Rupert Murdoch has tried a few things that did not work.

MySpace, News Of The World, taking his own Twitter profile picture.

However, with just one week of awkward tweets under his belt, @RupertMurdoch has already attracted more followers than his most recent online venture, the digital newspaper made for Ipad, the @Daily.

This shows that The Daily is yet to be fully accepted as a strong media force. The paywall restricts anyone but subscribers from reading most full stories. This is a terrible hindrance to the reach of any breaking news or potentially explosive investigative piece their team files.

This closed model cannot work in a world where the ease of sharing information is paramount, where the integration of social media into every nook and cranny of your daily life is becoming commonplace – e.g. I’ve just noticed my local $2 store has a Facebook page! – and where the next generation of readers’ first instinct is to tell someone about what they have just read or watched online.

As @RupertMurdoch enjoys the kudos of his follower numbers growing exponentially, (and, therefore, his influence) I hope he realises it is only occurring because of retweets, because of the free sharing permitted across other news websites that mention his tweets, and across other platforms like texting and within other social networks like Facebook and Tumblr.

Sadly, these are all elements of a strict paywall model that otherwise exciting forays such as The Daily seems committed to ignoring.