Yesterday Google posted the yearly stats for the Official Google Blog. Not bad – 294 posts, 7.6 million unique visitors and 15 million page views. Technorati ranks the Google Blog as the 16th largest among all blogs, and it is by far the most popular official company blog. Just one accidental deletion and a couple of hacks added a bit of spice and drama.

But today bloggers are starting to ask if the Official Google Blog is even an actual blog. The reason? It doesn’t allow readers to leave comments. The Official Google blog does list links to other sites referencing any given post (a sort of trackback), but that’s it. The conversation ends there.

Yahoo, in contrast, does allow reader comments on their official blogs. At times it has been painful for them, but I believe having this direct user feedback mechanism is helping them make better products.

Other prominent bloggers have removed comments, too. Seth Godin, no. 19 on the Technorati list, rarely allows comment on his blog. He says that comments affect what he writes, and “So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I’d have to choose the latter.”

The current definitions of “blog” in most dictionaries don’t mention reader comments at all when defining the term. Wikipedia says only that “the ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.” According to these sources, the minimum requirement for a web site to be a blog is that it have content, and that it be sorted in reverse chronological order.

I believe the term “blog” means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume. We’ve allowed comments here on TechCrunch since it started. At times, user comments can be painful to deal with. But they also keep the writer honest, and make the content vastly more interesting.

Should the definitions of “blog” be revised to exclude journals that do not allow reader comments? Yeah, absolutely. And Google may think so, too. At the end of their post, they write “And before long, perhaps you can begin leaving comments directly. We’re working on that.”

What do you think? Leave a comment, or answer the poll below.

RawSugar (the site is currently down), a company with offices in Israel and Silicon Valley, is closing shop (also reported by Steve Rubel and Rafael Sidi) and will enter the TechCrunch DeadPool. RawSugar can mosts easily be described as a del.icio.us competitor.

This is a company we’ve been tracking since August 2005. This is also one of the companies that I met with during my trip to Israel last year.

RawSugar never raised a big round of funding and simply ran out of money, it seems. And while this is a bit sad to see, the good news to come out of this is that the people working on the project can now move on to their next idea. It’s the way things go.

Taken in a vacuum, a fairly trivial thing happened a few days ago. The co-founder of Firefox, Blake Ross, wrote a post criticizing Google called “Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose“. He takes issue with a new Google search feature that promotes certain of their own products over organic search results. See Google searches for Calendar, Blogging, Photo Sharing and others and see Google pushing Google Calendar, Blogger and Picasa, respectively, above what is supposed to be the most relevant results – Google search. Even a search for Yahoo Calendar has these Google results above the obvious destination the user was searching for.

I say this is trivial incident taken in a vacuum because, quite frankly, Google has every right to promote their own products on their website. But I think Ross’ post may be a sign of a change in attitude towards Google that’s been percolating for the last year or so, and is beginning to manifest itself. The fact that a highly respected entrepreneur finally spoke out should be a wakeup call for Google.

Part of the problem is that Google has always held itself to a higher standard than other companies. We took them seriously when they said their corporate motto is “Don’t be evil“. It was the right thing to say when they were young and battling the hated Microsoft. But today, as they begin to put themselves before what’s best for their users, that motto is coming back to haunt them.

They can’t redact the motto, of course. They can’t take back those words. Google will forever be held to a higher standard than everyone else, simply because they asked us to.

This Google search misstep, aggregated with others, is taking a toll. People seem less willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt when they try something new. And with so many bloggers eagerly awaiting the opportunity to jump on any bandwagon that comes along, this subtle shift in public attitude could signal a tidal wave of negativity down the road.

We’ve seen this before. Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft were the darlings of the valley back in the late nineties. Just the fact that an entrepreneur got a meeting with one of them was something they brought up in their pitches to venture capitalists. The big three became very arrogant about their positions on the top of the food chain.

They had big revenue numbers to hit to keep the stock price soaring. Any kind of real business development deal took seven or eight figures just to get in the door. $10 million/year revenue guarantees became commonplace in deals. When the stock market crashed, and venture dollars dried up, so did the advertising market. Those big deals went away. Much of the revenue was never recognized because the companies promising it went bankrupt. Yahoo and the others were hit hard. Layoffs occurred and CEOs were fired. And the arrogance went away. Today, entrepreneurs tell me they are an absolute pleasure to deal with, and open to new and sometimes outrageous ideas.

