Our first Android App of the Week for 2011, though, takes this basic template – listing the latest posts from popular news and entertainment sites – and gives it a thorough makeover.

It’s called Pulse, is developed by Alphonso Labs, and formats the news in a grid rather than in a list: scroll down through different sources, and swipe from left to right through the stories available.

Each story is presented with a small headline and a bigger picture, and it’s all wrapped up in a clean UI with a black, blue and grey colour scheme.

Adding a news source is as easy as clicking a button at the bottom of the list, and sources are divided into categories – from business, entertainment and fashion to food, gaming, music and tech. Each category’s packed with top titles, and Google Reader integration makes it easy to add your favourites. There’s even the option to use bump and trade your news sources with other Pulse users.

Pulse’s main advantage, though, is its design. I know it’s shallow, but I’ve been using this app more than any of its rivals simply because it looks nice: I’d rather scroll around a page of interesting pictures than a dull, static list of headlines.

It’s just as slick when you click a story, too, with previews displayed in Pulse’s own browser, alongside links to the full version and options to share the story on Facebook and Twitter. You’re also able to call up a small menu that’ll let you scroll through that particular site’s other stories.

It looks great and that’s just on my phone, which is hampered by a relatively low resolution – 320 x 480 – when compared to other Android smartphones and tablets. I can only imagine that the Pulse experience gets better when it’s loaded on a larger screen.

It’s this combination of attractive UI and efficient presentation of information that makes Pulse a worthy winner of our Android App of the Week title. It’s free in the Android market and, if you like your news more interesting than the average RSS reader, you should definitely take a look.

Want more great Android apps? Check out our previous Android Apps of the Week or read our 36 Best Android Apps feature

Rubbing salt in the wounds is Google News, the simple aggregation portal that is managing to make money from the newspapers’ content that it is using for free (aka “stealing”).  Some publishers are even threatening to withdraw access to their content unless Google starts paying them.

So is Google a villain here? And can the ad-funded revenue model be made to work?

At first sight, reading Google’s recent response and defence of its role at the US Congress Hearing on the Future of Journalism  seems to be an excellent example of totally missing the point. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president in charge of Google News, gives an interesting insight into how to boost your ranking (create a single Wikipedia-style topic page rather than multiple repetitive stories) but completely ignores the thrust of the complaints ie that Google is making money from sites that aren’t.

On reflection however, it’s actually the newspapers that have completely missed the point. By its very nature, advertising only works if you have traffic, and the only way to get traffic is through centralized search, which effectively means Google. That’s just the way the web works.

In other words there is real advertising money on the internet (just look at Google) but it’s very localized (although in a global sort of way). If you want to make real money from advertising the only way is to follow Mayer’s advice and do everything you can to make sure that you’re on Google’s front page for as many key term searches as possible.

The real irony is that Google News, the web newspapers’ new hate figure, is actually their best friend. By ordering content based on time of posting rather than page ranking, it provides a level-playing field ensuring that news-oriented traffic is distributed far more evenly around all publishers. 

And that gives all aggregated sites the golden opportunity to persuade visitors from anywhere in the world to sign up to their RSS feeds (you do have a RSS feed don’t you?) based on the quality, type and tone of the content they provide. They might even be able to persuade some of these Google-delivered visitors to pay for value-added content and so open up more traditional revenue streams.

I’m not arguing that all is rosy in the web publishing world – it clearly isn’t (and it’s a subject I plan to return to). However Google isn’t the problem and, for a lucky few, it is the solution.

That sort of popularity is always going to bring problems. Just as a city experiences growing pains, with a rising population bringing a proportional rise in crime and drug problems, Facebook is starting to get clogged up with scammers, spammers and baddies of all descriptions.

Some of the attacks are getting quite advanced, too, such as the story covered on the Sydney Morning Herald’s website today, where a user’s account was taken over and used to request money from another friend.

The scammer sent a message claiming that the real user was stuck in Nigeria and needed money for a flight home. The attempt was foiled for the simple reason that the intended victim wasn’t an idiot, but it’s worryingly more advanced that the usual, pathetic 419 attempt.

