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_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Adelson_Offers_Small_Look_Into_the_Future_of_Digg';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';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!

  A few weeks ago, Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, published a long technical paperon his blog about Amazon's highly available storage system called Dynamo. The paper itself is quite complex and technical and includes a description of the architecture,algorithms and tests that Amazon has been doing with the system. Yet, even from a casual glance, it is clear that Amazon's work is very important. Since early last year,the e-commerce giant has been making forays into becoming a Web OS company. Amazon has been methodically exposing pieces of its own infrastructure as commodity webservices, and in the process confusing Wall Street analysts andmaking thousands of startups quite happy.Dr. Vogels has been both the architect and the evangelist of this effort. In his speechat last year's ETech conference he explained that by leveraging the Amazon Web Services Stack, web developers are finally able to focus on the core business logic of their apps and services.Hiding the enormous complexity of building a scalable web business behind a simple API, Amazon is paving the way toward a wholenew web ballgame.What Vogels talked about on his blog a few weeks back is not a public web service, but a piece of internal infrastructure,which allows Amazon to service millions of customers. The paper is a unique revelation about the inner workings ofone of just a handful of Internet giants. It is also a preview of the web services to come in the next decade. In this postwe take a close look at Dynamo, discuss where it fits and consider its implications.Scalability Issues With Relational DatabasesBefore discussing Dynamo it is worth taking look back to understand its origins. One of the most powerfuland useful technologies that has been powering the web since its early days is the relational database.Particularly, relational databases have been used a lot for retail sites where visitors are able to browse and search for products.Modern relational database are able to handle millions of products and service very large sites.However, it is difficult to create redundancy and parallelism with relational databases, sothey become a single point of failure. In particular, replication is not trivial. To understand why, considerthe problem of having two database servers that need to have identical data. Having both servers for reading and writingdata makes it difficult to synchronize changes. Having one master server and another slave is bad too, because the master has totake all the heat when users are writing information. So as a relational database grows, it becomes a bottle neck and the point of failure for the entire system.As mega e-commerce sites grew over the past decade they became aware of this issue - adding more web servers does not help because it is the databasethat ends up being a problem.Dynamo - A Distributed Storage SystemUnlike a relational database, Dynamo is a distributed storage system. Like a relational database it is stores informationto be retrieved, but it does not break the data into tables. Instead all objects are stored and looked up via a key.Asimple way to think about such a system is in terms of URLs. When you navigate to the page on Amazon for the lastHarry Potter book, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0545010225you see a page that includes a description of the book, customer reviews, related books, and so on. To create this page, Amazon's infrastructurehas to perform many database lookups, the most basic of which is to grab information about the book from its URL(or, more likely, from its ASIN - a unique code for each Amazon product, 0545010225 in this case).In the figure above we show a concept schematic for how a distributed storage system works.The information is distributed around a ring of computers, each computer is identical. To ensure fault tolerance, in casea particular node breaks down, the data is made redundant, so each object is stored in the system multiple times.In technical terms, Dynamo is called an eventually consistent storage system. The terminologymay seem a bit odd, but as it turns out creating a distributed storage solution which is both responsiveand consistent is a difficult problem. As you can tell from the diagram above, if one computer updates object A,these changes need to propagate to other machines. This is done using asynchronous communication, which is whythe system is called "eventually consistent." How Dynamo WorksThe technical details in Vogels' paper are quite complex, but the way in which Dynamo works can be understood more simply.First, like Amazon S3, Dynamo offers a simple putand getinterface. Each putrequires the key, contextand the object. The context is based on the object and is used by Dynamofor validating updates. Here is the high level description of Dynamo and a putrequest:Physical nodes are thought of as identical and organized into a ring.Virtual nodes are created by the system and mapped onto physical nodes, so that hardwarecan be swapped for maintenance and failure.The partitioning algorithm is one of the most complicated pieces of the system, it specifies which nodes will storea given object.The partitioning mechanism automatically scales as nodes enter and leave the system.Every object is asynchronously replicated to N nodes.The updates to the system occur asynchronously and may result in multiple copies of the object in the system with slightlydifferent states.The discrepancies in the system are reconciled after a period of time, ensuring eventual consistency.Any node in the system can be issued a putor getrequest for any key.So Dynamo is quite complex, but is also conceptually simple. It is inspired by the way things work in nature - based onself-organization and emergence. Each node is identical to other nodes, the nodes can come in and out of existence, and the data is automaticallybalanced around the ring - all of this makes Dynamo similar to an ant colony or beehive.Finally, Dynamo's internals are implemented in Java. The choice is likely because, as we've written here,Java is an elegant programming language, which allows the appropriate level of object-orineted modeling. And yes, once again, it is fast enough!Dynamo - The SLA In A BoxPerhaps the most stunning revelation about Dynamo is that it can be tuned using just a handful parameters to achievedifferent, technical goals that in turn support different business requirements. Dynamo is a storage service in the box driven by an SLA.Different applications at Amazon use different configurations of Dynamo depending on their tolerence to delays or data discrepancy.The paper lists these main uses of Dynamo:Business logic specific reconciliation: This is a popular use case for Dynamo. Each data object is replicated across multiple nodes. The shopping cart service is a prime example of this category. Timestamp based reconciliation: This case differs from the previous one only in the reconciliation mechanism. The service that maintains customers' session information is a good example of a service that uses this mode.High performance read engine: While Dynamo is built to be an "always writeable" data store, a few services are tuning its quorum characteristics and using it as a high performance read engine. Services that maintain a product catalog and promotional items fit in this category.Dynamo shows once again how disciplined and rare Amazon is at using and re-using its infrastructure. The technical managementmust have realized early on that the very survival of the business depended on common, bullet proof, flexible, and scalable software systems.Amazon succeeded in both implementing and spreading the infrastructure through the company. It truly earned the mandate to thenleverage its internal pieces and offer them as web services.How Does Dynamo Fit With AWS?The short answer is that it does not, because it is not a public service. The short answer is also shortsighted becausethere are clear implications. First, is that since Amazon is committed to building a stack of web services, a version of Dynamois likely to be available to the public at some time in the future.Second, Amazon is restless in its innovation; and that applies to web services as well as it applies to its retail business. S3 has already made possible a whole new generationof startups and web services and Dynamo is likely to do the same when it comes out. And we know that more is likely to come, as even withDynamo, the stack of web services is far from complete.Finally, Amazon is showing openness - a highly valuable characteristic. Surely, Google and Microsofthave similar systems, but Amazon is putting them out in the open and turning its infrastructure into a business fasterthan its competitors. It is this openness that will allow Amazon to build trust and community around their Web Services stack. It is a powerful force, which is likely to win over developers and business people as well.The Future - Amazon Web OSTo any computer scientist or software engineer to watch what Amazon is doing is both awesome and humbling.Taking complex theoretical concepts and algorithms, adopting them to business environments (down to the SLA!), provingthat they work at the world's largest retail site, and then turning around and making them available to the rest of the worldis nothing short of a tour-de-force. What Emre Sokullu called HaaS (Hardware as a Service)in his postyesterday is not only an innovative business strategy, but also a triumph of software engineering.Amazon is on track to roll out more virtual web services, which will collectively amount to a web operating system.The building blocks that are already in place and the ones to come are going to be remixed to create new web applicationsthat were simply not possible before. As we have written here recently, it is the libraries that make it possible to create giant systemswith just a handful of engineers. Amazon's Web Services are going to make web-scale computing available to anyone. This isunimaginably powerful. This future is almost here, so we can begin thinking about it today. What kinds of things do you want to buildwith existing and coming Amazon Web Services?

