The Gray Lady Is Fading Fast: This ought to make Eno happy. It's no secret to anyone that Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the search engine game. If you want to make it big time, you better show up on the first 1-3 pages or you'll probably never be seen. Well, in that case, the NYT may soon be nearly irrelevant on the Web.

See, Google rates its searches by popularity, i.e. linkage. Problem is (and this is by no means exclusive to the NYT, but b/c it's [still] the 800-pound gorilla in the news biz, it's the best example), after one week, all NYT articles go pay-per-view, and at $3.00 a hit. Which means, it's nearly impossible (but not entirely), and mostly non-sensical, to do much linking to NYT articles since they'll be all but un-readable in seven days.

This might not have been such a big deal, but some wise-acre over at the digital NYT famously bet $1,000 that NYT articles would trump blogs on top stories in 2007, in terms of search engine relevance.

Any bets on FauxPolitik being on page 1 of Google searches for top stories in 2007?