Digg users have begun calling with increased volume for the creation of a special section of the site designated for photographs and pictures.  Two requests to this effect have received more than 6 and 8 thousand diggs in the past 2 weeks.  It’s hard to imagine that some sort of photo section of the wildly popular news site won’t be introduced soon. I’m looking forward to it.

From item descriptions on the front page of the site that include a call for a photos section to repeated requests in comments left to photos – the desire from at least some users is increasingly visible.  When the upstart blog CenterNetworks posted a petition yesterday titled Dear Kevin Rose, Please Create a Photo Section, Digg users quickly responded with thousands of diggs.  Two weeks ago, a photo of a Digg error page at the URL http://digg.com/view/pictures became the second most popular item on Digg this month.

What would a photography section mean for Digg?  It would likely make Digg one of the most high profile and accessible places for photos to quickly find a mass audience.  If a substantial portion of Digg users take interest in a pictures section, more than they have the site’s Extreme Sports section for example, aspiring photographers could come in droves.  I can only imagine that many of those photographers could sell rights to the most successful photos after gaining the approval of tens or hundreds of thousands of Digg users.  A photos section could become particularly interesting.

Digg introduced major video and podcasting sections in December.  While the video part of the site is relatively active, podcasts have not proven to be conducive to the Digg model.  Since individual episodes of serialized podcasts can’t be listened to and voted on in any practical matter, the podcasting section of Digg has become a nearly static popularity contest.  In order to provide the maximum value for Digg users, a section needs to see large numbers of submissions and churn.  I expect we’ll see at least an announcement that a photos section is coming soon, perhaps at the same time OpenID support is added.

What kind of photos do people on Digg like? The following are all the photos that have received more than 1000 diggs in the last week.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

After months of intense and very public debate, closely tied to the Google acquisition, YouTube is reported to have licensed copyright filtering technology from AudibleMagic. The San Jose Mercury News cites two unnamed sources as saying that Google will soon unveil filtering technology for YouTube from the leading third party filtering provider, Audible Magic.

What does this mean? It means that the months of assurances that YouTube had copyright filtering technology in development and about to be implemented were either a ruse to buy time or a failed effort that has collapsed under pressure today.

Ten days ago it was announced that MySpace has licensed AudibleMagic’s filtering technology for copyright protection. The huge question that everyone asked was – what does this mean for YouTube? While reactions ranged from waiting with bated breath for a mystery technology to accusations of mafia like behavior on YouTube’s part – the truth may be something far more mundane. YouTube was arguably never a technology company in the first place.

Google and YouTube spokespeople have made repeated statements about the imminence of content filtering but did not respond to the Merc’s report.

Fox Interactive Media announced this morning that it has acquired the thrillingly named Strategic Data Corporation (Google cache of site). SDC offers ad optimization technology that it claims helps clients “typically see network-wide revenue increases of 50-150%.” Fox Interactive spans a large number of sites from AmericanIdol.com to AskMen.com but is dominated by MySpace. Thus today’s acquisition can be understood primarily as an attempt to leverage some high level algorithms to crank up MySpace monetization. SDC will optimize graphic ads and compliment Google’s search ads on MySpace.

Rupert Murdoch said two weeks ago that the site is bringing in close to $25 million in ad revenue each month. Murdoch says that in five years roughly ten percent of Newscorp’s earnings should come from its online properties. In order to best serve ads to an increasingly age and geographically diverse userbase like that of MySpace, the acquisition makes sense. A person can only click on the same dating service and punch the Flash monkey ads so many times; SDC’s technology could help make MySpace more appealing for more diverse advertisers. For a related example of a large content network taking control of an outside ad optimization service, see our coverage of the Yahoo! deal with RightMedia in October.

If MySpace is populated primarily by young people who treat it like email (probably not the best place to advertise) and old people who are there to try and sell things to young people themselves – then there may not be much hope for drastic improvements in ad revenue.

The SDC acquisition is the first major deal made since Peter Levinsohn took the helm of Fox Interactive Media after replacing his cousin Ross Levinsohn, the man who led the deal to acquire MySpace in the first place.

RSS management megavendor FeedBurner released an interesting report this morning about the relative market shares of the various leading RSS reader vendors.  The statistics go beyond mere subscription numbers and focus on what FeedBurner says is more important – reader engagement.

That engagement is measured in two ways, the number of times the feed’s items are loaded and displayed in the reader (called views)  and the number of times a feed’s link is clicked through (called clicks).  TechCrunch, for example, may now have almost 300,000 people subscribed to its feed who log on to their feed reader in a given day – but only a portion of those people view the TechCrunch feed in particular on a given day. I know I’m subscribed to many feeds that I almost never actually read, FeedBurner’s engagement metrics try to parse that behavior out from active readership.

The winning vendors in reader engagement are interesting but so are the larger implications of the numbers being reported. Full details and discussion below the fold (for those not viewing this in a feed reader, that is!)

The moral of the story is that Google Reader has come out of nowhere and stolen the hearts of active RSS users.
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The day that everyone knew was coming has arrived with the announcement that Google has launched Google Apps Premier, its subscription package of premium, hosted business applications in direct competition with Microsoft.

Michael Arrington posted this afternoon about a rumor of an undetermined major announcement from Google set for tomorrow, now the Wall St. Journal reports that Google Apps Premier has launched.

