The media tide is shifting yet again. According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 35% say that they get their fill of national and international news from traditional print media, a 1% increase from 2007. By comparison, nearly 40% say that they get their news fix from the Internet – a 24% increase. While impressive, the number has yet to come close to traditional television broadcasts, which posted a 70% user rate.

In other polling news, comScore has released the list of the top social media sites of 2008, and the proverbial “king of the hill” is not what you think. According to the research firm, Blogger.com is number one, clocking over 222 million unique users worldwide in 2008. The presumptive number ones, Facebook and MySpace, comes in at numbers two and three, with 200 million and 126 million respective users. Other notables include WordPress (114 million), Windows Live Spaces (87 million), and Flickr (64 million).

Finishing up the “New Years poll trifecta,” both Quantcast and comScore have released the list of top ten Google products of 2008. Much to the surprise of no one, the base Google Search tops both lists. The lists do deviate past number one, however. Quantcast has Google Maps and Image Search coming in second and third, while comScore has the services reversed. Rounding out the top five are Gmail (fourth, both companies), Google Book Search (five, Quantcast; eight, comScore), and Google News (five, comScore; six, Quantcast).

Many fans of the Free Line might remember our report on Bubbles and Fluid, two programs that turn websites into free standing web applications. Well it seems as if the folks at Mozilla are joining the “impromptu web app” party well. Based upon an old Mozilla experiment called “Prism,” the as-yet-unnamed Firefox feature will allow users to convert a site to an application with a click of a button. The new app would then be treated as if it was a traditional software package installed from a disc. Some within the industry see the new feature as a way for Firefox to compete with not only Bubbles and Fluid, but with Chrome, which features a simplified version of the proposed service. The exact release date for the new feature is not known at this time.

Finally, Movable Type creator Six Apart has released the “laws” of social networking add-on Motion – six rules designed to make the new service work properly with the base program. “We believe that the right strategy for connecting your blog or site to the world of social networking is not to select one particular social network to hold all the cards, but to connect to all of the powerful and vibrant social networks across the web,” writes Six Apart associate Anil Dash. According to Dash, it all boils down to the six “Laws of Motion.”

1. The biggest social network out there is the Internet.
2. Mainstream media never changes.
3. Take stock in your present online community.
4. You, and only you, are in control of your personal social network.
5. A good community should lauch with at least a half a billion members attached.
6. “The web is in Motion.”

Follow these rules, he says, and the web is your proverbial oyster. “We can’t wait to see how the open web evolves, continue working to help it evolve faster, and we’re even more excited to see what our community does with these new abilities in the coming year.”