For the most recent episode of Read/WriteTalkI sat down with David Karp, the founder of Tumblr. Tumblris a platform that makes it easy to create Tumblelogs - which Wikipedia defines as: A variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. One of the many tumblelog sevices is tumblr.Tumblr is announcing a number of new features today. We touch briefly on these features in the podcast, but also discuss David's vision for Tumblr. We also discuss how his service is specifically different than two competitors (Twitter and FriendFeed). In this post, I'll quickly cover how Tumblr is different, as well as put the spotlight on the new features being announced for Tumblr.New Features It has been six months since David and his colleague released Tumblr 2.0 and at that point they were still only working on it part time. (Beyond Tumblr, David was providing digital media consulting services in the New York area.) This is the first release since they started working on the project full time -- and they've been busy. David explained that it includes over 400 new features, fixes, and improvements. Beyond fixes, the features seem to cluster around four important themes for this release: Supporting Audio PostsUpgrades to Video Posting Private Communication: Channels Easier Integration Points (APIs)Audio Posts According to David, one of the most requested features was to support audio posts. The new version of Tumblr allows you to create an MP3 audio file or use your phone to create one and post up to one audio file per day. It will then play within a flash player on the post. Upgrades to Video Posting Before this release, Tumblr only recognized embed codes from major video sites. Now, they are supporting any video or Flash embed code. They also have partnered with Vimeoto allow, from phone or browser, posting videos directly to your Tumblelog. It should be noted that Jakob Lodwick, founder and CEO of Vimeo, participated as an angel in the funding round that Union Square and Spark Capital led a few months ago - so I'm sure the partnership between Tumblr and Vimeo is deep. Private Communication When I was interviewing David, he was very excited about the ability to support private group communication from Tumblr's posting tools. They are calling this capability "channels." Obviously, there are a lot of tools that are trying to make it easy for groups to collaborate, but to the extent a group is comfortable with the Tumblr posting UI, I could see this proving effective. Easier Integration - APIs The Vimeo integration is clearly a good example of a traditional partnership with Tumblr. However, they also have expanded their API and now support JSON. This is allowing applications to be built on top of the Tumblr API. Some of the companies that have taken advantage of the APIs already include Jottand Disqus. The importance of this is clear when you look at the value other companies have gotten from opening up their APIs. For example, when interviewing Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, on an earlier episode of Read/WriteTalkand he emphasized the importance of Twitter's APIs saying, "the API has easily 10 times more traffic than the website." Competition It is important to point out that there are a number of other companies that are operating either in adjacent areas or are direct competitors to Tumblr. TwitterWhen I first learned about Tumblr, the first service that jumped to my mind as competitive was Twitter. I asked David how he felt Tumblr was different than Twitter. His response was: Twitter is a service you use to tell people what you are doing. We look at Tumblr as a service to share those experiences ... It's also interesting that Union Square Ventures has actually invested in both Twitter and Tumblr. When Union Square announced the Tumblr investment on their blog, they proactively responded to the question of whether they are competitive services: We don't think so. As you can read in our post on investing in Twitter, we see Twitter as a communication platform ... By contrast, Tumblr strives to be the easiest place to express yourself online, to create your web presence simply and beautifully. In the designing the best service to tackle their respective missions, both Twitter and Tumblr have become services that enable short-form expression. That's why many people see Tumblr and Twitter as competitive services. But, this comparison is superficial and does not grasp the goals of each service. If Twitter succeeds in fulfilling its mobile communications goals, all the problems that Tumblr addresses will still exist; and vice-versa for Tumblr. So, in our opinion, these two investments are not competitive. FriendFeed In the area of aggregating other web-services, FriendFeedseems like the most natural competitor to Tumblr. In our interview, David also contrasts Tumblr to his understanding of FriendFeed, but acknowledges he hasn't tried the service yet. This is understandable as the service is still in a private beta. It's probably worth noting that Bret Taylor and Jim Norris founded FriendFeed as Entrepreneurs in Residence at Benchmark Capital after leaving Google. They have a great track record for developing innovative web applications while at Google including Google Maps, Gmail and Google Groups. While right now they seem more focused on aggregating different feeds from your life (such as Flickr, Twitter, YouTube) and letting you publish them in places like your blog or Facebook profile, it is a very early service so time will tell how they compete in the long run. Other Competitors Beyond Twitter & FriendFeed, there are other companies you could perceive as competitive to Tumblr. For example, Jaiku which was recently acquired by Googleand Pownce which was founded by Kevin Rose. However, both of these really seem like direct competitors to Twitter. Therefore, they are probably only as competitive with Tumblr as Twitter is. Conclusion To learn more about Tumblr, I'd encourage you to listen to my interview with David. I'd love to hear what you think of Tumblr in the comments below. Are they competitive with Twitter and FriendFeed? What do you think of the new features released today?