Now Google is in the position of dominance, and they definitely have the arrogance that goes with it. But they are in a very difficult spot because of that damned motto, and perhaps right on the tipping point where public opinion could change. More and more, people are hoping for Google to stumble. And every time they do, the press pounces. And they always point to the motto.

Google needs to change. They can’t kill the motto, so they need to live up to it, permanently. They need to stop treating the outside world with disdain, and replace it with transparency and honesty. Users must always come first. Always. And they need to do it soon. Once the shift in public opinion becomes obvious, it will be way too late. And while Matt Cutts, the unofficial Google blogger, deals with the Ross post in a straighforward and honest way, I think he should be far more critical of his company. Even to the point of risking his job. Because that is exactly what Google needs right now.

Geeks definitely love comic books and superheroes, and that’s why this simple site that tells you what superhero you are based on a few questions has seen over 12 million hits since it launched. I really wanted to be Batman or Spiderman, but I answered the questions honestly and came up with the Green Lantern. I’m not at all happy that I am 45% Wonder Woman.

I’m only 70% Green Lantern though. Jason Calacanis is 75% Green Lantern, so I guess he’s more hot headed than me. Dave Winer is Iron Man. Steve Rubel is Superman. Which superhero are you?

Your results:
You are Green Lantern

Green Lantern 70% Hulk 65% Batman 65% The Flash 55% Robin 50% Wonder Woman 45% Spider-Man 45% Iron Man 40% Catwoman 35% Supergirl 35% Superman 30%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Update: Someone pointed to the villain sister site in the comments. I took that test as well. I think the villain one is actually more fun.

Your results:
You are Apocalypse

Apocalypse 91% Dr. Doom 88% Magneto 83% Dark Phoenix 83% Two-Face 80% Juggernaut 80% Lex Luthor 79% The Joker 71% Green Goblin 68% Mr. Freeze 67% Venom 67% Catwoman 57% Kingpin 55% Poison Ivy 43% Mystique 40% Riddler 30%

You believe in survival of the fittest and you believe that you are the fittest.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

As techies, there are few components that affect our bodies as heavily as our chairs. Sitting in a chair for countless hours every day has a notable impact on our bodies. A crappy chair can cause immediate duress and also lead to prolonged pain. A quality chair, however, can do a lot of good for you. Recognizing this dilemma, CrunchGear has conducted a stress test roundup of several of the top ergonomic options currently available in a piece entitled Workspace Roundup: Ergonomic Chairs.

When PayPerPost announced the acquisition of most of the Performancing assets earlier this week, a lot of people asked about the future of the popular Performancing blogging plugin, which wasn’t acquired.

It’s alive and well and has been rebranded as ScribeFire. The site has a landing page up and will be launching shortly. In the meantime, the old plugin can stll be downloaded on the Mozilla site.

ScribeFire says that 400,000 people have downloaded the software. No word on how many active users there are, but a lot of bloggers swear by it.

Tagging should be a feature of operating systems. It’s usually a superior way of organizing information v. folders because a file can be placed in only a single folder, but multiple tags can be associated with that file. It’s one of the reasons I like Gmail, because emails can be tagged with multiple descriptive terms instead of just throwing it into a folder. I find it much easier to find tagged items on flickr, del.icio.us and gmail, for example, than it is on Mac mail, my desktop email client that doesn’t support tagging. Properly tagged items are much easier to search for down the road.

Vista does support a limited form of tagging, although it’s hard to get to. If you right click on a file and click properties, and then details, you can enter in a set of tags for that file. Using the search feature of Vista you can then find those files by searching for a tag. Windows XP doesn’t support tagging, nor does Mac.

Austria-based Tag2Find, though, has created a nifty application that allows tagging for any type of desktop file. It only works with Windows machines running XP or Vista, and it relies on the .NET framework. In our testing on a XP machine, it did very well.

To see how it works, see the demo here. The application sits in the system tray on the bottom of the screen. Click on it and a search bar appears to tag files, or find tagged files (see image to right). to tag a file you type in the tags and then drag files to the icon. Tag2Find will also suggest other tags based on what you type.