Google Apps for Your Domain was launched in August. The Google Apps for Your Domain page has already been updated to reflect tonight’s announcement. The service will include the existing Google Apps tools – GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and IM as well as the Google Docs applications that were just integrated into the suite today. Webmail will come with 10 GB of storage and Apps Premier includes service level agreements that promise 99.9% uptime and 24/7 tech support. A full comparison of the standard and Premier services can be found here.

The service costs $50 per user per year, dramatically undercutting Microsoft’s offerings. Google’s package does not currently include a presentation tool like Power Point or a CRM application. The most likely next addition to the package could be an enterprise version of Blogger. General Electric and Proctor and Gamble are cited as among the first Google Apps Premier customers.

One major concern that hangs over the head of tonight’s news is the ongoing question of Google security. TechCrunch asked for months whether business users would or should trust Google Apps with sensitive business information given the regular lapses of security experienced by the company’s hosted services. See a timeline and discussion of those lapses in this post.

Other skeptics have raised concerns about Google’s growing ubiquity and previously unfathomable access to information. Such power undoubtedly carries a political risk that no one can take lightly. The first post I wrote when I started working for TechCrunch was about the prototype ambient audio contextual advertising and search presented by Google Labs in conference this summer.

There are many different ways to look at tonight’s announcement. The discussion via Techmeme includes posts focused on everything from Apps Premier as a complex offensive move not intended to generate revenue to Google’s now greatly expanded call center needs and the Terms of Use that make service termination a bigger risk in office software than ever before. Lots of posts worth reading.

Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion. Google’s technological brilliance is only beginning to be recognized. What do I mean by that? I mean that with its powerful algorithms to analyze and contextualize information, combined with its growing catalogue of information to analyze – Google is an epoch defining company. Send the world’s business communication through Google and the machine gets a whole lot smarter.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

PBwiki closed $2 million in funding this morning from Mohr Davidow Ventures.  Founder and CEO David Weekly confirmed that previous investors Ron Conway and Chris Yeh also put in an additional $100k.

PBwiki advertises itself as the easiest way to quickly create a hosted wiki and the company’s product is particularly well executed.  It recently added a What You See is What You Get editor, which if satisfactory to new users, could help PBwiki overcome one of the primary barriers to wiki adoption.  The recent upgrade also added the ability to include YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, stock charts and chat functionality to your wikis.  Chat will likely be useful but I question how many of their users will be excited about the rest of the new features.  PBWiki’s basic features are what make it shine.

Weekly told me that there are more than 200,000 PBwikis and a substantial portion of them have been active in the past 60 days.  (My ten sleeping PBwikis notwithstanding, apparently.)  Weekly says the ads on free accounts make less than 5% of the company’s revenue; premium accounts are available for between $10 and $35 per month.  He says the 8 person company brings in enough money to be “profitable some months.”

Weekly says that he expects to make an announcement about interoperability with other wiki providers in the next few weeks.  I like PBwiki but will be curious to see what they have up their sleeve that would give confidence to institutional investors.  Mohr Davidow Ventures doesn’t typically invest in consumer facing, web 2.0 type companies.

The enterprise wiki landscape is widely seen as a mess, bereft of reliable, usable and lightweight solutions – perhaps we’ll see someone scoop up this solid service soon. Please hold the jokes about a possible Yahoo! acquisition.

Competitors include Wikispaces, Wikia and others.

Documentary film maker Steve O’Hear announced today that his film In Search of the Valley is now available for download using an innovative service called Streamburst – a move he hopes will raise the project’s sales after disappointing initial DVD sales. Streamburst offers a way to discourage and track piracy without limiting the use of files by people who purchase them.

We wrote about O’Hear’s film of interviews with Silicon Valley figures Steve Wozniak, John Warnock, Guy Kawasaki, Craig Newmark, Jef Raskin, Tim O’Reilly, Dan Kottke and many others when the DVD was released in December. The interviews explore the history of the Valley and why it’s been such a center of tech creativity.

Offering full films for download would probably be most independent film makers’ first choice of distribution methods were it not for the problem of piracy. While it’s easy for some people to mock the concerns of media giants, small independent film makers’ careers are obviously directly contingent on their ability to monetize as much of their work as possible. (And they are easier to sympathize with.)

Enter Streamburst, O’Hear’s choice for online distribution. This newly launched UK company takes an interesting approach to copyright. Instead of handcuffing viewers who want to view films they purchase on multiple devices and otherwise use content legitimately in ways DRM blocks – Streamburst takes two steps to prevent movie piracy.

The first is that every film begins with a 5 second display of the name of the person who purchased that copy, as it appears on their credit card. The second step is that Streamburst strips out an undetectable but unique series of bits from each copy of a file downloaded. The company claims that this signature will survive most editing and format transfers. That idea is that the psychological barrier of being named will stop many people from illegally distributing the files and those whom it doesn’t stop can be identified by the unique series of bits stripped from whatever copies make it into illegal file sharing networks.

It’s not an unbeatable plans by any means, but Streamburst could help make content distributors more comfortable offering their work for download. That’s been the case with the makers of In Search of the Valley, which is now available in high quality, portable and mobile formats all for $8 through Streamburst.

It’s an interesting model and an interesting film. See below for a series of short teasers from the In Search of the Valley account at YouTube.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

SMS call-and-response service Mozes will announce in the morning that the company has raised $5 million in series A venture funding from Norwest Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.  The SMS services space is one of the most active we cover and Mozes has a strikingly smart approach to the market. The Palo Alto based company, founded in 2005, offers almost the most sophisticated feature set of any consumer oriented SMS service I’ve seen yet.