  WordPressfounder Matt Mullenweg was at WordCamp Argenita yesterday where he announced the forthcoming launch of a new product offering - the WordPress Theme Marketplace.As liveblogged by Leo Prieto of the popular Spanish blog FayerWayer, Mullenweg told conference attendees:"The idea is that designers will be able to upload themes, we put a price (Automattic takes half), and users can navigate the directory and quickly select, pay and install a template, everything from the same place and without major expertise." (Thank you, Google Translate. And thanks to San Francisco based consultant Antonio Altamiranowho Twittered about the announcement.)The Theme Marketplace will provide an incentive for developers to build high quality WP themes and provide a frame work and distribution channel for those already interested in selling themes. No time frame was announced and the options for the WordPress.org community aren't clear yet.For buyers this sounds like a great idea, as long as the price point is fair and the variety is wide enough that it's not obvious you bought one of the 20 themes for sale. I'll be curious to see how pricing is handled as there will be a wide range of types of customers interested.For sellers a 50/50 revenue split is hard to look at at first, but will probably be acceptable in exchange for the prominent placement and automation involved. The company behind WordPress, Automattic, now has a growing list of ways it makes money and is doing well enough that it reportedly turned down a $200 million acquisition offer recently. None the less, calls to the company for comment went to a voicemail box that said "You've reached Matt, leave me a message." That made me laugh.

  With the rise of social networking and online photosharing, more and more people are putting their likeness online. But often, it's hard to get a perfect shot of yourself. Holding a camera out in front of your body and looking in a mirror (how I took the photo below), you often end up with something crooked, poorly lit, with a distracting background and messy hair -- not really the way you want to represent yourself on social networking sites perspective employers (or love interests) might be looking at!Enter Pixoo.us, a new service based in Spain that employs a network of graphic designers to fix profile photos to people to their specifications. Pixoo.us, which styles itself as a "beauty salon for social networking sites," is currently running a close beta test of its services. When it opens, profile picture touchups will cost $19.95 each and files are delivered within 24 hours.I had a chance to check out Pixoo.us over the past couple of days. I uploaded the photo below yesterday afternoon:I wanted to really put the Pixoo.us artists through their paces, so I asked for a pretty extensive touch up on my picture. Since I've cut my hair since that photo was taken, I asked them to give me a trim. I also asked them to fix the distracting background and odd angle of the photo, remove my glasses, and dress me in something more professional. That's a pretty large order to fill, but true to their word, by this morning, I had an edited photo waiting for me:While the results on the first pass aren't perfect, they're not bad either. My hair is more controlled, I'm in a suit, my glasses are gone, and the background is easier on the eyes. Everything I asked for was addressed. The only problem is that the whole thing looks a little painted -- but that is likely a result of which of the site's artists worked on the photo (I imagine results will vary from artist to artist) and the amount of work I requested. It would be great if the site also encouraged users to request a style for their editing work (i.e., painted vs. photorealistic) so that the company could match you up with the appropriate artist. Oh, and I'm not sure why they gave me a little gray in my beard; at age 24 isn't really something I want yet -- though I suppose it may make me look more distinguished (they also got my eye color wrong, but that's not something you could tell from the original photo and they would have had to guess).Pixoo.us offers a satisfaction guarantee, so theoretically, I could reject this result and have it refined by telling the site what I dislike about it. Once I accept the photo, however, the image is saved and delivered in a large number of sizes optimized for almost 50 social networks.The Pixoo.us virtual beauty salon is an interesting idea, and with so many millions of social networking users, most of whom don't know the first thing about fixing a photo in Photoshop, there is likely to be a market for this. More technical savvy readers of this blog may not fall into that target user base, but I would not be surprised if Pixoo.us does quite well servicing a rather broad niche.

