San Francisco startup RocketOn, the company behind a virtual world platform that bares the same name, has more tricks up its sleeve and is today showing off the second product it created.

The web application it’s introducing today is dubbed Blerp, and its ambition is to turn the Web into a giant interactive message board by making it possible for visitors to add text comments and multimedia to existing web pages and share them with their friends.

Under the motto ‘layer the web!’, Blerp aims to enable people to enrich web pages with an additional layer of content with the ability to let others join in on the fun at any time. RocketOn is calling the concept Hyperlayers, and if the idea makes you think of social annotation services like Reframe It, Diigo or Fleck, that’s because it’s taking an extremely similar route with Blerp.

The European Commission today announced that it has fined Intel a record €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) for abusing its dominance in the market for computer chips to exclude its biggest (and frankly, the only serious) rival AMD by paying computer manufacturers Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and NEC as well as retailers to postpone, cancel or downright avoid using or selling the latter’s products.

That’s one hell of a fine, considering the previous record for similar abuses in the EU was ‘only’ €497 million (Microsoft, back in 2004).

The European Commission has ordered Intel to stop the exclusion practices immediately, and said it would closely and actively monitor Intel’s compliance with its decision. E.U. regulators first began investigating Intel in 2001, after AMD filed a complaint in Brussels the year before.

Over the last few months celebrities have become something of a currency on the social web as services vie to attract big-name stars (and gather the resulting media coverage and new users in the process). Twitter has garnered the most attention for its roster, which includes celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah. Facebook too has been making strides in this area, especially since releasing its redesigned ‘Pages’ that allow celebrities and brands to broadcast their updates to fans.

Another contender in the celebrity hunt is social network platform Ning, which is already home to a number of social networks dedicated to celebrities, politicians, and musicians. Today, the company has announced that it has forged a partnership with The Collective, a management company whose clients include Enrique Iglesias, to create custom networks for a number of The Collective’s biggest clients.

Ashton Kutcher got his start on the small screen. His roles in That 70s Show and development of the MTV show Punk’d (which is being kind of reborn with Ustream) allowed him to become a movie star. But these days he seems more interested in using the web to further his career. His recent race with CNN to be the first user with a million Twitter followers was just one facet of what he’s doing online. He also has his own web-based show Blah Girls. But now he’s sending that the opposite way: Back to television.

Katalyst Media, the production company Kutcher runs with Jason Goldman, has signed a deal with CBS Television Distribution (CTD) to distribute Blah Girls on television. Specifically, the show will run as one-minute interstitials between segments on the entertainment magazine show, The Insider. While the show has run on the web since its launch during TechCrunch50 last June, a television distribution deal has always been a part of the broader goal for the content. And CBS has a larger development deal with Katalyst Media, so this is simply an extension of that.

iLike, the popular music discovery site with a huge presence on social networks, is launching a set of new syndication services for musicians. Beginning tonight, iLike now offers extensive integration with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, allowing artists to distribute content to each of their online presences from a single control panel. In addition to these, the company is also launching a new self-serve platform for building customized iPhone applications for artists, allowing them to establish themselves on the App Store with a minimum amount of effort and resources.

While most readers probably associate iLike with music playlists and streaming, the service is also home to 300,000 artists who use its services to help manage and distrbute their content. Before today’s annoucement, the service offered more limited syndication options, allowing them send data through the iLike Facebook application, its iGoogle widget, and an iTunes plugin. But the new options go much further.

Lots of heat is being put on Facebook over Holocaust denial, ranging from blogs to CNN to pissed off moms who still can’t post pictures of their breasts on their Facebook pages. Facebook is standing firm in their defense of the deniers.

Meanwhile, MySpace is just hoping no one looks their way. In an email to MySpace forum moderators today, MySpace asked moderators to “keep an eye out for anti-semitism and derogatory comments.” Based on the text of the email, some of which has been redacted, it looks like moderators are expected to remove this content promptly and even perhaps ban offending users.

MySpace’s motivation to deal with the problem may be fairly sad (just to avoid bad press), but at least they’re doing the right thing by getting this hate speech off the site. MySpace’s terms of use are similar to Facebook’s – specifically hate speech is banned.

Here’s the email:

Twitter is officially getting dumbed down.

For the second time in less than two months, Twitter has changed its @reply system, this time by removing an option that has existed for many months in an effort to appease confused newcomers.