Users send a keyword by text message to 66937 (Mozes) and receive whatever message the owner of that keyword has determined.  In addition to news updates on any topic, keyword owners can send ringtones and perform polls.  Registering your first keyword is free and additional keywords cost $5 per month.   The dominant use cases right now are bands enabling their fans to request updates but the possibilities are endless.  Gabe Rivera, I found out after trying it, scored the keyword “gossip” and sends the newest headline from his gossip memetracker WeSmirch when users text “gossip” to Mozes.  When users go to the Mozes website and enter their phone numbers, they are shown all their most recent received messages, complete with links from the senders.

The service enables a number of other activities by SMS as well.  Users can text any question they have to Mozes and their friends list will be given an opportunity to answer that questions by Google Talk IM.  Users can send notes to themselves by entering “.n” before any note they want to store in their Mozes account online. (.n nice hair, singer guy.)  Links to MySpace and Facebook user profiles can be saved by sending the social network’s name followed by the username.  Amazon affiliate links to books can be saved in you Mozes account by texting “book” and the ISBN number.  That way the next time you are at a bar and someone recommends a book to you, you can save the book by ISBN and remember who sent it via their Facebook profile link!  

Ok, so that may not be realistic but the moral of the story is that Mozes gives ample opportunities for users to send a whole lot of text messages.  The standard business model for SMS services is to receive a share of the SMS fee for each message sent to the service from the carriers.

This call-and-response model sounds less annoying though also less sticky than the model used by TextMarks, another SMS company profiled here this week.  I think it’s a very smart approach. The only issue it raises in my mind is that messages are driven by keywords and prime (short, memorable) keywords are inevitably in short supply. The name “Mozes” is far enough from the number 411, 0 or whatever other catchy point of access  previous generations used that adding long keywords could make the service too onerous for ongoing use.  If usable keywords prove to be a finite resource, that could be a problem.

The feature set, approach to markets and direct path to monetization make Mozes look like a money printing machine, albeit one that prints money in very small increments.

The already highly competitive startpage space saw an interesting new play tonight when YourMinis.com relaunched with a changed site and a new strategy.  

YourMinis is a beautiful aggregation of RSS feeds and web functionality that competes with Pageflakes, Netvibes and a long list of other startpage services.  YourMinis reports having more than 800,000 user accounts but remains well behind its leading competitors.  It does score high in the Wow department – I’ve never added a live PandaCam from the San Diego Zoo to Netvibes with two clicks, for example.

Just minutes ago the site relaunched with an HTML home page placing new emphasis on highlighting users, featured widgets and topical widget collections.  The startpage has been moved to yourminis.com/start Over the next few weeks the company will roll out a public API for developers to use in building their own YourMinis widgets.  

The company will also demonstrate integration with Apollo at the Adobe conference next week – meaning that YourMinis widgets will be able to be constructed on the web and used on the desktop.

Highlighting the social in a startpage application sounds interesting, but I’m not sure how much demand there is for it.  I would love to be proven wrong about that – may a million minis bloom and be gobbled up by users hungry for well compiled startpage tabs.  Looking at the featured Chicago Cubs page that appears on the left (as a mini mini, if you will) I can imagine the appeal.  Top blogs, video sources and other dynamic feeds on a given topic compiled by someone who wants to share their knowledge on that topic.  Unfortunately things like that have been tried many times already. Presumably being ugly isn’t the only problem with Squidoo, for example.

A good API and Apollo integration could be interesting but I think the strength of YourMinis will remain the sharp visual appeal of the service and its solid handling of the basics.  If that’s not good enough to build traction for the company in the face of as much competition as it faces, I don’t know what will be.

A new open source cross-site social networking service called Explode launched today and looks like a very appealing alternative to the now Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog.  Built by UK open-source social network provider Curverider (whose primary product, Elgg, is similar to PeopleAggregator), Explode offers an embeddable widget that links out to users’ respective profile pages on any social network but allows commenting and befriending in one aggregated location.  I found Explode via Steve O’Hear’s The Social Web, one of my new favorite blogs.

Explode users can search for other users by interest tag, they can view each others’ Facebook style “comment walls,” and users can access their site’s traffic stats for free using the javascript widget that Explode provides.  Users of MySpace, Vox and other javascript hostile networking sites can post an image widget that simply links out to their page on Explode.  The javascript widget will display the most recent of a person’s friends to have done “something online” according to the least clear part of the service’s FAQ.  

MyBlogLog has been a fascinating success story – it’s very appealing to see the faces of people who have been reading your blog.  People are willing to expose a lot of personal information in exchange for the experience.  The service’s explosive growth, if you will, combined with its underlying data capture capabilities lead to a Yahoo! acquisition.

Unfortunately MyBlogLog has been plagued by problems.  Spammers (nothing personal Mr. Online-Pharmacy, thanks for reading my blog) are relatively easy to block from your widget but identity problems have been a bigger challenge.  From my face appearing in comments left by my friend after I borrow his computer to my boss’s face appearing in comments I leave because we co-author the same blog to Michael Arrington’s dog’s face appearing next to comments I leave around the web for who knows what reason – MyBlogLog cookies have a tendency to get mixed up.  This month’s spate of random invitations to be added as co-author other users’ blogs was just the most recent issue.  On top of it all, I now find myself unable to gracefully deny having read a post on someone’s blog once my face has appeared in their sidebar.