  Techcrunch has sniffed out detailson Google's new social network project, named OpenSocial(set to go live Thur US). OpenSocial is not a social network itself, rather it is a set of three common APIsthat allow developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:Profile Information (user data)Friends Information (social graph)Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)These are 3 fairly generic API calls - specialized data will remain the responsibility of the "hosts", which currently include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. Developers already signed up include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide - who you will recognize as being 'power developers' on Facebook.Image via TechcrunchWhat this meansSimply put, Google has created a distributed social network framework that will end up competing with Facebook and MySpace (and Bebo in markets like the UK). It is kind of a 'third place' of social networks - and it is a huge boost to the less populous or more specialized social networks such as Ning, Hi5 and our old friend Friendster. For developers there are lots of benefits. They can build an app that easily works across all the OpenSocial partners. And they can use normal HTML, Javascript and Flash - instead of the proprietary languages Facebook forces developers to use.It's not entirely clear yet what the benefits will be to users. I assume there will be some interoperability - e.g. when a user joins up to a Ning social network, there may be hooks into their Friendster profile and data. Will this be the full 'export' functionality that industry people like Marc Canterhave been crying out for? It remains to be seen. I think it's fair to assume there won't be an export function from OpenSocial to Facebook or MySpace, at this point anyway. I'd love to be proven wrong though.With the limited details released so far, it seems that this is another example of Google creating a distributed system (think Adsense, search). It plays to their strengths and is certainly aimed at challenging Facebook and MySpace. For a start, they've already got on board all the main developers that Facebook has (iLike, Slide, et al). And while Google doesn't 'own' the Third Place, powerful social networks like Hi5 and Friendster have signed up - and so Google has become the platform for those social networks. It's Facebook vs MySpace vs The Rest - and The Rest is now operating under a Google framework.