There is also a larger view option that opens up a window showing tagged files, a tag cloud or tag list, and a built in media player to play media files that you’ve tagged (see image below).

There’s no word on the business plan, although it’s possible this could be advertising supported. The beta period, at least, is free. Right now the company is in private beta, you can request an account here.

This is a great Windows tool, and I’d definitely use it if I wasn’t on a Mac. Microsoft, by the way, has certainly given some thought to moving in this direction – see this video (works in IE only) for information on their Project Tesla.

Google’s Orkut social network, which has been having a bit of a renaissance this year, has been down for the last thirteen hours as of 2 am PST. It’s unlikely this is an upgrade given the amount of time the site has been offline. This just isn’t Google’s day.

Update: Orkut is back online now, after 22 hours of down time.

Metrics company Hitwise writes a sensational blog post showing the dramatic rise of Google Blog Search against competitors Technorati and Sphere. Their data is saying that this week, for the first time, Google Blogsearch surpassed Technorati in total visits.

Google Blog Search just passed 0.0025% of total internet traffic, according to Hitwise, v. 0.0023% for Technorati. The reason for the surge seems pretty straightforward: Google linked their Blog Search product to Google News in October, which had a immediate and significant impact on traffic. Google also added a Blog Search link in the “More” section on the Google main page. It was not enough to take the lead, but a recent Technorati decline in traffic put Blog Search on top.

It makes sense that the extra attention Google is giving BlogSearch would result in a spike in traffic, but we looked to Comscore for confirmation. What a surprise.

Comscore tells a much different story, and one that makes little sense given the facts. The most recent Comscore data (November) says Technorati had 3 million page views v. Google Blog Search’s 1 million. But Comscore also shows highly erratic Technorati data over the last twelve months, swinging from a high of 22 million page views in April 2006 to a low of 1 million in December 2005.

We’ve seen situations where Comscore showed erratic traffic swings before. In August Comscore showed a significant decline in Del.icio.us traffic, when Hitwise said it was increasing. Yahoo showed disclosed some internal traffic stats and it turned out Comscore was dead wrong. In the case of Technorati v. Google, it looks to be wrong again.

Google made a clarification today to their much criticized list of most popular queries in their search engine. The list raised eyebrows because it included some fairly unlikely terms. “Bebo” for example, was the number one term on the list.

In the original announcement, Google said: “Google today announced its annual Zeitgeist, featuring lists and charts of the most popular and fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed into Google.com.” It turns out that while that statement was literally accurate, it was still somewhat misleading.

In the clarification today, Google said: “we do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period — the truth is, they don’t change that much from year to year…Instead, we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 — the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006’s most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005. (”Bebo”, for example, had very little traffic in 2005.) We also gave a bit higher score to searches with more traffic. Similarly, our “what is” and “who is” lists are not necessarily the absolute most frequent searches, but rather those that best represent the passing year.”

I agree with Liz Gannes at GigaOm. If at the end of the day Google is taking the top few thousand searches, subjectively picking a handful that are interesting and then redetermining the order based on velocity of growth rather than overall rankings, we end up with a list that is, in the end, completely meaningless.

Just a week after I wrote “Uh Oh, Gmail Just Got Perfect” a number of users started complaining that all of their Gmail emails and contacts were auto deleted.

The first message, posted on the Google Groups forum on December 19, stated “Found my account clean..nothing in Inbox, contacts ,sent mail..How can all these information residing in different folders disappear? ..How to write to gmail help team to restore the account..is it possible?..Where to report this abuse?.Any help ..Welcome..Thanks in advance ps101″

Other Gmail users then added to the conversation, saying that their emails had been deleted as well. Most of the users reported using Firefox 2.0 and that Gmail was open in their browser when the deletions occured.

The cause of the problem isn’t clear. One user wrote that after the deletion they received the following message: “This is not a mistake. All your emails and contacts have been deleted on purpose. This was a malicious attack and not an error. Have a nice day. =)” One user pointed to a known security issue with Firefox 2.0, which was fixed in 2.0.0.1.

On December 22, four days after the initial incident was reported, a Google representative posted this message on the thread:

Thank you all for reporting this issue. We apologize for the scare and
inconvenience that it’s causing. We’re actively investigating as we
speak, and we’ll follow up individually with users in this thread as we
get to the bottom of the problem.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Google’s official policy is that once emails are deleted, they are gone forever. And based on the Google Groups thread, no one has been able to have their Gmail accounts restored to pre-deletion status.