Even if these problems were all solved, there’s a level of data capture by Yahoo! via the service, and subsequent lack of access on the part of users, that’s disconcerting.  You can opt out of a lot in MyBlogLog and still use the service, but it’s not at all obvious how to do so. An open source, community based alternative could prove very welcome.

Explode requires that users click a link on a site they visit in order to befriend that site’s author, unlike MyBlogLog’s default addition of users to a site’s community after a given number of visits to that site.  It would be nice if Explode allowed users to add each other as friends while on the Explode site and unless there’s good reason to prohibit it I expect this functionality will be added soon.

The idea of adding a cross-network friendship and commenting community isn’t a shocking innovation, but if Explode can implement it well then it could find strong support among users.  The creators of Explode report that they will soon implement widget skinning, OpenID and an API.  Explode is a simple system, but it solves a very clear problem of siloed social networks without asking people to abandon the services they are already invested in.

IReader 2.0 is a semantic analysis and link preview tool that launched today. Syntactica, the company behind iReader, hopes the browser plug-in will bring its technology back to life after a previous incarnation as a search engine was allegedly shut down by Google. If you’ve seen CoolIris, Browster or Snap then you’re familiar with the idea of a browser plug-in that provides a preview of the page behind a link. What makes the iReader unique is that the software analyses the text behind the link and gives readers a handful of bullet points intended to summarize the most important parts of that text.

Compatible with IE or Firefox on Windows or Mac, the iReader installs very easily. It can be turned off at any time with a right click or control click. The program’s performance varies at launch; some summaries are good and some aren’t. The two second delay between hovering over a link and seeing the small pop-up window is probably unavoidable but is sometimes longer than I care to wait. Of course seeing a pop-up as soon as any link is passed over is annoying as well, so perhaps what’s at issue is that this whole class of tools is unappealing to me.

A quick test of the semantic analysis provides some interesting examples. The iReader does a great job of summarizing OpenID.net – perhaps that’s its true calling, who else do you know that can summarize OpenID clearly? Hovering over the company’s own link results in text with bad enough grammar that it’s distracting. A Google News link for “Brittany Spears Checks Into Rehab” gets no summary at all – perhaps that headline speaks for itself.

I’ll give the iReader an extended trial and perhaps it can surprise me. I can’t help but wonder what else its semantic analysis could better put to use for. (See the previous post on Adaptive Blue for an example of semantic analysis put arguably to better use.) In most cases, the title, context and URL that appears for a link when I hover over it provides sufficient preview for me.

It will be interesting to see what kinds of business models beyond obtrusive advertising emerge for services like this. Analytics could offer interesting opportunities, but pop-up previews could lead to an unhelpful reputation for intrusion that would leave users hesitant to willingly expose their traffic and attention data. Give me a readable summary of the text of all the links I’ve hovered and clicked in a day and I might be interested.

See also Read/Write Web, where Richard MacManus gives iReader a more positive review.

Semantic web Firefox plug-in provider Adaptive Blue announced today that the company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Union Square Ventures.  The company’s product, called Blue Organizer, is a tagging and search tool with an incredible array of features and a focus on parsing the semantic meaning of web pages it interacts with.  Union Square Ventures is most well known for its funding of Del.icio.us prior to the Yahoo! acquisition.  The firm also invested in Feedburner.

Blue Organizer rolled out a series of substantial feature upgrades this week as well; I reviewed the previous version of the product  here in November.

Adaptive Blue is a four person company that was founded one year ago and had been self funded by founder Alex Iskold.  The company’s big break came when the Blue Organizer was selected as an official recommendation on the Firefox 2.0 add-ons page.  User downloads grew from 20k prior to that listing to 130k in November to 340k today.  It’s interesting to see that growth rate has continued since the release of the latest Firefox version.

To get a good idea of Blue Organizer’s power, I recommend either trying the browser plug-in out or reading my previous review of it.  Below is a screenshot to give you a taste of what it looks like when I was on a web page containing a music review and used Blue Organizer.  The product automatically determined that I was reading about music and what search options would be most relevant.   It’s very impressive, but my personal use of the web is focused enough on one topic that it’s topic discerning powers and vertical search are less relevant to me than they might be for more casual web users who read online about things like wine and books.

VideoEgg and its content delivery network Akamai Technologies have announced this morning that the two companies have passed 3 million video uploads together.  Akami provides the webcam capture and video uploading service for users of some AOL sites, Bebo, hi5, Piczo, myYearbook, Dogster, Tagged and others.  

VideoEgg says it’s now serving 15 to 20 million video streams each day. US users consume about 230 million video streams per day, according to ComScore. You might remember that YouTube announced that it hit 100 million streams a day back in July. It’s bandwidth costs were already believed to be well more than $1 million per month by that time.

VideoEgg’s ad network, rolled out late last year and dubbed The Eggnetwork, claims to be the largest ad network for social media sites and it is undoubtedly substantial.  The company’s elegant and unobtrusive banner ads are a model that the rest of the industry is likely to follow.

The combination of white labeling video services for users and offering an ad network for B2B customers is a strategy that appears to be paying off uniquely well for VideoEgg.  It’s frequently discussed as a shining light in the video startup space that’s grown blurry post GooTube.

VideoEgg has received funding from August Capital, First Round Capital and Maveron.  The company was launched about 18 months ago by a team of Yale classmates whose decision to move to Silicon Valley was widely discussed as an example of the area’s continuing importance in the industry.

