mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/02138/

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According to the Register, Google has killed the AdSense account of Enturbulation, a site ran by Anonymous, the group that’s got their panties twisted in a knot over Scientology.

The reason is quite obvious: Enturbulation talks about Scientology a lot, and AdSense picks up the context wrong, serving a bunch of pro-Scientology ads there (which are, most probably, the only Scientology-related ads there are). Google’s explanation for the cancellation, from their letter to Enturbulation, is this: “While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.”

This is all nice and dandy, and Google AdSense does have a policy which says that partners may not advocate “against any individual, group, or organization.” The fact is, however, that this happens on a daily basis on millions of other sites. For example, it took me 30 seconds to find an anti-creationist site with a bunch of pro-creationism AdSense ads. Once again, Google implements its policies selectively - possibly under pressure - and this is probably worse than having no policy at all. mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/google-deals-a-blow-to-anti-scientology-anonymous-adsense-acc-canceled/

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Kontera is a company that offers in-text and side-text marketing opportunities for those brands that are hoping to become a part of the discussions occurring on social media sites. They do this through a number of advertising methods, but most notably through providing in-text advertisements (you know, those random words you see occasionally unerlined in blog and news websites?).

The Blog Herald today is reporting that Kontera is releasing a plugin that creates the ContentLink style ads on for Kontera users on WordPress powered content sites.  The new plugin also allows a great deal of customization on what sorts of content the ContentLink ads will appear, allowing you to block the ads from appearing on particular posts, or particular categories, or even just having them appear in comments.

Granted, this isn’t the least annoying form of advertising known to man, but in my experience is a good way to monetize remnant inventory, even on a blog.  When it comes to particularly old content on a news-based site, it’s very difficult to give advertisers much bang for their buck.  Most folks coming into, say, two or three year old content on sites in the genre of tech blogs generally come in from search engines. Naturally, they’re going to find the content stale, and generally irrelevant. Offering those visitors an easy exit to more relevant content in the form of these types of advertisements can translate into good results for advertisers, as well as good fiscal reward for publishers.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/kontera-wordpress-plugin/

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Leave it to Virgin Mobile to come up with some crazy marketing schemes that usually work. Some of you may remember the Sugar Mama program that launched back in 2006, that lets you earn minutes for your monthly wireless bill by viewing advertising campaigns, other “creative materials,” referrals and taking quick quizzes and surveys.

Well, now the Sugar Mama program has got new live, through a Facebook application called “Fund my Phone.” So how does the app work? Those creative and advertising spots that are part of the Sugar Mama program are accessible on Facebook, and can be shared with friends. The more friends you get to watch these spots, the more minutes you earn for your mobile cell phone bill.

There’s a new way to look at Facebook Beacon. What’s better than “peer endorsed” advertising?

Not to say that this is actually part of the Beacon program, but we are seeing a few ways in which brands are looking to Facebook ads and applications as alternatives to Beacon. I haven’t gotten a chance to play with the app, as it wasn’t live at the time of this writing, but I am curious to see the type of spots Virgin Mobile will be pushing through “Fund My Phone.” That can make all the difference, for the Sugar Mama program.
mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/virgin-mobile-faceboo/

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Timothy Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Web, a fact that often gets overlooked when other showboats come along and claim that they invented the entire Internet (I’m looking at you, Mr. Gore). However Berners-Lee didn’t just end his involvement at the mere moment of innovation.

While still at PodTech, Robert Scoble conducted an interview with Sir Berners-Lee, last November. During the interview, he spoke more about the social nature (a term he used in a much looser sense than we’re used to here in the echo chamber) of the web, the need for data portability and the need for semantic tagging and the overal innate desire for people to have semantic access to the data they need to utilize on the web.

News today comes in from the Wall Street Journal that Timothy, along 15 other grant applicants, have won grants from the Knight Foundation totalling $5.5 million altogether. Timothy Berners-Lee won his share based in part on what he was talking to Robert about towards the end of the video - using semantic web and data portability concepts to break databased information out and make it usable to more of the public at large.

In this particular instance, the application is better tagging with the goal being more transparency and accountability in journalism (a particularly timely topic, incidentally). From the project description:

With the copious amounts of information – and misinformation – on the Internet, the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data - the “story behind the story” - to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.

The idea sounds interesting, and ambitious enough that only the inventor of the Web could pull it off.

Sir Tim’s share of the grant money came to $350,000, and the money will be given to the Media Standards Trust organization, who will work on creating and implementing the standards.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/timothy-berners-lee/

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Whether you’re into cars, boats, motorcycles, or bikes, there are others that feel the same way. Sites like Motortopia have created networks around this love of vehicles, and other communities like TheBoaters have come along to fill in the niche markets.

OutForARide has just relaunched its niche network for boys and their toys–bicycles, that is. At OutForARide you can share information and images about your bicycle, add images, map routes, and track your progress along trails. You can also create a blog, organize an event, and initiate a group. Others’ routes can be added to your own profile, so you can make a mapped route one of your own.