  MSNlaunched its sustainability focused content portal, MSN Green, this week and the announcementlooked good enough. MSN will distribute videos and articles on environmental news from a wide variety of partner sites including heavy hitters TreeHuggerand Grist.org.Now that the site has been live for a few days, it's clear that MSN Green is nothing more than an object lesson. If you think that big company acquisitions of small technology innovators lead to stagnation - wait until you see what a content partnershiplike this looks like. MSN Green is a classic example of cynical crap; a super low-investment way for big media to sell ads against ostensibly important content.How is that the case? Here are just a few of the ways.There's no mention of Green on the MSN front page.There's a whole lot of links to a whole lot of content projects there - but nothing pointing the bulk of MSN traffic to the option of learning about this oh-so-important initiative. The Green page itself is all about links to other MSN content - it's enough to make you think that Green is nothing more than a niche marketing tactic to drive marginal eco-engaged yuppies to the entertainment and financial news sections of MSN. Of course this is no surprise, but then it's no surprise that the whole project is a joke, either, is it?Less than 25% of the content on MSN Green is from independent environmental specialists.There is no shortage of content available, but these celebrated partnerships are really just window dressing while MSN selects a handful of old, politically safe content from partners that publish hundreds of new articles every day. Ask anyone who's been acquired in a content deal and they'll tell you it's an awful struggle to get any of the formerly grass-roots content featured meaningfully on a big media portal - even if that portal paid a whole lot of money for the content. I imagine this distribution deal is one the independent partners will just try not to let themselves think about too often, until they need to pull it out for bragging rights or to secure similar deals.The content hasn't changed since the site launched three days ago!The content could never change and Chevy would likely keep renewing that huge ad on the site. Mission accomplished. What a joke. It's a good thing this is the only MSN site I've been able to find that doesn't offer an RSS feed - because nothing would likely ever come through it.The videos section of the site is almost entirely populated by licensed VideoJugcontent.VideoJug is a great site for evergreen tutorials, but there's a world full of timely environmental news video available, even from existing partners. Perhaps this way no one will notice when the the video section doesn't change for 6 months or a year, though. Yahoo! at least pledged to go carbon neutral when launching their environmental portalback in May (see our review). It was very nice of them to take time out of their busy schedule turning reporters over to the Chinese government for decades of imprisonment in order to launch a green portal and go carbon neutral.Moral of the story? At least some of these deals, but MSN Green at the very least, are worthy of nothing but disdain. If ecological crisis were no big deal then this wouldn't be either. As it is, this kind of big media eco-cynicism is strikingly offensive.

  According to New York-based rmbr, which is currently operating in closed alpha, organizing photos is a pain. When you get back from vacation, tagging, sorting and organizing your 400 vacation photos is a lot of work -- and no one wants to associate vacation with work! Instead, many people just dump their photos in chronological order into a photo sharing service like Flickr or Webshots. And most of your friends likely don't want to click through your entire vacation slide show just to find the small handful of photos that might be of interest.To make the process of tagging, organizing, rating, and sorting photos less work and more fun, rmbr has developed a series of games based around photosharing. This concept is called funware, and according to rmbr co-founder and CEO Gabe Zichermann, a veteran of the computer game industry, funware is already employed all over the web. Yahoo! Answers, he told me, is really just a research game, i'm in like with you is a flirting game, and so on.Users can import photos from any popular photosharing service into rmbr. Once the photos are inside the application, users can discuss and vote on them using an interesting scale that ranges from 'sucks' to 'cute' to 'funny' to 'cool.' Users are also encouraged to play games around their photos and attempt to win points toward a site-wide competition -- Zichermann told me that eventually rmbr would like to award cash prizes to top point getters as an incentive to use the service.The point of the site is not just about having fun and competing for points, however. While discussing, rating, and playing games based around their photos, users are actually contributing valuable semantic data to each image. rmbr has developed a number of games already, including standard favorites like "Memory," where you match photos, but one of the most intriguing games I was shown was one called "Super Photo Match." In the game, the a user selects a photo and chooses a handful of words to describe it. Friends then attempt to guess which