The New York Times announced today (Monday, Sept. 17) that their online content available only through paid subscriptions via “Times Select,” will become free as of Wednesday, September 19. The material available only to subscribers has covered the Times’ top-tier columnists, including Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Bob Herbert, Frank Rich, Gretchen Morgenstern and others. After Wednesday, the subscription service will go away and this material on the Times’ Web site will be available without charge.

Critics of the Times Select experiment pointed out that walling off valuable contributors, like columnists, limited their availability and constrained the reach and influence of the Times’ highest paid writers. New York Times management eventually had to concede, apparently, that the potential for online advertising revenue outweighed the estimated $10 million in annual revenue coming from roughly 227,000 paying subscribers.

The extension of free services applies also to Times’ archived materials. Current Times Select subscribers will receive a pro-rated refund. Details are on the Times’ Web site at this link.

News is circulating today that Yahoo! has bought online applications service provider Zimbra, which will pit Yahoo in the competitive race with Google Docs and Microsoft’s Windows Live for a new generation of online applications. Zimbra was an early entrant into the online collaborative application suite business, with e-mail, shared calendars, contacts, Voice-over-IP, and shared documents. The Zimbra suite was also compatible with a variety of clients, such as Outlook and Apple Mail.

This purchase adds more fuel to the online applications race, which was recently the focus of new attention because CapGemini, the IT and outsourcing consultant firm, recommended Google Apps to its customers. Gartner commented that the CapGemini deal will allow services firms to act as brokers for “software as a service,“ which is heating up as a hot area of technology business. Yahoo!, which has been rethinking its business after the departure of its CEO, Terry Semel, in June, appears to be playing catch-up with this purchase of Zimbra.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com features an article about how San Francisco’s citywide plan for free wireless Internet—currently on hold after contract negotiations broke down and Earthlink pulled out—could potentially adopt a sharing model like Spanish-based FON.

FON is a company that promotes people sharing their WiFi networks with other “foneros,“ people who have signed up for the FON service and who also share their WiFi bandwidth, wherever it is. Alternatively, people who have WiFi hotspots can “bill” people for use of the Internet connection, through the FON network and the network’s supplied software. FON claims to have more than 450,000 users worldwide.

The article mentions that sharing could be an alternative for San Francisco, and cites the example of AnchorFree in Sunnyvale, California, which promotes sharing among business customers. The author doesn’t mention that the Austin Wireless City Project was the original model for a community-wide free network, nor is the CU-WIN network in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, mentioned—CU-WIN pioneered the concept of a grassroots, community-based shared wireless network for an entire city.

The Associated Press today reports that Microsoft lost its appeal in the antitrust case before the European Union, and the EU Court of First Instance has ruled that Microsoft must share its communication code with competitors, sell a copy of Windows without Windows Media Player, and pay a $690 million fine, the largest ever levied by the court. In Europe, the move was hailed as an important protection for consumers and for stimulating competition, helping level the playing field for European software firms. BBC News also reports on the story.

AT&T’s “Blue Room,“ its music portal, which will be featuring live feeds from this weekend’s Austin City Limits Music Festival, will not censor the feeds, said Tiffany O’Brien Nels, AT&T’s Austin, Texas-based spokeswoman. During the Lollapalooza music festival, AT&T was widely criticized for blocking some political commentary from performers, while leaving profanity unfiltered. According to BroadbandReports.com, the company still reserves the right to censor any “excessive sexual content—nudity or simulated sex acts.“

Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, will today deliver Google’s endorsement of a global privacy standard, at a meeting of UNESCO in Strasbourg, France, reports the IDGNS news service.

“Google envisions the policy to be a product of self-regulation by companies, improved laws, and possible new ones, according to a Google spokesman based in London.“

UPDATE: Peter Fleischer has now posted the Google position on global privacy standards on the Google Policy blog.

Wired magazine has published an interactive map that shows the price in dollars for 100 kilobytes per second of broadband Internat access around the world. The accompanying text notes:

Only about 3 percent of the world’s population has broadband, and prices vary wildly. In Japan, DSL or cable averages 6 cents per 100 Kbps, with users typically paying 0.002 percent of their monthly salary for high-speed access. But in Kenya, that same hookup speed costs $86.11 — nearly twice the average monthly income.

It is clear from this map and other sources of statistics about broadband access that high-speed Internet is most expensive in the world’s poorest countries.

The AT&T Foundation has launched a $1.5 million competitive grant program for nonprofits to integrate wireless technology into education outreach efforts. The foundation will award grants in the range of $2,500 to $25,000 for wireless applications and hardware.

“To qualify for a grant, organizations must utilize the funds for projects that enhance the delivery of education through wireless technology in settings that engage youth and adults in life-long learning. Additionally, 51 percent or more of the project must target underserved populations, including racial and ethnic groups, low-income populations, seniors, youth and/or people with disabilities,“ says the AT&T news release.

More information about the grant program can be found at this link, a PDF document with facts about the wireless education grants.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Centers, has published a report that shows that the content selected for online versions of major news outlets, such as newspapers and television news programs, is strikingly different than what is selected by online users themselves, on sites where users can “vote” on content, such as Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. The report notes:

The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected did not appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied. And there was often little in the way of follow-up. Most stories on the user-news sites appeared only once, never to be repeated again in the week we studied.

The sources user news sites draw on are strikingly different from the mainstream media. Seven in ten stories (70%) on the user sites come either from blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMd that do not focus mostly on news.

The report did note that this was gleaned from a one-week “snapshot” of news sites versus reader-ranked sites, and that the users of reader-ranked sites may be using those as supplements to learning about news from more traditional news sources.

Nevertheless, if there is a trend among younger Web users to information sites that are primarily user-generated, the information on those sites appears to be quite different from what many people consider “news,“ as well as fragmented, transitory, and from sources other than professional journalists.