  The Electronic Frontier Foundationand a number of other organizations will hold a press conference tomorrow calling for the creation of a national "Do-Not-Track" list, according to a report today in AdvertisingAge. While on face the creation of a method of opting-out of browser history and other tracking seems reasonable, as Steve Rubel points out- this is just the first shot in the coming Behavioral Tracking Wars.Railing against cookies is back in style. The Whois system of publicly available records about who owns any particular website is under attack for privacy reasons.In the vast richness that is the open web, personalization and recommendation are two of the most powerful areas of opportunity for all of us - advertisers included but also every user of the web.Having the opportunity to opt-out is good, especially on a case-by-case basis, but the Behavior Tracking Wars should not drive us into an online Dark Ages any more than it should bring about a Minority Report dystopia of ubiquitous tracking.While vendors serving those of us who love information are moving to respect our desire to have control over our own aggregate data, this blogger fears that moves like this latest by the EFF run the risk of forcing the software vendors we interact with to let our data run down the drain unused. If you don't want vendors to control your data that makes perfect sense, but insisting that it not even be captured in the first place does not.

  Colorado based Intense Debate, the sophisticated blog comment system with the silly name, launched its public beta this morning. There are some definite kinks in the service still, but there's also quite a lot to take note of. The service offers a powerful combination of ease of use and feature richness; I'm impressed.Intense Debate lets users set up good profiles that include easy access to their social networking pages around the web, you can friend or follow comments from particular users, there's some basic stats available to both comment leavers and publishers and threaded comments are available. It's got reputation, it's got lots of RSS, it's got quite a few widgets (like "top commenters on this blog") and it integrates with your blog's CSS. It's nice. I'm testing it out over at my personal blog, marshallk.com and there are a list of other blogs using it on the Intense Debate site. One issue I do see is that the commenting platform takes a moment to pull in its host blog's CSS, that's not ideal. I wonder if a copy of my stylesheet could be cached with Intense Debate. Throughout the site it would also be nice if avatars were larger, visual recognition of faces is huge in tools like this.Important DifferentiationThe comment plug-in market is a really crowded one, but there are some things about Intense Debate that warrant an extra close look. (Update: Wednesday morning saw a $1m VC investment in a more lightweight competitor, SezWho. TechCrunch coverageis good.OpenID support for leaving comments is fantastic, if a bit clumsy in implementation right now. It's really difficult for individual bloggers to install OpenID support in their own blogs right now. If Intense Debate can do it for us, that's great.Ease of install. One tiny PHP file is all it took me to get Intense Debate running on my Word Press blog. It was remarkably easy.Email notification is a global setting. Every blog should let you get an email if your comment has been replied to. With this plug-in, you can automate that on any Intense Debate using blog you comment on.The single most important thing about Intense Debate is its data export options.If you are using the service in Wordpress or Blogger (more platforms to be supported later) and you decide you want to stop using Intense Debate, you can export your comments for import into your native blogging software's comments database. This is the kind of option that makes all the difference in user adoption - I will let value from my work accumulate in your service if I know I can get it back out again if I so chose. Thank you Intese Debate! I ask every web app I profile about data export and the vast majority just tell me "oh, we're working on that."You may or may not feel inclined to use a service like this, and we'll see how it holds up against spam over time, but at the very least - I think Intense Debate is a classy operation that deserves some attention for its technology implementation in a crowded market space.