This huge size also has some benefits. Another interesting story this morning talks of family members who had never met, and had no idea of each other’s existence, finding each other through the site.

It’s becoming quite a common tool in politics and demonstrations as well, with another story today documenting the use of Facebook in organising a huger strike demanding the release of political prisoners in Saudi Arabia.

It’s a disruptive technology, for sure, but does it deserve all the media attention it gets? These three stories all ran today, in separate publications.

Scammers have targeted people online for years, Friends Reunited and countless other websites have brought estranged family members together before and political demonstrations have been organised online and over email since I can remember.

Facebook seems to get the bulk of the attention, partially because its an easy brand name that can be used as a catch-all descriptor for online technology.

If a political demonstation was arranged using a combination of email, SMS, Twitter and message boards, would it make a good enough, and simple enough story? Probably not.

Don’t get too excited though, Ballmer bashers, because there is a bit of a wind-down period to allow him to get his affairs in order. Nine or ten years to be precise, or at least until his “last kid goes to college” apparently.

Seriously though, it does seem a shame it will take so long when you consider how badly Vista has been received generally speaking, and no matter how you try and paint it pretty that is the truth of the matter, not to mention the whole not buying Yahoo fiasco.

But if not Ballmer, then who? Bill Gates has, of course, already been there, done that and got the ‘I’m out of here’ t-shirt. Indeed, he gave what is widely expected to be his last major Microsoft speech this week before concentrating on whatever multi-billionaires with time on their hands do.

Joanne Bradford, former MSN Media Network chief media officer and also a former Microsoft VP of sales and marketing is out of the running. The clue is in the ‘former’ preface, as she has jumped ship and joined a startup instead. I guess nobody would have seriously thought that Rob Short, the former VP for Windows Core Technology or, to put it another way, the man responsible for Vista, was ever going to be a serious contender. Not least because he suffers from the same former-itis as Bradford having quit earlier in the year. I can’t imagine why. Jeff Raikes, another long-time Microsoftee, currently the president of the Microsoft Business Division is not yet a former but will be by the end of the year as he has announced he is retiring in September. Which pretty much only leaves Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect and another man to have well and truly served his time at Microsoft.

It’s him or Hillary Clinton…

Basically, you can use Yahoo’s SearchMonkey technology to tart up your web searching or at least that’s the idea. The Beta version of the Yahoo Search Gallery has been launched, and this features a whole host of plug-in enhancements that are meant to make searching a better looking experience.

So you get enhancements from the likes of LinkedIn, IMDB, Epicurious, WebMD and the like to provide additional wrappers for your search data: want ratings by your movie hits, or perhaps maps next to restaurant listings, well that’s the kind of thing to expect.

Yahoo itself says that SearchMonkey lets programmers package search results on the site with more sophistication, opening up the web search concept to third party developers in order to bring a richer and more semantic web approach to the where the heck is it party. Of course, Yahoo’s own in-house developed stuff is switched on by default for your Yahoo search, or at least 3 of them are: a video player, hotel info application and a Flickr viewer. The most popular, however, appears to be the LinkedIn plug-in that shows LinkedIn profiles alongside search results.

And why do I not approve of this advance, of this added functionality, of this extended search concept? Because all I really want are results that are accurate and relevant, that get delivered as quickly as possible, and which are not buried within a screen full of fancy wrapping. No matter which SearchMonkey extensions are running it slows down the search process because you have to wait, in effect, for all those additional little web pages within your web page to load before you are presented with the full picture. It does nothing to improve relevancy, just brings a load of frankly irrelevant waffle into the search arena. That plug-in will bring less relevant results to the top, pushing them at you and crying ‘but they look nice’ as a defence.

I am not buying it, in fact I am pushing for a return to the early days of Google when all you got was a search box to start with and a text based list of accurate and relevant results to finish. Which is probably why I find myself using the text only, totally stripped back to basics, mobile Google search more and more these days.