If you’re really that into bicycles, I’m sure you can find some value in joining this rather niche community. It’s pretty consistent with the standard social networks we’ve seen emerge in the past couple of years, and there’s little outside integration with other networks, iCal integration for events, or Flickr integration for sharing photos, etc. But for advertisers, the most promising aspect of OutForARide is the Brands section, which features information on various bicycle brands, all of which link back to that brand’s website. mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/outforaride-relaunc/

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Putplace

CEO’s 20 word description: PutPlace gathers a lifetime’s worth of digital stuff, then protects and organizes it so you don’t have to.

CEO’s 100 word description: In our lifetime, we’ll probably own 10 digital video cameras, 20 PCs, 30 MP3 players and 40 cell phones. There’s a lot of stuff–email, documents, photos, audio and video–on all those devices.

All that digital stuff runs amok when it comes to organizing, finding and backing up the files we create in our lifetime. That’s why we made PutPlace, a software plus service offering that secures, organizes and shares your digital life. PutPlace puts your fractured digital life back in order.

Mashable’s Take: Putplace is a new virtual storage solution that organizes and distributes your digital life, too. Most virtual storage solutions out there offer safe (relatively, as long as they stay in business) places to keep your digital photos, documents, and videos, but not many have integrated and automated organization options for other social media-sharing sites.

What Putplace does, aside from auto-update your PC, is offer a distributed method to your madness, if you want. So images on Putplace can be shared on Flickr, and videos can be sent to YouTube. Putplace will also keep track of what files have been sent where. Master copies of all your content are saved as well, so no matter how many times you change it, you’ll always have the original file to go back on.

There are other services, similar to Putplace, that are seeking a more integrated approach to file storage. Box.net for example has Open Box, which allows third party services to be accessible directly through Box.net The good thing about such integration is that actions can be taken with files in an immediate fashion, as opposed to downloading the file to your PC and then reloaded in another program. Given Putplace’s existing integration with media-sharing sites, hopefully such action-oriented features will be a future inclusion as well.

Right now, Putplace is still in private beta and is only available for Windows. The Mac version will be ready in the near future. Also, while Putplace’s service is currently free, there will be a subscription-based model implemented in the future. Someone has to pay all those Amazon S3 bills.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials
mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/putplac/

I guess we should just stop whining, since the service is up most of the time, even when it doesn’t seem like it.  The fact remains is that Twitter, the service that has time and time again pledged that they’d be working on that scaling issue, is down again.

The outage has lasted at least an hour at this point, and has eerily coincided with the announcement from CNN and other major news outlets that John Edwards has pledged support for Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. While Twitter vassilates between weathering major political discussions and crashing during them, and since we can’t blame Ruby on Rails anymore, I think the Democrats make as good of a scapegoat as any.

I obviously kid, but at this point, there is not much one can do about everyone’s favorite time-sink when it goes offline (other than be productive). On top of that, it’s fairly rare when a rational explanation is provided by Twitter as to why the outages occur.

I propose we waste some time by coming up with scenarios that could lead to these Twitter outages.  We’ve covered all the possible rational explanations in our past “Twitter is down” posts.  What are some irrational ones (aside from the Democrats)?mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/twitter-is-down-i-blame-the-democrats/

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Finally, Plaxo has admitted to having been acquired, by none other than Comcast, for around the speculated $175 million, according to Reuters. After dodging rumors that eventually seemed unsubstantiated, the communications services company has in fact been the one to take on Plaxo.

Having an existing partnership with Comcast was surely a factor in the decision to take on Plaxo, as the partnership included alerts for customers, among other integrated options. And in acquiring Plaxo, thanks to its vertical expansion with Plaxo Pulse, Comcast is hoping for an opportunity to really insert its brand into social media across the web.

Plaxo is all about an open social web experience for individual users, and though this has caused a bit of controversy in the past few months, it’s a generally progressive company that is moving in the direction in which most web-based social networks will have to go.

There have been times when some of us here at Mashable had trouble thinking of an ideal acquisition situation for Plaxo, as it’s somewhat on the fringe of networking given its progressive moves and sometimes non-user friendly integration with existing tools like Outlook. Nevertheless, we’re all quite interested to see exactly how Comcast will be incorporating Plaxo into its own communications services.

According to Plaxo, the company will remain an independent operation, keeping on all 50 of its employees and working on growing its networked address book features, and Plaxo Pulse as well. So far, we do know that Plaxo will be integrating with some of Comcast’s online properties like Fancast and Fandango, as well as its own portal, so I imagine that the face of Plaxo and the application of its technology will be shifting a good amount over the next year.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/plaxo-comcas/

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Here’s the moment all you map mashup junkies have been waiting for: Google Maps for Flash is now available for development through its new API. What a maptastic week it’s been. Flash graphics can be used for each title layer, maker and information windows, meaning you can create more dynamic map mashups. Even throw in some animation and video.

For the user experience, however, the smoothness for things like zoom and drag functions are likely the most important new features to get excited about. For developers, it’s important to note that Google has split the interface and implementation, so you can build against the current version of the API, and future updates will be automatic. See here for more details, and see here for some Google Map mashups worthy of time-wasting.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/google-maps-api-flas/

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