  Recently launched Cofundos.org, from the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web Research Group at the University of Leipzig in Germany, is a community funding site for open source software. The site allows non-coders to join forces to fund open source programming projects that might otherwise not get made. Software made as a result of these community-funded bounties must be licensed via the Creative Commons CC-BY or an OSI approved license.The site essentially works like microPledge, which we wrote about in August. After someone posts a project idea, the crowd discusses and refines the idea and contributes to a project fund. Programmers then bid on the contract to make the software and the funders vote on who gets the bid. After completion, the project's funders vote one whether the programmer completed the task satisfactorily, and if so, the programmer is paid. Voting is weighted based on how much that person contributed (money) to the project's bounty.There are currently 47 projects listed on Cofundos.org, with the highest commanding a bounty of 1030 Euros. In the first week of operation, the site has attracted 3700 Euros worth of pledges from approximately than 100 bidders, according to the site.Cofundos.org is focused specifically on open source software, but the team behind it has indicated that they plan to adapt the concept to other areas, including beyond software development. microPledge has also indicated the desire to branch out beyond software and use the same scheme to crowdsource the funding of things like events.

  Document sharing site DocStocopened to the public today after months of a high-profile private beta. Similar to the already launched and funded Scribd, DocStoc aims to provide a place for you to post and discover professional documents on a wide variety of topics. Think sample contracts, sample press releases, proposals, etc. If DocStoc can keep itself from being overrun by crap, as has happened to Scribd, that itself would be a major accomplishment. Like Scribd, this L.A. based company has its own roster of high profile investors.These sorts of sites face serious challenges, though. At public launch DocStoc has more than 12,000 documents already uploaded during the private beta. Most of those documents appear relatively well labeled and of high quality. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe this trend will continue. Despite the valiant intentions of the site, there are almost zero comments or ratings on any of the documents. The company says it hopes that the precedent set by high quality docs at launch will facilitate community policing against low quality docs and spam. I question that; it might work, but the effort required to provide feedback on search results and document quality may be too high.The fact that the company is giving away an iPod touch to the people who upload the greatest quantity of documents each week doesn't bode well for the quality of search results on the site. The words "Free iPod!" shouldn't appear on a reputable company's website, in my opinion.I want DocStoc to work, and when looking for sample documents in the future I will give it several tries. Results so far are acceptable. I'm not so sure that I wouldn't be better off paying for a human-selected "best of" list, though.

  According to Lee Lorenzen, of Altura Ventures, and AllFacebook, the "Social Ads" advertising service Facebook is supposedly set to launch next week will take Facebook ads outside the social network.The rumored technology would work like this: Facebook would place a cookie on your computer (the site already requires users to have cookies enabled to log in), every time you visit a third-party site that runs ads utilizing the "Social Ads" product, they would be targeted based on your social networking profile data. So, theoretically, if you've professed your love of Pepsi on your Facebook profile, you might see Pepsi ads while reading the news at MSN.Ad networks like DoubleClick and aQuantive already use cookies to track user behavior, that could theoretically be used to build a profile of which sites you visit. That ability does not necessarily sit well with privacy advocateswho are concerned that these companies have too much information about users. What Facebook is reportedly planning to unveil would go beyond tracking your web browsing behavior and building a profile on what you like based on the sites you visit, however. Instead Facebook would use explicit data about your interests to target ads across the web.Would users be comfortable with the idea of their profile data following them around outside of Facebook in the form of potentially very personally targeted advertising? Though, in reality, it is probably not that different from using your data to deliver ads on Facebook (the data is available to advertisers either way), it may just feelcreepy to users to have the information about their lives that they had thought they were sharing privately with friends being used to target advertising directly to them across the web.If this does fly, it could be a big win for Microsoft, whose $240 million investmentin Facebook is thought by many to be more about acquiring a stronger advertising relationship with the site than acquiring a stake in the company. A combination of Facebook's immense, untapped user data set and Microsoft's ad sales team could mean significantly higher CPMs for sites using Microsoft's ad networks and higher revenue for Facebook and Microsoft.What do you think? Is this a good idea for Facebook or will it just draw the ire of users? Would you continue you use a site that you knew was using your personal information to target ads to you on other web sites? Is Facebook's rumored proposal crossing the line in terms of privacy?