Update: A representative from Google just sent the following email:

Red Herring and VentureBeat are reporting that Digg closed an $8.5 million Series B round of financing from previous investors Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network, bringing the the total of capital they’ve raised to just over $10 million. They previously raised $2.8 million in October 2005 from Greylock, Omidyar and several angel investors.

In a recent interview with the Digg executive team, they said that they are not yet cash flow positive but should be in the near future, and currently have 18 employees.

Digg competitor Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast in October. We mentioned the likelihood of an upcoming Series B round when we wrote about rumors that Digg was also in acquisition discussions with News Corp. back in October. While Digg disputes this, a few sources indicated that they tested the waters to see if they could sell for $150 million or more. When no offers came in, they raised additional capital instead.

There are clearly too many social networks, and if you belong to one you likely belong to many. Boston based (soon to be relocated to San Francisco) ProfileLinker’s aim is to help you stay organized across those networks. Like Meebo did with instant messaging, ProfileLinker wants to aggregate your social networking experience.

The target user is someone with a profile on at least two networks – MySpace and Facebook, for example. You tell ProfileLinker your site credentials and it pulls your bio, friends and other information from those sites and centralizes it. You then use ProfileLinker to manage your activity on those networks: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks.

The company is also launching a number of widgets that will pull data from all of your social networks and allow you to present it on another website. The first widget will be a “portable profile” with links to your various networks.

This differs from PeopleAggregator (our coverage), which has actually created software for customers to create their own social networks. ProfileLinker is trying to aggregate your data from existing networks and make it more useful.

To do this they’ll need to keep those networks happy, while taking some page views from them. They have one partnership sealed already, with Photobucket, and hope to do more. But for sites where they are unable to get a partnership they’ll have to gather information using the user’s credentials. There’s a risk that networks will simply cut them off.

The company is currently closing an angel round of financing. They are in private beta – sign up on the home page for an invitation.

Screen. shots of the current version are below.

Russia-based, DRM-free music download site AllOfMP3 made a brief statement today in response to the RIAA’s $1.65 trillion lawsuit, filed in New York against them. In effect, they told the RIAA to go pound sand:

“AllofMP3 understands that several U.S. record label companies filed a lawsuit against Media Services in New York,” an unnamed “senior company official” stated. “This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3 does not operate in New York. Certainly the labels are free to file any suit they wish, despite knowing full well that AllofMP3 operates legally in Russia. In the mean time, AllofMP3 plans to continue to operate legally and comply with all Russian laws.”

AllOfMP3 may not be around much longer, given that their own government has promised to find a way to shut them down, but they are certainly going out with a little panache.

PayPerPost, the controversial startup that pays bloggers to write about advertisers’ products, will be in the news again tomorrow. They will be announcing the acquisition of blogging tools and services company Performancing (see our earlier coverage of Performancing).

The main purpose of the acquisition appears to be for PayPerPost to get access to the 28,000 Performancing users, most of whom are bloggers and potential customers of PayPerPost. The popular Performancing Firefox blog editing plugin is not being acquired, and will be spun off into a new brand.

Our previous coverage of PayPerPost is here.

It looks like some people using Google Notebook are bookmarking sensitive personal information, including social security numbers and email passwords. And others are finding that sensitive information via the Google Notebook search tool.

This all played out in the comments to this Digg post. What’s amazing is that Google Notebook defaults to privacy, and users have to explicitly opt in to have information made available via the search. Google probably has no responsibility for this information, although some of it appears to be third party personal information, and they are hosting it on their servers. We’ll see if they start to censor this stuff to avoid liability.

Our previous coverage of Google Notebook is here and here.

Update: Yep, it looks like Google is starting to take down some of the sensitive content linked from that Digg post:

Tools to convert file types, particularly audio and video files, are among the last to move from the desktop to the browser. Part of the problem is CPU usage during the conversion (it’s expensive to do this online) and part of the problem is the upload time for the user.

We’ve written about a couple of products that do online file conversion, Zamzar and Media Convert. But Marseille, France based Hey!Watch, which we tested our yesterday evening, appears to be a much more robust product than anything we’ve seen previously, and they’ve added developer tools to help build their functionality directly into other web services. The service is in private beta, but there is some information on the home page and you can request an invitation to join.