Two weeks after Viacom ordered Google to take down more than 100,000 allegedly copyrighted videos from YouTube, the media giant is about to sign a content deal with Joost, the Wall Street Journal is reporting tonight.    Joost, the P2P online television service soon to launch from the founders of Skype, is purportedly aimed to challenge traditional TV networks more than it is YouTube.  User generated content will not appear on Joost.  The company has put together a number of smaller deals, including one with Warner, but a Viacom deal would be its biggest yet.

Though near consensus opinion credits copyrighted content as the foundation of YouTube’s success, the competition may be less direct today than some might think.  Original and user generated content now plays a very important roll in making YouTube thrive.  OK Go, Lonelygirl15 and countless other YouTube-born stars have taken on a life of their own.

Viacom pulled out of an effort by major broadcast stations to build a YouTube rival in December, effectively bringing that effort to a halt.  While moving back into safer territory online (if the unlaunched Joost can be called safer) can’t be the company’s ideal solution.  Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman told the WSJ that this partnership was evidence that the company is more than willing to work with online distributors who protect their copyright.

It would be a real loss to the world if the two tiers of creativity, professional and user generated, were forever bifurcated in different distribution channels.  YouTube has signed a number of distribution deals with music studios and others, but its viability as a distribution channel for copyrighted content appears to have decreased since being acquired by Google and failing to bring to market an effective copyright protection technology.  The emergence of viable online alternatives like Joost could spell trouble for any hopes that we will soon be able to watch Beavis & Butthead and Chad Vader all in one convenient location.  

Evan Williams, the man who co-founded blogger.com foundation Pyra Labs with Meg Hourihan, has put his beleaguered product Odeo up for sale.  Odeo is a consumer facing audio service that’s been remarkably high profile about its struggles over the past year; Williams discussed mistakes candidly and bought the company back from investors in October.  The site continues to get respectable traffic and Williams believes he will be able to get a fair price for the whole Odeo package. Williams reports the site saw 684,951 visitors last month, 3,012,921 pageviews and perhaps most importantly these days 1,523,963 Flash plays.

AdSense is reportedly paying for Odeo to survive but that development efforts have stalled since the company launched Twitter, an SMS service that’s a favorite among Bay Area web aficionados.  Another Evan Williams company, AudioBlogger, was shuttered in November.  

People close to Odeo had said that it was changing focus away from the company’s original mission and towards other types of media more than a year ago.  Browser based audio messaging is something that a number of other companies, including Evoca and MyChingo, are also trying to make work.  Much like user generated video – it’s hard to monetize.  SMS services, with money changing hands with every user action, is a different game.  It’s one that allows for a lot of innovation as well; the Twittr team is working on microformats for example.

As for Odeo, Williams says that a putting something up for sale doesn’t have to be a sign of desperation and in fact indicates that the seller believes it has value.  Williams presumably paid more than $5 million for the company when he bought it back from his investors last year.  It will be interesting to see whether anyone wants to spend some good money on it now and what they will do with it.

Last week we saw first Yahoo! and then Dell launch sites that were largely acknowledged to be Digg inspired.  Digg may not have invented the vote-on-news motif but it may have been most important in popularizing the paradigm so far.  Now LiveSide, a great place to follow all things Live.com, reports on three European Microsoft sites currently in Beta that better embody the ethic of Digg than any of the other big players have yet.

Called MSN Reporter, the service is being tested in the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway.  Users can submit links from any domain on the web.  Other users can then vote stories up or down and leave comments.  The sites are seeing a fair amount of traffic, approaching a total of 1 million visitors per month after two months in beta.

Two things are most striking about MSN Reporter.  First, these social news experiments are already being leveraged in the heart of MSN’s larger online properties – nl.msn.com for example displays the top four MSN Reporter stories right on the front page.  AOL certainly doesn’t put the top Netscape stories on its front page – there’s a fairly arduous editorial process required just to get stories from the sprawling Weblogs Inc. network onto AOL proper.  For MSN to put top social news stories on the front page of a primary site is a big deal.

The second big step taken by MSN Reporter is that unlike supposed Digg clones at Yahoo!, Dell and AOL’s Netscape – MSN Reporter users are able to submit links to pages completely outside of MSN control and no effort is made to keep readers tied to the MSN domain when they visit those sites.  Reporter is an important sign that for at least one big player, walled content gardens aren’t as set in stone as we might think.  Digg was a key market leader in demonstrating that a site can win in terms of traffic by letting its users point each other off site.  Monetization is a big question that remains for these sites, but MSN appears willing in Europe at least to experiment meaningfully with the approach.  

There are certainly differences between MSN Reporter and Digg, the most notable being the ability to vote stories down as well as up and the absence of substantial user profiles.  Digg has arguably gained a lot of steam from the top users whom until recently won bragging rights from an onsite list of their names and contributions.

Despite those differences, Digg’s launch in 2004 marked the beginning of a shift towards accessibility and popularity in social news that SlashDot in 1997, Del.icio.us in 2003 and Reddit in 2005 did not.  If MSN Reporter spreads beyond these 3 beta sites and continues to be placed on the front page of MSN sites – I think MSN may go down in history as the first major player to leverage deep integration of the social news paradigm.