  The Associated Pressis reporting that ICANN may consider shutting down the Whois system, which lets Internet users search for domain name registration information, because of disagreements over how it works. Privacy advocates in favor of shutting down the database feel that individuals should not be forced to give out private information -- which is then potentially available to spammers or scam artists -- in order to register a domain name on the Internet. Those who want to keep the Whois database operational, feel that it is a valuable tool for doing business and making sure you know who you are dealing with.As the AP writes, the Whois database has many uses, "Law-enforcement officials and Internet service providers use it to fight fraud and hacking. Lawyers depend on it to chase trademark and copyright violators. Journalists rely on it to reach Web site owners. And spammers mine it to send junk mailings for Web site hosting and other services." There have also been reports that some registrars use Whois search data to register domains that could be lucrative in the domain aftermarket, a practice the New York Times likens to insider trading.Some proponents of the "sunset" plan that would end the Whois database, don't necessarily want it shut down. Ross Rader, an executive at Tucows who is the chief sponsor of the plan, has indicated that he only wants to force discussion on the issue. "What removing the status quo will do is force all of the actors to come together without the benefit of a status quo to fall back on and say, 'We are now all screwed. What will we do?'" Rader told the AP. "It will lead to better good-faith negotiations."My opinion is that nixing the Whois database would be a mistake. There are certainly better ways to conceal contact information, or to keep spammers from scraping the information, but the database has a lot of practical applications and is very helpful to a large number of honest users. I often use it to track down information on web site owners for stories, or to verify information about a web site I may be considering doing business with, for example. Losing it would negatively impact a substantial number of people. "The sense of shock that would settle around certain people would be rapid and immediate," said Syracuse University professor Milton Mueller. I agree.What do you think? Do the benefits of the Whois database outweigh the potential for abuse? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

  Steve Rubel has written a postbemoaning the lack of innovative Web products these days:"...I miss the days of 2004 when the class that includes Flickr, del.icio.us and others started. They really were about changing the web, not making a quick buck(they did so only because they added value). There are companies still out there like them. Twitter is one I believe takes this approach. Automattic (the company behind Wordpress) appears to be another. Dave Winer also shares this spirt. He creates services like NYTimes River because it's fun and he thinks it will add value to our lives (and he is right).However, most of the rest of today's net startups are only after the almighty dollar and while that's capitalism, it saddens me because it has done little but breed hubris."Emphasis oursIt'd be easy to agree with Steve on this. Indeed in my wrapup of the recent Web 2.0 Summit, I said it was 'steady as she goes' and lacking in innovative startups. Other than the semantic appsthat presented at the Summit, there was little evidence of disruptive technologies. It was still a well-organized and enjoyable conference, but the cutting edge was absent.And from a web product perspective, 2007 hasn't seen a lot of innovative startups in comparison to 2004-06. Twitter, which Steve mentioned, is one - albeit it is still extremely niche and no mainstream people I know use it.But even considering the Web 2.0 Summit and 2007 so far, I'm inclined to disagree with Steve that the Web is being over-run by "the almighty dollar". There is innovation happening - and enjoyment. The Mobile 2.0 Conference I attended recently in San Francisco showed me there's a lot of innovative technologyhappening in the Mobile Web space. The shift to the Webof many big companies is also exciting (as is the experimentation with desktop technologiesby online organizations). Partnerships are happeningbetween web 2.0 startups and big tech companies. Social networks are showing signs of truly opening up(although slowly). Semantic appsare set to go mainstream. Utility computingis coming in a big way. Alternative search enginesare nipping at Google's heels. There are opportunities for entrepreneurs in Attention, Intention and VRM businesses. Use of the Web for environmentaland non-profit purposes is at an all-time high.I could go on and on, but my point is that the Web is still changing - despite the seeming lack of new innovative startups (maybe we as bloggers just aren't uncovering enough of them?) and the 'steady as she goes' Web conferences. So I do push back on Steve's post in that respect. There's a lotof change happening on the Web; actually that is what Read/WriteWeb is all about, documenting and covering that change.But tell us what you think, in the poll below. Are we, collectively as startups, organizations and media, still changing the Web? Also, please use the comments below to list startups or initiatives that you think are changing the Web.Poll Survey- Take Our PollImage: Brouhaha (Jonathan)