words were used to describe the photo and whoever gets the most matches wins.Unbeknownst to players, while having fun playing a seemingly innocuous game, rmbr is gathering the information provided to learn about your photos. Those words used to describe the image are actually tags, and if multiple players use the same word to describe a photo, it more likely to be an accurate description. The idea behind all of rmbr's games is to get users to do things like tag, organize, and rate photos without making it feel like that's what they're doing -- in other words, remove the work from photosharing.Though rmbr can be used as a full photo storage solution, Zichermann told me that the company is really more interested in addressing the tagging/fun layer than the storage layer. They fully intend to free the organizational data that they create for users and let people export their photo data back out to the third-party storage services they already use. The company is currently working on a two-way iPhoto connector, but with online services it is a bit harder to make that possible. Zichermann told me there are a lot of great APIs that allow you to take data out of photo services, but very few people want to put data back in, so adding new tagging data back into a photosharing site, for example, is not always easy.rmbr is currently in private alpha, but you can sing up for a slot in the beta slated to begin later this month by entering your email address on their site. What do you think about the idea of using funware make the process of tagging and organizing photos less work? Is a rmbr a service you would use? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

  A virtual stripper named "Melissa" that promises to progressively remove items of clothing for viewers who solve online CAPTCHAs is actually part of a scheme by spammers to crack web site registration traps meant to keep them out, reported security researchers this week.Every time a user correctly enters the text on a CAPTCHA, the user is rewarded by Melissa removing another item of clothing. The catch is that the CAPTCHAs are being fed from real services, like Yahoo! Mail's signup process. So users looking for a free skin show are actually helping spammers and scammers thwart online security measures that usually keep their robots out."They're using human beings in semi-real time to translate CAPTCHAs by proxy," Paul Ferguson, a network architect at Trend Micro, told IDG News. "You have to give them this, it's clever." Certainly it is. Human intelligence has often been used in this way to solve problems that computers struggle with. We've previously reported on the reCAPTCHAsystem (here), which uses the spam-fighting images to digitize books, and on GalaxyZoo(here), which utilizes human input to identify and categorize galaxies.According to Trend Micro, the Melissa striptease is part of a Trojan called CAPTCHA.a (Symantec calls it Captchar.a) that attacks Windows PCs. This isn't the first time spammers have employed humans to try to crack CAPTCHAs, said Trend Micro. "Work-at-home money mule schemes run by criminals have hired people to do this same thing," Ferguson told IDG. "They're told to log on to this Web page and type the CAPTCHA. They have a quota."For now the threat appears to be benign -- used only to register free email accounts to flood chat rooms with unsolicited marketing pitches -- but there is a worry among security researchers that the same technique could be used for something more diabolic, like breaking into financial institution web sites.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/The_State_of_Office_2_0_and_its_Future';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Over the past 10 years, Corel, Sun, IBM and others have tried to compete with Microsoft in the office software business, but thus far none of them have been able to take a significant chunk of Microsoft's large market share, which generates revenues exceeding $15 billion each year. These companies have tried everything; including Sun open sourcing their StarOffice suite and releasing it as the free OpenOffice. Yet, even this very compelling move has not been able to make a serious dent in the market.However, with web 2.0 and the rise of Rich Internet Applications there are renewed hopes for entrepreneurs to be able to compete with Microsoft's Office juggernaut. Now these smaller players can leverage the sharing &collaboration capabilities of the Internet, remove installation &maintenance frictions, and provide globally accessible office software.Competitive LandscapeBy snapping up Virtual Ubiquity, Adobe has become the latest player in the web office market, but Google, Yahoo!, Zoho, and even Microsoft, are all established players in the game as well. Let's take a look at all of the major contenders and their strategies:Google AppsGoogle, whose web office solutions are based on AJAX, probably has the strongest and most clear online office strategy among the big companies. In order to provide offline capabilities (still a must for many, especially outside the USA) Google developed Google Gears, which is a set of browser plugins and Javascript libraries that enable AJAX applications to run offline.Google built its web office suite via acquisitions. The startups they have acquired are: Gtalkr (instant messaging), Writely (word processing), iRows (spreadsheets), JotSpot (wiki), Tonic Systems (presentations), and Zenter (presentations). By acquiring outside talent in the web office space, Google was able to bring together a team of well focused engineers to execute their Google Apps vision.All of Google's offerings are freely available thanks to their ad-based business model. For enterprises, Google offers an ad-free subscription based model.Google is betting on centralized servers and thin clients. That's why they are spending $600 million to build a new data center in North Carolina - the purpose is to provide 100% uptime which is a must for enterprise grade acceptability.Microsoft Office LiveMicrosoft, the old stalwart of the office software space has a dilemma: they need to find some way to simultaneously compete with the free web based offerings from their rivals, while not hurting their existing massive revenue stream from their ubiquitous PC-based office suite. For that reason, Microsoft is not in a great position to make bold moves in the web office market.Perhaps that's why Microsoft's vision is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Microsoft doesn't believe in Google's thin client model and it betting that people will continue having strong computers at home and in the office. Microsoft is not trying to centralize software, but instead keep it on the client side. In traditional terms, this means more privacy as well.That's why, with Office Live, Microsoft is centralizing only the data storage tier. Microsoft's assumption is that every computer will have Microsoft Office installed - that's why they are readying the release of a free, limited and ad-supported version of their Office suite. Further, like Google, Microsoft recently invested $550 million to build a massive data center in San Antonio, with the purpose of providing full availability for its upcoming enterprise grade services.Making Office free and universally accessible seems like a good idea, but personally, I'm skeptical of the user satisfaction level in a world where all applications are shifting to the web.Yahoo! / ZimbraYahoo! made a late entry to the web office market by acquiring Zimbra for $350 millionin mid-September. Zimbra is certainly a great web-based enterprise application provider and will bring a lot to Yahoo!, but Zimbra focuses mainly on groupware features and competes directly with Microsoft Exchange - not Microsoft Office. It is not yet known what Yahoo! will do with Zimbra. They could choose to focus on its office functions (spreadsheets, word processor) and take them out of beta. Or, alternatively, it may use Zimbra to position itself as the leading email communications company, with both hosted, ad-supported (Y! Mail) and ad-free, enterprise (Zimbra) offerings, rather than compete directly in the contentious online office market.In any case, by following Zimbra's approach, Yahoo! appears to be betting on a decentralized office 2.0 structure. Maybe that's because Yahoo! does not want to invest in beefy server farms like their rivals, which is risky, and possibly is more concerned about privacy than others.Adobe / Virtual UbiquityYahoo! was not the only major player to enter the web office space in September: Adobe's Virtual Ubiquity acquisitionseemed to announce that company'sintention to compete for online office market share. Adobe uses its Flash and Flextechnologies to power its fledgling office suite. However, there are some obvious concerns here:Adobe is inexperienced compared to rivals such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft at offering hosted servicesEnterprise-grade acceptability of Flash technology as an office suite backend is questionableAlternatively, Adobe may have less ambitious plans and the reason why they snapped up Virtual Ubiquity may be to showcase the possibilities that the Flex platform can bring.ZohoZoho is not as big or as well funded as the aforementioned players, but offers perhaps the most complete office suite on the Internet. Similar to Google, Zoho has a fully centralized approach and its solutions are based on Javascript technologies. Zoho's suite includes a word processor, presentation app, spreadsheets, wiki, CRM, web conferencing, project management, and much more. However, one problem that Zoho faces is that their applications are loosely connected. There is no single sign-on and sharing capabilities are weak or nonexistent between most of its parts. Trust among enterprise users may also be an issue - large corporations may feel more comfortable keeping their data with a public company. These factors put Zoho in a good position for potential acquisition.OthersSmaller players, such as ThinkFree, suffer from being based on deprecated technologies like Java Applets. There is also gOffice, which seriously lacks usability.Surprise Player, meebo?meebois one of the most successful online instant messaging clients, but with this week's annoncement of a platformthere now exists the potential for a lot of development to occur around their user base. By allowing third-parties to tap into meebo's communication platform and users, the company's new development platform could actually be used to create intriguing web office applications. Below is a mockup of what a meebo platform app might look like:The picture above imagines Google Presentations embedded into meebo.ConclusionFinally, we may see new web office attempts from Sun (JavaFX) and Laszlo (OpenLaszlo) - because, like Adobe, they are working hard to prove the readiness of their RIA platforms for the enterprise.In any case, the future is online and all software makers will need to make their applications available through the web. For me, the big question is whether Google's thin client model will work or not. This model would lead us to live with dumb machines that hook into Google's server farms to do any real computation.What do you think the future of Rich Internet Applications and specifically the online office will look like? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

  Semantic search engine Hakiahas just released a new social networking feature, called Meet Others (MO). The basic idea is to "meet others" who asked the same query. This is something I've never seen in a search engine before - and actually I'm not convinced that social networking is a good fit with search. But let's take a look at how this works, using an example provided to us by Hakia:1. You ask a query and then receive your search results: 2. You will see an icon in the top-right of search results that says "Meet Others who asked the same query". If you click on the button, you enter into a room (if the room exists) of people who have a) asked the same or similar query; and b) decided to post a message to the room. 3. You can either post a message or contact someone who has already posted a message. To post, you only need to authenticate your email address - there is no other personal info or registration required. You can choose the method you'd like to be contacted: via email (which is masked), or IM (Skype of MSN). So if a user has IM contact enabled, you canstart chatting with that person with one click. There is a voting system too, which together with message age determines how long messages stay in the room for.ConclusionHakia MO kind of resembles Yahoo! Answers, in that you are basically asking a question and then getting feedback from other users. However Hakia points out that MO is nota collaborative search result voting system. They are calling MO a "peer-to-peer transactional platform". Rather than Yahoo! Answers, Hakia says that MO most resembles Craigslist - because "users post content and there are no registration requirements."In evaluating Hakia HO, I'm in two minds about the usefulness of social networking in a search engine. On one hand, it enables you to join groups of like-minded users in a very specific topic. I'm a big Velvet Underground fan for example, so if I search for "velvet underground" then it might be useful and/or enjoyable for me to join a "room" full of VU fans and begin conversations. On the other hand, social networking is not something I am usuallylooking for in a search engine. I use search engines to gather information - in and out. Once I get what I came for, I'm outa there. So, will enough users join topic-focused rooms to make Hakia's MO a compelling feature? I guess we'll find out, but it's an open question worth seeing the results of. Google would probably be very interested to see if they can integrate social networking into their search homepage, given their new OpenSocial APIs. Although, Hakia says they have a patent application on MO - so maybe Google won't be able to do it anyway!What do you think: do search and social networking go together? Or should they be kept separate?Disclosure: Hakia is a sponsor of our network blog AltSearchEngines and recently they signed up as a Read/WriteWeb sponsor for November.

  The very controversial service PayPerPost, which pays bloggers small sums for writing about the products of advertisers, will change its name tomorrow to Izea. Izea will be the parent entity of a wide variety of services the company provides, from PayPerPost to various other projects that I've never been able to hold my nose long enough to look at closely. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.netreported first on the change. Rowse says it's a good move as the company's varied services are used by some bloggers who love the PPP brand (like the charming Chad W. Smithin the video below) and others who hate it.PayPerPost is a venture funded Search Engine Optimization scam that threatens to torpedo the reputation of the already widely questioned blogosphere. It may also be a perfectly fair way for small time bloggers to make a living, depending on who you ask. You won't see a lot of moms or retirees among the more financially comfortable A-list blogger set, though those bloggers making substantial sums of money from blogging have had to work almost as hard as a mom to get where they have.None of us are pure and there are few firm lines established regarding what is and is not acceptable when you're trying to make money blogging (I called a paid review service brilliantjust last post) - but disclosure of payment is one of the most basic requirements for paid blogging to be ok. Even with disclosure, PPP is a sketchy operation; the disclosure story at PPP has always been a little murky. The company instituted a requirement of some on-site disclosure at the end of last year, but even some major brands patronizing PayPerPost require "no in-post disclosure." Just a quick note so that the next time you see the name Izea, you know who you're dealing with.