Jyte is a new service that leverages OpenID to allow users to start a discussion on any “claim” they care to make. Other users can then vote and discuss those claims.  Users can give each other credibility points regarding any topic by tag.  It’s a nice, full featured site that could come in handy for all kinds of different discussions.  It’s more timely than ever now that OpenID is gaining more widespread support every day. The best thing about OpenID is that it allows a single sign-in across all sites the support the protocol. If you have an AOL/AIM user name, you can now use it to log in at all kinds of different sites, including Jyte.

Jyte is a nice, lightweight service with a lot of possibilities.  There’s a lot of sophisticated social networking type features included. If you’re looking for a polling feature with more personal accountability and context this could be just what you’re looking for.  The site is a product of Portland, Oregon’s JanRain.

You can log in to Jyte with any OpenID login, which as of last week includes AOL.  I used JanRain’s MyOpenID.com service, but if you want to participate in a discussion you can also log in like this: http://openid.aol.com/

As you can see above, there’s a nice embed function.  Claims can also be subscribed to by RSS.  Users can make related claims and there’s a similar claim filter upon submission to decrease duplicates.  Participants in Jyte discussions can be limited by group membership via the API’s “social whitelisting” feature.

Only a few things have disappointed me about the service so far.  The embeddable widget appears to be very limited in the length of the claim displayed.  It would also be nice if I was given the option to log in from inside the iframe widget instead of launching a new page. Finally, as you can see via the claim below, if I make a claim just for discussion I’m automatically listed as being in agreement with it. In this case, I don’t.

I think Jyte provides a good look into the cutting edge of online conversation.  It may also prove useful in and of itself.  Of course that’s likely only true if OpenID sees widespread use.  That’s what I think – how about you?

The company SimpleStar released a new version of its PhotoShow product Friday and brought the popular photo and video sharing service up to speed with a number of developments pioneered by early adopters you’re more likely to have read about here on TechCrunch.  The service now supports the social sharing and online categorization that’s typical of other media sharing services; the change is comparable to what Yahoo! Photos did last summer when it changed for a largely private service into a much more Flickr inspired phenomenon. Photoshow combines sharing online with a desktop application for managing your media.

The most notable thing about SimpleStar, though, is the company’s incredible acumen in business development.    The company reports an amazing 20,000 new installations of its desktop software every day, thanks to partnerships with companies like Comcast, Walgreen’s and Wolf Camera.  SimpleStar received $6 million in funding from Venrock a year and a half ago.

There’s a certain flavor to PhotoShow, consisting of the product’s price point ($40), Windows-only desktop application, being in bed with big cable companies and ISPs and the photos of software in a cardboard box all over its website despite being available primarily by download.  That particular flavor makes me want to turn my snobbish Web 2.0 nose up at the company – but the fact of the matter is, they know how do get the job done.  

PhotoShow monetizes the initial product, an inexplicable upgrade for $20 that apparently consists of a number of graphic themes for your photos (”Kids, Love and Patriotic Theme Packs” etc.), DVDs of your media and anything else it can think to charge users for.  

SimpleStar says its PhotoShow service appeals not to early adopters but the the last 2/3 of the adoption curve.  It appears to be successful so far in reaching out to that market; though Alexa does indicate that the humble Photoblog.com gets 4 times as much traffic as PhotoShow.com – that’s probably less relevant because of PhotoShow’s reliance on desktop software.  

I personally find the service patronizing and obnoxious, but perhaps that says more about me than it does PhotoShow.  There’s no doubt that the company deserves recognition for its large partnerships and decision to add more social features to the service with this newest upgrade.  It may be a prime example of the strategy many people recommend – focus on making money, let the early adopters take the biggest risks and implement what sticks with the market later.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

In what could be an interesting sign of things to come industry wide, Dell today launched a customer relations site called IdeaStorm.  Users can submit product and feature requests, policy changes or whatever else they care to share with the Dell community.  Those submissions are then voted on Digg style.  Dell’s move follows just one day after Yahoo! unveiled a similar site.

The company also unveiled StudioDell, a video sharing site focused on Dell issues that contains both company video and submissions from users.  Comments are allowed on IdeaStorm but not on StudioDell.

The company fully acknowledges its intellectual debt to Digg, calling IdeaStorm “a combination of message board and Digg.com.”

Jeremiah Owyang calls this a nod to the idea that “intranets are anachronisms,” though the second most popular submission as I write this is a call for a separate, internal IdeaStorm site for Dell employees.   That makes me question how enthusiastic Dell’s employees will be about IdeaStorm.  The leading suggestion is the make Dell more ecologically responsible.

I think it’s more a testimony to the usefulness of paradigms made popular by Digg and YouTube.  Like the Yahoo! Suggestion site that was launched just yesterday – Dell’s IdeaStorm looks a lot like Digg.  Many people were very critical of Yahoo’s move but both Michael Arrington in yesterday’s coverage and yours truly in this post support what these companies are doing.  

These types of sites are just plain smart.  If web lovers are critical of big companies trying to patent processes that are logical and widespread (like social networking or mash ups), isn’t it unfair to turn around and criticise them later for humbly following the lead of trailblazing startups?

You don’t see outrage about Meneame or Hugg trouncing on the ways of Digg.  Countless companies now allow user upload of videos and only the most unimaginative people say they are all trying to rip-off YouTube.  I think Dell’s new sites are a brave move that many more companies will follow.  Hopefully they’ll push this trend of online two-way communication to the limit and listen to what their users have to say.

