With advertising annoying the life out of us, it is easy to see why services like Readability and its comrades Instapaper and Read it Later are becoming popular. These sites remove all the clutter around websites so that you, the reader, can get to the text without have to duck-and-dive your way through the adverts, and read it wherever you choose.

Instapaper, which is one of the most popular services to bookmark posts on the web to read later, has partnered up with Readability. Readability is similar to Instapaper however it asks for a donation of $5 or above to gain access to the site. The subscription fee is monthly and 70% of the donation is distributed to the site publishers who install a simple “Read Now/Read Later” button on their pages.

How Readability works: You’re asked to make an account and then directed to Amazon payments. The donation of $5 and up is then taken from you at the end of the month. There is no fee for the product itself. Once your account is created you can add publications to your reading list.  The adverts are removed, leaving behind the text. There is a handy personalization feature where you can chose the text size.

Readability provides an interesting solution to the monetization problem of publishers. And to help the publishing ecosystem and distribution of Readabilty, the founder of Instapaper Marco Arment, who previously lead developer at Tumblr, announced on his blog today that Instapaper will be developing and powering the Readability mobile and tablet apps. Arment, who is also an advisor for Readability, also announced that Instapper will soon provide an option to send logs of your reading activity to your Readability account.

Readability is aimed at helping readers and publishers. However what will happen to my paid subscriptions? Will I have to pay twice? Additionally will Readability be partnering with other easy-reading-services like Read it Later? Or will this partnership only extend to companies in which it has an active role in? How will site publishers react with the loss of advertising revenue? The other area of contemplation is that Readability and sites like it, do not have comments, I as a reader find comments engaging and often spend as much time reading the article as I do reading the comments.

TNW will be getting our own Readbility button soon, make sure to add us to your list.

Print is dead. The Web is dead, and according to Gawker Media’s British born founder Nick Denton, current forms of blogging may be next.

Beginning this January, Denton has announced that his nine blogs, including celebrity gossip site Jezebel, gadget sites Gizmodo and Lifehacker and of course the the eponymous media news umbrella Gawker.com will be starting 2011 with a new design aimed to improve quality and emphasize originality. The new design will eschew their current reverse chronological format of endless posts for a new format resembling a “newsmagazine” and dominated by a single story. Other posts will be delegated to a stream of headlines on the right-hand side.

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Denton explained, “I’m out of blogs…I don’t want to be the No. 1 blog network anymore. That’s like being king of the playground.”

“I can’t bear to look at the current site,” Denton said. “It is so constricting.” Denton hopes the new design will draw attention to original work, not just scandalous news of Lindsay Lohan running over baby carriages. “The most popular story is not always the one we are most proud of,” he added. “There’s too much sex.” He also hopes to emphasize the growing video network with the new design, which received 17.3 million unique U.S. visitors in September. The new site will also create more space for video ads. “The new layout is optimized for video, so it’s going to be great for Gawker.TV,” says Richard Blakeley, Gawker.TV’s editor.

To preview the new Gawker.com and its sister sites, replace the www in the URL with beta—e.g., beta.gawker.com. The landing page is dominated by a large image, headline and single story with a list of other headlines will sit along the right side. In a recent New Yorker profile, Denton says that the redesign will “probably be seen as the end of the blog.”

Since Denton launched Gizmodo in 2002 a large number of media news sites have copied and admired his blogging instincts, SEO happy headlines and back-end analytics system. ”He has been pushing this envelope in terms of using technology,” said Om Malik in the Wall Street Journal, who has been blogging about technology on Gigaom.com since 2001. He has a talent for “nudging [users] along towards a new usage behavior.” Gawker’s CTO, Thomas Plunkett, said he believes the new design will double the network’s monthly page views to one billion a year after launch.

In the days of Twitter and Facebook, personal profiles turned soap boxes may be rendering traditional blog writing obsolete. Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo recently reported on the subject, interviewing bloggers and editors to define the difference between an “article” and a “blog post.” As technology expands and the Internet takes on such a life of its own, a blogger’s clarity of purpose can become a bit blurred. When large media organizations re-tool their current strategies to disseminate news more quickly through an array of social media channels, it’s promising to see an emphasis placed on original news and richer multi-media content.