Group recently reported that Apple has eclipsed Wal-Mart as the nation's leading music retailer.

In explaining the dramatic growth In-Stat is projecting, the analysts cited the sustained demand for downloads of individual songs, increasing broadband uptake, and the expanding inventory available in online catalogs.

Of course, the record labels are still struggling with ways to regain control of the digital music business from Apple, so you see them striking deals with MySpace and Amazon to offer their content free of digital rights management (DRM) software, a concession most of them have not yet made with Apple. In-Stat cited lingering DRM restrictions as a drag on the rise of digital music, but the overwhelming popularity of iTunes suggests that it might not be so big of a consumer issue after all. At the very least, it seems unlikely to serve as the differentiator that the labels hope it will be as they cast around for an iTunes killer.

In-Stat identified the single biggest anchor on the digital music industry as piracy, also noting that the subscription-based services are still relatively unpopular.

Tick tock. We've been watching this mating dance for some time now. Well, Steve Ballmer's had enough.

In a letter sent to Yahoo's board of directors dated today, Microsoft's CEO gave the embattled Web pioneer a hard-fisted deadline to come to the bargaining table in good faith before taking his company's acquisition bid hostile, also seizing the opportunity to vent his impatience with the molasses pace that the process has taken.

"It has now been more than two months since we made our proposal to acquire Yahoo at a 62 percent premium to its closing price on Jan. 31," Ballmer wrote, reiterating that Microsoft's initial offer was "generous."

"If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo board."

Ballmer also indicated that if Yahoo continued to stonewall, Microsoft might lower its bid, initially valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 a share.

"The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective, which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal," the letter said.

Most analysts have expected that the two companies would eventually agree on deal priced around the mid-$30's.

In the time since Microsoft made its bombshell offering, Yahoo has done everything in its public communications to pretend that it never happened. The company has pressed on with its starting-point-of-the-Web transformation strategy with announcements of new features for its Web search, e-mail and mobile products, as well as support for the Semantic Web and Google's OpenSocial initiative.

But it has been impossible to regard any of these initiatives without looking through the prism of the Microsoft acquisition bid.

Ballmer said that there had been "limited interaction between management of our two companies," but that Yahoo had not entered into "substantive negotiations."

While Yahoo has been (reportedly) talking with AOL, News Corp., Google and foreign equity groups in search of a viable alternative, none has surfaced, Ballmer said. In the meantime, the macroeconomic picture has worsened.

"During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably, both in general and for other Internet-focused companies in particular," he wrote.

While Yahoo has maintained that Microsoft's offer substantially undervalues the company's worth, the failure to deliver an alternative solution coupled with today's letter could suggest that the companies are entering an end-game scenario in which Yahoo will be forced to come to the table in a compromised position.

At least seven shareholder groups have already brought class-action lawsuits against Yahoo's board, claiming that the company has breached its fiduciary duty in reacting to the bid.

"It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo's shareholders and employees," Ballmer wrote.

"We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass."