Update to our January post: Super blogger Robert Scoble, who has argued that having advertisements on blogs destroys trust, added advertisements to his blog today along with a redesign. At least it’s clear now who scratches Scoble’s back - Seagate.

One thing I do like - the FriendFeed widget that shows his activity stream and comments from readers.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Meet Watercooler, a startup developing social network applications for all the usual suspects - Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster - that allow fans to rally around their favorite sports teams and TV shows.

The Mountain View-based firm raised a previously undisclosed $4M in Series A funding from Canaan Partners this past September. While it’s been developing Facebook apps since July 2007, it just recently launched a corporate website to provide a more unified front to its efforts.

While you may not associate the name “Watercooler” with the more famous app developers Slide and RockYou, as well as SGN and Zynga, the company has created over 700 community-building apps. Watercooler’s installs and active users earns it the #9 spot on Adonomics top Facebook developer list.

Watercooler’s apps focus on particular shows and teams, and give fans an opportunity to discuss recent events, share photos, and take quizzes. The applications can also communicate with each other, allowing for interaction between rival groups, even across the supported social networks. The company’s platform allows the company to produce these applications very quickly, each tailored to a particular show or team.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Mathew Ingram notes that Jimmy Wales's company, Wikia, has unveiled a new version of its search engine. The basic premise of the search engine, allowing users to edit search results the way they can edit Wikipedia pages, is clever. But I think Wales is going to have difficult making the project successful. The fundamental problem, I think, is a matter of raw mathematics: there are far, far more potential web searches than there are pages in Wikipedia. Last month I critiqued the business model of Biographicon, a site that's attempting to create a Wikipedia-style page for everyone. I argued that they're likely to have trouble making it work because any given page is unlikely to have the critical mass of contributors necessary to make the wiki model work. I think Wikia's search engine is likely to suffer from an even more serious case of the same problem. Wikipedia achieves this critical mass by limiting itself to subjects that are "notable." But a search engine can't have those kinds of limits. People want a search engine to have good responses even for (maybe especially for) obscure searches. And by definition, it won't be possible to get a bunch of people to contribute to the page for an obscure search term.

Closely related is the problem of bias. Wikipedia strives to take a neutral point of view, presenting all viewpoints fairly and accurately without passing judgment on which one is correct. This often leads to pages being longer than they would otherwise be, but they tend to be reasonable representations of what various people think on the subject at hand. This approach won't really work with a search engine because people expect the most important search results to be at the top, and deciding which results are the most important is an intrinsically subjective decision. If Wikia's search engine ever became popular, it could be beset by edit wars that would make the infamous Danzig/Gdansk edit war look tame. Companies pay search engine optimization firms thousands of dollars to improve their Google ranks, a successful Wikia search would likely succumb to the same kinds of pressure, and the site appears to lack Wikipedia's well-defined procedures for resolving disputes.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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What it does

PicArtia will get your creative juices flowing. Remember those posters of your favorite celeb made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny little pictures of that celeb? The digital mosaic picture was quite the fad on par with the likes of Magic Eye and America Online. Now there’s an outpour of technology that allows you to create your own photo mosaics. Among them is PicArtia. PicArtia is a web-based application It requires no downloading or installation. Getting started is easy. Just click on the Start Button. PicArtia lets you use pics from your flickr or PhotoBucket account; pics from your hard drive work as well. Mid-Resolution Photo Mosaics are free and you can purchase your own creations for a nominal price. Register to get news and tips.

In their own words

“PicArtia helps you create your photo mosaic online for free. It’s fast and easy to use.”

Why it might be a killer

PicArtia is a fun little tool that’s free to use. It’s great for making cute gifts for mom, dad, or baby and purchasing your creation won’t break the bank.

Some questions

PicArtia has a lot of competition. How will it beat them? What makes them better than the others? Will users be satisfied with the end product?

Updates


 » original news

Picnik has done a lot in the past few months, like make its services readily available for integration amongst other social media-sharing sites, embark on global growth, seek out additional revenue through peripheral products and make all of its services free, in the ad-supported kind of way.

That’s a lot going on, especially as Picnik is striving to stay competitive in the web-based photo editing space. So to help it do so, Picnik has chosen Tribal Fusion as its new ad network. As part of Tribal Fusion’s Brand Certified program, Picnik even gets special treatment and additional advertising opportunities within Tribal Fusion’s network.

This also gives Tribal Fusion an opportunity to strut its stuff, in terms of its vertical advertising capabilities, where it really shines. The types of ads you’ll be seeing as a result will include things like custom skins used for background images, and other floating ads. In providing this type of integrated advertising option, Tribal Fusion and Picnik leverage both of their own strong points and make the ads part of the content with which end users are interacting.

Given Picnik’s demographic and spreading popularity within Facebook and MySpace, such marketing certainly seems better than a simple banner ad, and fits better with Picnik’s distributed access across the web as well.

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Picnik’s Latest Move to Beat Photoshop Express: Global Growth and Mouse Pads
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Picnik MySpace Application is Pretty Darn Cool

Filed under: Gaming, Household

Highly modified foosball tables are a dime a dozen, but this contraption could easily be mistook for some sort of Martian gaming machine at first glance. Dreamed up and crafted by designer Chelpa Ferro, this Tota Treme Terra looks to be a vanilla foosball table with an artsy overhead light and a hodgepodge of speakers wrapped all around. Word on the street has it that the machine belts out sound effects based on the action up above, but sadly, the actual details about this potential ninth wonder of the world are being left to our imaginations.