The basic premise behind the @reply system is that it allows you to create a semi-public conversation with another Twitter user. To prevent you from having to listen in to conversations you might not care about, the default setting has long been to only show these @replies if you were following both people in the conversation. And that’s the choice most people stuck with.

But there was an option to receive all @reply messages from any users you were following. This led to an increase in noise, but it also exposed you to new Twitter users and conversations that you might have otherwise missed out on. I’ve had it turned on for over a year. But apparently that option has confused too many people, so Twitter is killing it.

Earlier today Google announced that it was going to begin limited support of RDFa, a framework that allows web developers to incorporate structured metadata into their sites. To most people, this probably doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but it’s an important step that may indicate that the search giant is going to embrace structured data on the web – something that it has long shied away from.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of the RDFa standard (if you’d like a more thorough explaination you can find one here and here). But the benefits of using such semantic tagging can be seen in a few basic examples. If I was to write a post that mentioned “The President” without naming him, Google probably wouldn’t realize that I was talking about President Obama – it might think I was referring to another US president, or perhaps the leader of a company. But using RDFa I could tag the words “The President” with “Barack Obama”. That tag would be visible to machines spidering the page for indexing (resulting in smarter search results), but wouldn’t be shown to users reading the post.

Today saw the launch of two new real-time search engines, from OneRiot and Tweetmeme. While the two are slightly different in ways that I went into earlier, all that really matters are the results you get. So I put those two to the test along with Twitter Search, Google Search, FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler. To see which would give the best results based on a current event.

One bit of news I was interested in was the space shuttle, because it received some damage today while venturing into space. I decided to do a pretty generic search for “Space Shuttle,” since that is likely what most people would enter of all the possible combinations of words. Here are the results:

Celebrities love Twitter, right? Just look around, Ashton Kutcher, Jimmy Fallon, P Diddy — they won’t shut up on it or about it. But not every celebrity loves it. Take hip hop artist Kanye West, for example. Apparently mad about people pretending to be him on Twitter, he went on a Peter Finch-style rant today on his blog about the service.

He specifically calls out the “heads of Twitter” a few times. Let’s see if @ev @biz and @jack are listening. (Update: yup) – Hopefully, he doesn’t have the caps keylock on for nothing. Here’s what he had to say:

In 1999 eBay was under heavy fire for allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia. Their policy approach at the time mirrors almost exactly what Facebook is doing now with Holocaust denial groups, namely banning behavior in certain countries to comply with local laws, but allowing it everywhere else.

From a 1999 New York Times article: “eBay…said that the company already prohibited the sale of such items in Germany because they are outlawed there. But he said it generally polices the sales of banned items only after receiving complaints from users”

From a PCMag article in May 2009 on Facebook: “We have recently begun to block content by IP in countries where that content is illegal, including Nazi-related and Holocaust denial content in certain European countries,” the Facebook spokesman said. “The groups in question have been blocked in the appropriate countries.”

By 2001, though, eBay had changed its policies to ban all sales of Nazi memorabilia across its sites. The ban includes sales of Holocaust denial items. The current policy is here.

Part of the balancing act eBay uses when making a decision on a listing is is to ban items which “lack substantial social, artistic, or political value.” It goes on to state “this includes items that may be deemed inappropriate or insensitive to victims of natural disasters or human tragedies.”

Philip “Pud” Kaplan, founder of FuckedCompany and Adbrite, is adding another Twitter application to his name. He recently created both Tweetname, a domain name registering site and Fast140, a Twitter speed typing game. Now Pud is launching Flirt140, a flirting and dating site for Twitter.

A free service, Flirt140 allows you to search for Twitter users by gender, geographic area and keyword. The site uses oAuth to connect to your Twitter account. Kaplan says a proprietary algorithm is used to determine gender of Twitter users and claims that it’s pretty accurate.

Just when it appeared that Web 2.0 may be abandoning the UGC ship for premium content, Break.com, a social video site for guys, is upping its budget to add more user generated content to the site. Through Break’s “stimulus package,” the site is increasing its investment in content purchased from its users and other amateur filmmakers by 50%.

Break.com, which had 3.8 million unique visitors worldwide in March according to Comscore, buys original user generated content from its audience. Break says that it spends between $200 and $1000 per video. Additionally, Break.com licenses professional content from a number of sources, including the NBA, for a higher amount. Break.com also produces content internally. In total, Break has acquired over 2,000 clips. This year, Break says it has purchased more than 140 user-submitted videos that have been seen published on the site.

Real Time is the new black. Everyone’s doing it, or wants to be doing it. Even Google says it’s one of the biggest challenges in search today (making sense of all that real time data).