Hey!Watch allows users to import files to the service in a number of ways, including uploading from a hard drive or simply putting in the URL of a video froa YouTube or other popular online video service. But they also allow users to upload videos via a RSS feed, so new enclosures from future show will automatically be uploaded as well. The company has also created bookmarklets and a Firefox plugin to import a video from a currently viewed website to the service with a single click.

Once files are uploaded, they can be converted to all of the usual formats and then downloaded. And they’ve also used RSS intelligently here as well – they’ve created a RSS feed for all of a user’s converted files, so they can simply be gathered from a feed reader without going back to the Hey!Watch site each time.

There’s a use case for this that is really compelling – any time you see a video on YouTube or another site that you want to keep, all you have to do is hit the button on the bookmarklet, and later gather the file from the RSS feed. Those files can be in MPEG4 format for an iPod, or DVD format for burning to a DVD. Want to create a DVD for a friend of your favorite YouTube music videos? This service is going to make that dead simple.

And the fun doesn’t stop there. All of the key functionality is available via a REST API, for developers to build directly into their products.

Hey!Watch will have a free version, along with a premium version with higher limits on total upload limits, maximum video size and length, etc. Look for their launch in a couple of weeks.

TailRank and competitor Megite are fighting for second place behind blog news leader, TechMeme. It’s not surprising that both companies are expanding into ranking popular videos, too. But it’s surprising that both companies launched their products on the same day. We covered Megite earlier, and then received an email from TailRank founder Kevin Burton that they have just launched their product as well.

The basic idea is the same – TailRank is analyzing videos that blogs link to and embed on their sites, and then determine what videos are popular based on the aggregate weighted statistics. Bigger blogs get more weight, but smaller blogs get a vote, too.

Competition is a great thing, and these companies are competing hard. Megite even recently took a swipe at TailRank based on recent Alexa stats, here. As to video, which product is better? Well, they look about the same, although I give a slight nudge to Megite based on on the interface, which shows more videos on a page.

News At Seven is a brilliant piece of technology. The problem is that it is a useless product in its current form. And they used tax dollars to create it.

In an entirely automated process, News At Seven gathers news items from around the web and presents a newscast from an avatar:

News at Seven is an automatic system that crafts daily news shows. It finds the news you are interested in; edits it; finds relevant images, videos, and external opinions; and then presents it all using a virtual news team working in a virtual studio. News at Seven is a uniquely compelling experience that can present traditional news–augmented with supplemental images, videos, and opinions from the blogosphere—all without human intervention.

The end result is a newscast, with an avatar, and a computerized voice. The headline seems to be fairly relevant, and I’m interested in understanding how they determine the most newsworthy items of the day.

I’d say this would be useful for blind people, but the images and video is an integral part of the product. In its current form, it’s nice to look at once, but it is not an efficient way to consume news, for any demographic. Actually, perhaps SecondLife’rs would be into this.

The project was created by Northwestern University’s InfoLab and was apparently funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant no. 0535231). I can’t find any information on the NSF site about this particular grant, but I would be very interested to know how many tax dollars funded this.

Forgetting the interface, there may be some interesting uses of the technology that gathers and contextualizes the news bits. I’ve included a quick poll to see what readers think.

Update: The grant information is here. News At Seven has received $268,112 so far from the NSF.

Megite, a blog aggregation news service (see here for a comparison of Megite to its competitors) has launched a videos vertical that tracks popular videos in an interesting way. Unlike the Digg video channel, which ranks videos based solely on user voting, Megite’s ranking is based on what vidoes blogs are linking to or embedding into their sites (the same way Megite tracks other news). An authoritative blog linking to a video can drive it up in the rankings, as will a large number of less authoritative blogs. The “freshness” of the video is also important (meaning Megite is tracking newly uploaded videos). Megite is tracking 20 video sites, although understandably YouTube is currently dominating the results.

This is a good way to rank videos because it suffers from less potential voting fraud than, say, Digg. If an established blog links to a video there’s a very good chance it is a real vote for that video. Taking aggregate statistics from tens of thousands of blogs will tend to yield very good results.

More from Rex Dixon, who also links to an interview he recently conducted with Megite founder Matthew Chen.