In response to requests from probably thousands of other online publishers, Google announced today that it will begin reporting the number of subscribers any RSS feed has through Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage.  Other feed reading Google products may be included in the future but these are the two big ones.

FeedBurner requires reporting from feed reader vendors in order for their subscribers to be counted. Feedburner’s Rick Klau said this morning that the Google announcement is good news but reminded readers that Feedburner offers additional statistics including the number of subscribers who actually view your feed and click throughs on individual items.

Publishers can expect to see their Feedburner subscriber numbers include Google Reader numbers Saturday morning but the real difference will be most noticeable on Tuesday or Wednesday when Feedburner numbers hit their weekly peak.

We’ve covered Google Reader extensively here in the past and believe its newest version to be one of if not the best online reader on the market.  The question of adoption has been a nagging one, however.  Hitwise reported last month that Google Reader gets less traffic than industry leader Bloglines and, strangely, Rojo.  On an individual publisher level at least, the question of Google Reader’s number of users should be put to rest tomorrow morning.

For futher coverage of this announcement, see the discussion on TechMeme.

The new “all legal” P2P service from Azeurus called Zudeo announced this morning that they saw more than 1 million unique visitors last month in the service’s first full month online. The announcement provides great evidence that P2P is a viable avenue for legal distribution of online video.

We covered the company’s content deal with the BBC in December and the company said at launch that its goal was to offer content from 20 major TV and film studios. Parent company Azureus reports more than 140 million downloads in 100 countries of its BitTorrent platform in 100 countries. The company has raised $12 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures and BV Capital.

Today’s Zudeo announcement will provide an interesting reference point for the eventual launch of Joost. Both companies will bring offer online distribution of commercially produced, high quality video content and may compete for eyeballs with low-quality user generated content.

Our previous coverage of Zudeo can be found here.

Two new health related services came our way this morning; they couldn’t be more different but both could prove useful.  

The first is Healthline’s new Symptom Search.  The successful online medical resource site Heathline has added a new search function that is definitely worth a look.  Symptom search lets you enter one or multiple symptoms you’re experiencing and displays licenced articles from medical professionals about conditions that could be causing those symptoms.  It’s an elegant tool that brings back results ranging from conditions that could cause just the symptoms you identify through more serious conditions that could be indicated by other symptoms in addition to the ones you’ve identified.  

For example, if you type in “cough” you’ll be shown first an article explaining that “Coughing is an important way to keep your throat and airways clear. However, excessive coughing may mean you have an underlying disease or disorder.”  Subsequent articles become increasingly serious; if for example you are actually experiencing a cough, sharp rib pain, a fever and you’re hot to the touch then you should check out the article on Bronchitis.  

Symptom search is integrated into Healthline’s primary search function and has a page of its own.  The company claims it’s got the first symptom search service on the web. Whether that’s true or not, this one looks particularly good.  This is a great example of quality vertical search that’s likely to be used extensively.

If you’re in need of a more social solution – CheckTonight is a new service which purports to offer online verification of negative STD test results from your doctor.  (Your test results via your doctor, that is, your doctor’s night life is none of any one’s business.)

CheckTonight users print up a medical release form, take it to their doctor’s office and presuming your test results are negative you can become a CheckTonight member.  (For a $25 annual fee – that’s like the cost of 5 drinks at a bar!)  Members must be retested every 6 months and positive test results are never stored in the system.   Then, when you’re getting frisky with someone you’ve just met – you can get a text message from CheckTonight verifying that you’re Doctor-certified STD free!  (For an additional $3 fee per text message.)  If you don’t make the cut at CheckTonight, see our coverage of Prescription4Love.

I don’t know about you, but I either trust some one’s word or I don’t – no text message delivered to their phone is going to convince me to change my sexual practices.  But let’s not get into that here – I’m as good as married anyway.

If Facebook offered a service like this, it might have legs.  Maybe. Some things just aren’t meant to be web services though and I’d contend that STD status confirmation is one of them.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.  Marshall does not have a cough or any STDs, in case you were wondering.

Sendori is a newly launched service that most of us will never see – and they could make sure we don’t end up seeing web pages defiled by the putrid stench of domain squatters either.  That’s the most charitable way to look at this very interesting Sunyvale company.   Sendori will auction off redirects from parked domains through their servers and to sponsored advertiser pages.

There’s a $2000 minimum buy-in for advertisers and the company is just expanding beyond very small beta tests now. Advertisers bid on a per-visitor basis.  Sendori is currently running on angel funding.

The company’s patent pending technology will use cookies to ensure that visitors are redirected to the same page for 30 consecutive days even if the winning bidder has changed.  Sendori will also track sales conversion rates for visitors it redirects to your site, it will allow advertisers to geotarget redirects and it will (try to) monitor and block click-fraud automatically.

The idea is that “domain portfolio holders,” as they are called in polite company, aren’t effectively able to monetize their domains right now with AdSense or other ads placed on those domains.  Sendori believes that conversion rates are much higher when visitors are directed to a page with a single vendor’s recognized brand than it is on a page full of ads.  That makes sense to me.

They believe that 10 to 15% of web traffic is via direct navigation or entering URLs – though keyword.com type URLs as Sendori will auction must be a fraction of that traffic compared to just typing in Google.com  or your webmail URL.  