So it isn’t surprising that people are making fun of it. Jonathan Abrams (who has mocked Incubators of Incubators and Feed aggregators, now goes after Real Time with FutureFeed, which “answers the simple question: What will you be doing?”

“Are you sick of hearing what your friends are doing after the fact?” FutureFeed asks. “FutureFeed tells you what your friends are doing before they do it!”

Like Google Future Search, this is a joke. And it’s a good one, at least for those of us who’ve jumped on the Real Time bandwagon and haven’t looked back. Enjoy.

When he’s not mocking the Internet, Jonathan builds a real startup at Socializr.

Looking at Twitter’s visitor growth charts every month is like watching a rocket go to the moon. ComScore released its U.S. numbers for April, 2009 today and it shows Twitter reaching 17 million unique visitors in the U.S. during the month, an 83 percent increase from March when Twitter had 9.3 million domestic visitors. While Twitter nearly doubled its audience in April, its monthly growth rate did temper down from the 131 percent growth in March.

Given Twitter’s rocket-like trajectory, it is appropriate that just about two hours ago we saw the first tweet from space. But it still has plenty of places to grow here at home. As it spreads into the mainstream, it is getting a boost from celebrities and TV. For instance, now Nightline is developing a new “Twittercast” show called NightTline which will incorporate viewer feedback via Twitter. If Twitter is experiencing a 60 percent abandonment rate every month, as Nielsen recently suggested, those people sure are being replaced at an awfully fast clip. Meanwhile, everyone and their mother is trying to get into real-time search, an area Twitter seems to have a lock on for now.

Online survey tools are a dime a dozen, but you will not be sorry you’ve checked this one out.

I signed up for Survs earlier this year because I’ve tried a number of online survey applications in the past and none have proven to suit my specific needs so far, and I wanted to see if it was a match for the likes of SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang and countless others I’ve tested. Unfortunately, the startup was in private beta and refused to grant me access for months on end, until today. As just announced on the company’s blog, Survs is now in public beta and free for all to take for a ride.

Casual head to head games, also known as synchronous or real-time games, are becoming increasingly popular on the web. Geewa, Zynga, and Playfish all offer real-time synchronous social games where you can play against another player live, not against the computer.

Resistor Productions has merged a synchronous game with role-playing, blood, guts and gore aimed at adults called Disciple. Known as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), Disciple is delivered entirely over the web browser (no separate download is required).

Zune fans (all 12 of you), I have some bad news. There will be no new Zune announcement in June, apparently that was just a mix up on Microsoft’s part linking to the wrong Twitter account. More importantly, it also means there will be no ZunePhone announcement of any kind. But there are still potentially some new details on that front today thanks to ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley.

Foley claims that a “trustworthy source” has given her the hardware specs for Windows Mobile 7 Chassis 1, believed the project Microsoft is calling “Pink.” While it may not be exactly a “ZunePhone” per se, Pink is thought to be a project to build a more iPhone-like mobile device that uses the Zune software mixed with Windows Mobile — though it would likely be built by a third party. Like Google with Android, it’s thought that Microsoft would create an outline of specs it would like to see from hardware vendors, and that’s what this list Foley has is. And it’s very interesting for a few reasons. None bigger than the word, “multi-touch.”

One of the next frontiers of search is taking all of the unstructured data spread helter-skelter across the Web and treat it like it is sitting in a nice, structured database. It is easier to get answers out of a database where everything is neatly labeled, stamped, and categorized. As the sheer volume of stuff on the Web keeps growing, keyword search keeps getting closer to its breaking point. Adding structure to the Web is one way to make sense of all that data, and Google is starting the tackle the problem with a Google Labs project called Google Squared, which Marissa Mayer mentioned earlier today at the company’s Searchology briefing.

Google Squared extracts data from Web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. Michael was at the event and got a personal demo (see video after the jump).

Loopt was the first location-based iPhone app to get a lot of buzz. It’s a social network that lets you keep track of where your friends are with the help of the iPhone’s GPS. Since it launched in the App Store on day 1 in July of last year, several other competitors have come along including Google with its Latitude service (though it’s not yet available on the iPhone). Now Loopt appears ready to strike back with Loopt 2.0.

The screenshot we received appears to show what Loopt is going for with this new version. The second button in the toolbar is now “Places,” something which didn’t exist before. A source close to the company says this is a big part of the new version. We hear this could help the company offer more monetizable features, such as coupons.