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The recording industry group known as the IFPI, one with international support from some 1400 companies located all around the globe, has come to terms with a hard truth. No, it hasn’t caved to the pressures of the peer-to-peer crowd. That war is still very much in play. Rather, they understand that children are quite impressional young individuals, and can really absorb things like sponges, good and bad.

So while kids’ minds are still moldable and accepting of all sorts of information, the IFPI is taking the liberty to propagandize or educate them on “legal and safety issues surrounding online music,” according to Nate Andersen of Ars Technica. The international charity Childnet, in cooperation with the recording industry collective, has produced a music download guide that addresses all the right and wrong ways to purchase and manage their content. Oh, and they so wish, parents can sit down for a lesson, too.

Aces. To start, the guide will first be distributed in the UK and Singapore, and will later be sent off to 21 other countries. And, yes, because the technical specifics might fly right over the heads of many of today’s iPod-contained youth, they’ll be pressing adults to show succeeding generations how to convert word to action. Which may seem tedious at first, but take into account the added time spent with the kids, and it’s all good fun in the end.

First, of course, childrens’ elders will have to do some of their own brushing up on what’s legal and what’s not. But all should know that the guide is simply a convenient part of the overall effort to have citizens all across the world play it straight when it comes to consumerism. So before you go out a BitTorrent spree, pick up a copy of the IFPI’s guide. You may just think twice about your frustration with copyright law and various measures to protect what is absolutely, positively not yours to own. At all. Ever.

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© Paul Glazowski for Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us digg
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

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BitTorrent Tracker OiNK.cd Shut Down, Admin Arrested
Yahoo! China Found Guilty of Copyright Infringement
Playing CDs On Your Computer is a “Privilege”
Warner Music Group: Going the Way of the Dodo
Rumor: Google Considering UK Wireless Bid

Del.icio.us fans will be glad to know that they have finally released a Firefox 3-compatible add-on.

As our own Stan Schroeder mentioned last night in a piece titled “Are You Frustrated With Firefox?,” he has held back from switching to Firefox 3 because one of his favorite extensions wasn’t supported. I’ve heard the same argument from many Del.icio.us users. Well, while Stan may still be left out in the cold with many of his preferred add-ons, Del.icio.us users just got upgraded.

The Del.icio.us blog does stress this is a beta release, as it is built for Firefox 3; they explain that some items may break, and ask adventurous beta testers not to issue normal support tickets, but rather to raise issues in a special Yahoo Group. You can head here to download the new Del.icio.us add-on immediately.

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© Sean P. Aune for Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us digg
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

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The idea behind BlogRize is that the "wisdom of the crowds" works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize's solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most...blogs like the one you're reading now, for example.

About BlogRize

You may have heard about BlogRize's launch earlier this month, when they kicked off their private beta with pre-built communities for a handful of top sites, including ReadWriteWeb.

The way BlogRize works is by allowing members to join the community of their favorite blog or blogs. Within that community, the popular news stories are the ones recommended by the other readers of that blog. These stories will be a mix of not only that particular blog's articles, but any articles the community thinks are interesting. 

Our BlogRize Community

By focusing only on the news that a reader of ReadWriteWeb finds interesting, for example, you wouldn't have to sift through loads of posts you don't care about to find the best news. Instead, the content you find is relevant to your interests.

Determining Relevance

BlogRize is different than aggregators like RSSMeme and ReadBurner, as those sites only focus on one thing to build a popular page - number of shares. But to become "popular" on BlogRize, an article is rated using a more sophisticated algorithm.

Without giving too much away about that process, we can say that the algorithm uses more than one factor. Instead, it looks at factors which include the article's popularity, relevance to readers, and attention data, among other things. What this means is that an article from another technology-focused blog would have a good shot at becoming popular on ReadWriteWeb, but it would take a lot more for an article from, say, TreeHugger.com, to achieve that same level of popularity.

BlogRize's Voting Process

The first thing you'll notice about BlogRize is that the voting system for articles is a bit different than what you'll see on other social news sites like Digg or Mixx. Instead of just voting for a story, the news item is classified as "interesting," "funny," "insightful," "lame," "disagree," or "facts wrong." This system was created by BlogRize's creator, Jesse Spaulding, as somewhat of an experiment to see if he could get people to vote in a way that has more meaning and offers an opinion.

The system could use a little work, since terms like "interesting" and "insightful" are somewhat similar in meaning and because stories can, obviously, be both. Also, voting for things as "lame" seems a bit juvenile. However, for now, the system remains, although Jesse hints that he may be working on a slight modification of this interface in the future.

BlogRize Voting Buttons

Join Our Exclusive BlogRize Community!

Although BlogRize is still a private beta, they're now opening their doors to fans of ReadWriteWeb, and are offering us 1000 invites to distribute to our readers. To get access, just click this URL: http://www.blogrize.com/join/readwriteweb.com?code=readwriteweb. You can then began sharing and voting for the stories that interest you in a community filled with other blog readers like yourself.

We talked back in March about how all of you nerds spending your time on GTA IV could mean a lull in sales for the opening weekend of Iron Man. Besides spending your weekly allowance on a $60 DVD, you’ll also likely be holed up without food or water, to engrossed in virtual drunk driving to go out and see a movie.

This weekend we’ll find out. Iron Man opens on Friday nationwide, and by that time most people will be four days deep in GTA IV. The film and the game have the same basic target audience, but will they be able to split their time this weekend?

Of course, if you’re in San Francisco you can go watch it today courtesy of us at the Crunch Network, no matter what Marvel says.