  The consumer product review site SharedReviews.comwill announce tomorrow that it has taken an undisclosed sum of investment from parties in the domain buying industry. Those investors include Frank Schilling, one of the world's most successful domain buyers, Seattle based early-stage VCs Monster Venture Partners and the big domainers at Internet Real Estate Group.Content from SharedReviews will subsequently be leveraged to populate a vast swath of parked domains. Genericly named domains, misspelled domains, random domains that show up in search results - now they'll have real live (syndicated) content on them, in addition to contextual advertising. Though it's easy to look with suspicion on anything that big domainers do, this might not be so bad for the rest of us.SharedReviews is a somewhat complex site where review creators maintain profiles and reputations, publish directly to the site or through an offsite widget, then vote on each others' reviews to determine who receives a small shared revenue bounty. Think ExpoTVbut with an emphasis on print and more community features. The company is based in Toronto.It's a brilliant plan, really - so logical that someone else must have thought of it already. While people around the world scrape original content without permission to run beside contextual advertising on fly-by-night blog subdomains, these guys are going to be professional about it. Few are in a better position to do so than Schilling's company Name Administration and Internet Real Estate Group.Other strategies in bulk-content monetization are being explored by other high-profile, substantial investors. Demand Media, for example, a company lead by former MySpace Chairman Richard Rosenblatt, has taken the route of acquiring small content-production sites like ExpertVillageand AnswerBag. The strategy being explored by the investors in SharedReviews may be the next step in the evolution of the bulk-content monetization game. It may also make stumbling into what used to be the underworld of spammy domains a little less painful for the rest of us.

  JumpBoxis a virtual appliance platform that simplifies the deployment of server software on local machines. By utilizing virtual machines and cleverly packaging an operating system, web server, database, application, and any necessary additional libraries or components into a single appliance, JumpBox has made the process of deploying server software exceptionally simple. Instead of spending hours setting up complex programs like Trac, JumpBox deployment slims the process down to a couple of minutes.JumpBox currently offers virtual appliances for Joomla, Drupal, SugarCRM, vTiger CRM, MediaWiki, TWiki, DokuWiki, PunBB, Trac/Subversion and Wordpress. A number of new appliances are planned for beta testing in the next few weeks, including TikiWiki and Bugzilla.JumpBox, which launched on July 19 of this year, has attracted over 200 customers that pay for premium services, like technical support, and value added features such as a built in backup and restore mechanism. They currently support virtualization software from XEN, VMWare, and Parallels. Tomorrow they will be announcing a partnership with Microsoft to make JumpBox appliances compatible with Microsoft's Virtual PC and Virtual Server software. Next week, they plan to announce a partnership with Virtual Iron."Effective creation and deployment of pre-built applications and resources running in a Microsoft Virtual Server virtual machine are essential to our customers, so we're pleased that JumpBox is bringing new applications to Microsoft's virtualization platform," said Tony Bailey, senior product manager, Windows Server division at Microsoft of the partnership.But why would anyone want to deploy any of those server software programs on their local server in the first place? JumpBox is targeting two core groups of users: those looking to quickly deploy complex software to test it out in a secure environment, and people who don't want to jump through hoops to get their IT department to install something for them. JumpBox makes it easier for non-technical users to install server software on their local network. That software can then be shared over the network with their organization or used locally.Initially, the company thought that software like Trac and wikis that make sense in a closed, local environment would be the most popular. That has played out as expected, but JumpBox co-founder Kimbro Staken told me that, rather surprisingly, Wordpress is their third most popular appliance.The real power of JumpBox is that people without a lot of expertise in deploying server software can get complex applications running in minutes on any platform (and can even transport them between operating systems, or drop them onto a public server -- the JumpBox company web site is actually running off a JumpBox appliance). For evaluation purposes, this is great because it means that you can quickly deploy and test software, and if it doesn't suit your needs, you can throw it away without any time or money lost.You can see a video introducing JumpBox here.