Advertising on parked domains is undeniably big business though, and redirects from squatted domains as a form of advertising itself could likely be big as well.  Sendori founder Ofer Ronen assured me that the domain buying industry has cleaned itself up quite a bit since the early days, though he said an estimated 20% of it is still made up of misspelled brand names. (Ronen cites Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets on that number.)  While brand advertisers must be frustrated about domain squatters throwing ads on pages mistaken for theirs -imagine their frustration when they find that those pages are up for auction.  Perhaps they should just pay the squatting piper.  

The company says it will prohibit adult themed domains from participating but may create a separate marketplace for those types of sites at a later date.  Classy.

None the less, I think their strategy is a relatively good one.  Perhaps they will redirect me away from parked pages to something topical and I’ll be able to forget that this whole part of the industry exists.  There’s certainly money to be made with such a plan.

The Vista marketing challenge saw an interesting new development today with the announcement that Microsoft has hired Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg as Enthusiast Evangelist.  Gartenberg says in a blog post on his move that he will “find, engage and work with enthusiasts and other influencers and show them all the cool stuff that Microsoft is doing. In short, it’s our [department's] job to act as the bridge between Microsoft and end users.”

The experiment with Robert Scoble as Microsoft’s blogging point man must have worked well, as the company has now hired two very high profile commentators to carry out functions similar to what Scoble did.  Bringing Jon Udell over from InfoWorld in December was the first of two notable coups.

Gartenberg has served as the Jupiter Research vice president and research director for the Personal Technology & Access and Custom Research groups.  He’s a highly respected analyst who was quoted extensively by press upon the release of Vista.  ”The challenge,” Gartenberg said about Vista two weeks ago, “is that it’s the only product on the market that has to appeal to the CIOs of Fortune 500 companies and my mother all at the same time.”  Presumably Gartenberg’s mother is now more favorably inclined than she might have been before.

The announcement has been received warmly but a few questions have been raised.  It’s a perfect example of one of today’s leading questions:  is the benefit of bringing a respected public figure onto the payroll greater than the potential loss of credibility that person risks?

Hiring social media power users to evangelize for your company’s product is becoming an increasingly common practice.  From Microsoft’s hiring Gartenberg and Udel to startups like Revver, who has Micki Krimmel, and Pluggd – who recently hired Drew Olanoff.  (Disclosure: post TechCrunch, I took a job doing similar work at SplashCast and I feel great about it.) The pioneer in this field, Robert Scoble, sometimes faces criticism for an alleged lack of clarity in the business model and editorial independence of the startup he joined, PodTech. Here’s one of Scoble’s responses.

Pure editorial independence may have always been an illusion.  Full disclosure may solve the problem all together.  What better way is there for a tech company, whose own executives are unlikely to be skilled in the use of new social media, to embrace the possibilities?  Consumers want corporate transparency but you’d better believe that companies are going to hired skilled practitioners if they are going to engage in the conversations that blogging and podcasting make possible.

Most pertinently perhaps, can an All-Star communications lineup make up for the PR mess and widely known problems that Microsoft and its software already face?  

Here’s some more of Gartenberg’s thoughts on the position.

Why Microsoft? There’s a revolution going on. A battle for the hearts and minds of consumers in terms of their digital lives. I firmly believe that Microsoft is the only company that will enable the seamless transition for users to move in and out of the different aspects of their lives. In short, no one else comes close to presenting a complete, unified and integrated view of the digital home of the 21st century.

Whether it’s work, school or home, Microsoft has the potential to change lives even more than they already have. Who else could deliver mission critical technology to the business world, create the best Smartphone operating system, build a successful platform for console games (and pioneer online and connected play) and take on the iPod. All at the same time.

In a substantial upgrade this morning, the TV listing discovery service MeeVee has integrated a number of online media types along with its broadcast TV listings, including viral videos.  It’s a good move that will make the company all the more relevant in a world that is increasingly blurring the line between traditional and online media.

MeeVee’s basic service allows users to input their favorite actors, genres and keywords to be cross referenced with their local TV providers listings for a personalized viewing schedule.  Though this is fun to use, as Michael Arrington pointed out it’s relevance is somewhat mitigated by the widespread move towards time shifted TV viewing.  The company also provides a widget that can be placed off-site to display what you’re watching on television – though I personally couldn’t care less how your personal interests intersect with your local TV listings.

Note that the company’s site is not Mac friendly – it crashes Safari every time I open the front page and requires a WMV viewer to watch the TV it offers.

Today’s addition of online video from a number of sites functions like a splicing of search feeds run along side your MeeVee TV recommendations.  That’s smart.  I don’t know why more companies aren’t using online video search feeds to facilitate personalized discovery.  

MeeVee’s blog is one of the most prolific of any vendor blog I watch; the company writes every day about TV news.  That’s built a strong brand awareness throughout the blogosphere. Today the company added a “blog central” section to the site, where hand picked posts from various entertainment blogs around the web can be found.  They are presented nicely.  In most cases, the company told me, those posts are used in a content exchange though I’m guessing that some other compensation may occur at times.  If that content proves wildly compelling to users I wouldn’t be surprised to see this become a more serious part of what the company does.  The blog central section of the site is, at launch at least, not positioned very prominently on the site however.

MeeVee was rumored to have raised approximately $8 million in funding last August.  If MeeVee could build some sort of tie in with PVRs and could send these recommended online videos to your TV set, I think its prospects could be greatly improved.  I’m sure they are thinking the same thing.

For now, MeeVee does well in the “wow” department and could be useful for some people.  It’s moving in a good direction and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it become an important player in this space if it can pull of a couple more big moves.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.