  Digg's Jay Adelson has an interview in today's London Guardianthat includes a few interesting nuggets concerning the future of the site. Yet more social features are coming and further integration of Digg functionality into other sites around the web is likely but complicated.Adelson told the Guardian that in addition to the forthcoming Images section of Digg, the increased engagement that's come from enhancing user profiles has also created the conditions that will allow for recommendations and alerts to be offered. Recommendations and alerts would be a huge value ad for this Digg user.NumbersIt's hard to talk about Digg without at least wondering about numbers. Adelson says Digg now receives 21 million unique visitors per month, has 2 million registered users and sees about 20% of users submit, digg or comment on stories. The engagement percentage is clearly a broad estimate, as only registered users can submit, digg or comment on stories and the entire number of registered users is only 10% of monthly visitors.Buttons distributed around the web to submit a story or vote on Digg currently get about a billion impressions a month, he said. In case you're curious - one billion "digg this" button clicks by 21 million unique visitors to the site per month equals about 45 clicks per month or an average of one and a half every day. Obviously some of you are going nuts with your button clicking.NetworkingIn the interview he emphasized that social networking around content was of increasing importance. "Obviously some people are hoping for the opportunity for the return traffic," Adelson said, "but I think that more powerful is the sharing component of what's going on. When you click that Digg button you're sharing it with your buddies and your social network within the Digg community." Adelson said the company has only done about 15% of what it wants to with the site UI and I would contend that there's a whole lot more work that needs to be done before the new social networking capabilities are truly valuable to users. Sharing a story through a "shout" for example, results in such a maddeningly vague email that I've come to resent the feature and have decreased my use of Digg.Free Digg Software for Other Sites? Eh, MaybeThe Guardian pressed Adelson on the question of white labeling Digg's software, and Adelson made vague statements about giving it away for free to other sites covering other verticals. Digg's value, Adelson said, is in its audience - which is clearly technology focused. While the company does want to facilitate niche content-oriented sub-social networks on Digg, the prospect of enabling Digg functionality on other sites is interesting as well. While the open source Pliggdoes this already, it's unclear whether their respective black box algorithms are comparable. On Digg at least not all votes are equal and the presumably dynamic algorithm that determines the relative impact of votes is essential for keeping Digg users honest. It's that algorithm that provides a disincentive for a small group of users to try to game the service - if their votes on one item are received poorly by the larger collective of users, for example, or a pattern of voting blocs and single domain voting emerges, then those users' votes lose impact in the future. Under the covers there's probably a lot of value in those calculations, as well. If Digg makes a major push to take its functionality to other sites, even for free, I would expect it to look most like Google's emerging OpenSocial strategy - all things are open, as long as they go through us.Lessons learned? Digg is a serious media business that plans on making some big plays in the future. What those will be is still very unclear - but hopefully the story recommendation engine will launch soon.

  digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/business_finance/Google_Stock_Mania_Continues_700_share';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Google's stock price broke $700 for the first time today, reaching as high as $704.79 in morning trading. That means it has taken Google under a month to go from $600 per shareto a staggering $700 share price.Since mid-September Google has added 30% to its stock price and an additional $53 billion to its market capitalization -- or about one and a quarter Yahoo!s. Google's market cap is hovering in the $220 billion range, this morning, and the stock has gained 723% since its IPO in August 2004. Amazingly, despite its phenomenal growth over the past few months, Google has actually been outperformed by a number of other tech stocks this year, including Apple, Amazon, Research in Motion, and Baidu.Chart from Yahoo! Finance.Today's surge is likely due to rumors about Google's new open social networking APIand the company's supposed mobile phone plans.Some investors might be wary that Google's stock topped $700/share for the first time on Halloween, but others aren't frightened so easily. "Bears certainly make the argument that Google is a scary stock that has benefited more from hype and momentum trading. But Google’s stock, as I noted yesterday, isn’t nearly as frightening as some other dot-com stocks," writes Paul LaMonicaof CNNMoney. "Don’t be fooled... shares of Google, even at $700, are probably more of a treat than a trick."Update:Google surged late in the day to close at $707/share -- a new high for the stock.

  Dot-com era tech business magazine "The Industry Standard" will be making a triumphant return in the form of a blog and community site in December, reports Reuters. Founded in San Francisco in 1998, the weekly tech magazine touted itself as the "the newsmagazine of the Internet Economy," until its own bubble burst in 2001 and it was shut down by publisher, IDG.Earlier this month, the New York Times reported thatthe magazine might be making a comeback, and yesterday IDG CEO Bob Carrigan confirmed the "experimental" relaunch slated for December. "We're going to have fun with it - it's an experiment," he said at the Future of Business Media conference in New York.The new Industry Standard will be located at the magazine's old website, www.thestandard.com, and will include blog and editorial content, as well as contributions from the reader community. Carrigan noted that the site had already sold out its ad inventory for a substantial length of time, according to Reuters. Let the talk of the new bubble commence: doomsayers, start your engines!