Blogger Aditya Mahesh has managed to corral some of the biggest names in blogging to contribute to the BlogOnExpo, an event Mahesh describes as an online conference aimed at helping bloggers improve their blogs.

Starting yesterday and running through the 18th of January, the BlogOnExpo includes interviews and short tutorials from names many readers here will recognize.

Ryan Block talks about the hard work behind Engadget, John Chow recorded a video titled What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Source of Traffic and Pete Cashmore discusses looking for literacy in prospective Mashable contributors. There's a long list of big names (plus yours truly, fwiw) who have already contributed content. Sessions will continue for the next two days.

Context

The idea of offering a "conference" on blogging for free, online, with such high profile contributors is a good one. Most real-life conferences strive to have big names but end up with mediocre content and the best value comes from conversations in the halls with other attendees. In this case, the content in the BlogOnExpo is pretty darned good. I was skeptical about how many of the listed participants would actually participate but a few days into the event - I am impressed!

If I had any criticisms they would be that the interview transcripts are a little awkward and the participants are limited primarily to tech bloggers. There are a lot of bloggers online who are wildly successful who don't write about blogging or tech at all. My favorite examples are the blogs Simply Recipes and Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. It would be nice to hear from some more top bloggers outside of technology about what's worked well for them.

That said, Aditya Mahesh has done a remarkable job in this first iteration and I look forward to seeing what he does next.

The Library of Congress and photosharing site Flickr today announced a partnership that will put photos from the LoC's collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. The Library is home to more than 14 million photographs and other visual materials, and to start they've selected about 1500 works each from two of their collections that are known to exist in the public domain. The images come from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and The George Grantham Bain Collection, for which no known copyright exists. The collections will be housed on the LoC's Flickr page.

As part of the pilot program with the Library of Congress, Flickr has launched a new tagging initiative called The Commons. The Commons encourages people to help describe the historical photos being added to Flickr by institutions like the Library of Congress by tagging them or commenting on them.

"From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and -- most importantly -- wisdom," said Matt Raymond, the LoC's blogger-in-chief. "One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it."

The photos, which are already available on the Library's photo and prints page (along with over 1 million others), may not be on Flickr permanently. The length of the pilot program will be determined by the amount of interest and activity shown by Flickr users, according to the LoC.

According to George Oates, at Flickr, the pilot program with the Library has two main goals, "firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search."

Flickr also said today that the site now houses over 20 million tags which help to power the search function of the site.

OpenAds, a free and Open Source ad network with more than 30 thousand installs, has announced a forthcoming hosted version of its service and another round of venture financing. RWW's Sean Ammirati discussed OpenAds and the desirability of a hosted version in a May post here titled Google's Potential Vulnerability - An Open Ad Network

The hosted version will be in Private Beta for the first several months, but publishers interested in requesting access to that beta can do so here. OpenAds also offers access to a demo version of its software on its own servers.

At a time when other ad networks are being scooped up by the biggest players for staggering sums, the Accel Partners led B round brings this Open Source company's total raised to more than $20 million. The current round also included money from existing investors Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. With this kind of backing you can expect to hear a lot more about OpenAds in the coming months.

In addition to its stand-alone software, OpenAds can also act as a platform for other ad networks to build on top of. FederatedMedia, to which this blog belongs, has reportedly taken this approach.

The new hosted version of OpenAds should dramatically lower the barrier to entry for new publishers. Watch this space.

I admit an unhealthy addiction to Scrabble. I have been playing almost daily for many years. I think my girlfriend and I own 5 or 6 different versions of the game between the two of us. That's why I was so excited last year when brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla launched Scrabulous on the Facebook platform (they actually created the game in 2006, but it didn't really take off until it was introduced to the Facebook audience). Being rather familiar with the various incarnations of Scrabble online, I am confident in my opinion that Scrabulous is by far the best.

But in the back of my mind I knew it wouldn't last. The name is too close to Hasbro's trademark. The rules, tile distribution, the game board -- all the things that make it superior in every way to Yahoo!'s Literati -- all infringe on Hasbro's copyrights. And so, this past week has not been a very good one in Scrabulous land.

On Friday, Fortune's Josh Quittner broke the story that Hasbro had sent the Agarwalla brothers a cease and desist letter. According to Jayant Agarwalla, Facebook was sent a take down request two weeks ago. As of this morning, Scrabulous -- where I am currently engaged in 5 matches -- is still online.

It's easy to see why Scrabulous caught Hasbro's attention. According to Facebook measurement firm Adonomics, it is currently the 9th most popular app on the site by active users, with over 600,000 today. It generates 70 million pageviews per month and pulls in "over $25,000 a month."

Fans of the application have taken Quittner's advice to "please start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous" to heart, and the Save Scrabulous group this morning has about 3,000 members. Users have organized email campaigns aimed at Hasbro headquarters, and the BBC News has even taken notice, with a reporter posting a call for Londoners willing to be interviewed live on BBC News 24.

Hasbro has also gone after Bogglific, which is a Facebook incarnation of its Boggle word game. "Hasbro, Inc. has sent a DMCA notification notice to Facebook regarding Bogglific. They claim it violates their trademark, and violates copyright over the Boggle rules," wrote developer Roger Nesbitt in an open letter to users this morning. "I'm no lawyer, and can't see how it violates copyright. But I have neither the time nor the money to fight this, and Facebook has given me a grace period of 48 hours to shut the application down voluntarily."

It would be interesting to see if Hasbro has experienced any sort of sales bump since the explosion of these games on Facebook. A number of users posting to the "Save Scrabulous" group have said that they became hooked on the game via Facebook and have since purchased copies of the board game (and the same anecdotal evidence appears on the message board of a group trying to save Bogglific). It seems a safe bet that apps like Scrabulous and Bogglific have exposed these traditional board games to a new audience. It is easy to draw parallels to the RIAA here.

"Anything promoting Scrabble to a younger audience is a good thing," said Stewart Holden, the publicity officer for the Association of British Scrabble Players, which has operated under a licensing agreement with Mattel (who licenses the product internationally) since 1987. "While we recognize the legal ownership of the Scrabble trademark by Hasbro and Mattel, the impact of the Facebook Scrabulous application has been enormous and it would be a shame if no agreement could be reached which enabled this huge publicity boost for the game to continue."

The Aragwalla's are reportedly trying to work out a licensing deal with Hasbro.

A form letter sent by Hasbro Senior Manager of Consumer Affairs Kriss De Nardo to Scrabulous fans who have emailed the Rhode Island-based company seems to indicate that the company is open to licensing the use of the Scrabble intellectual property. "SCRABBLE has been entertaining millions of people around the world for 60 years so we are not surprised that fans have thoroughly enjoyed playing Scrabulous on Facebook.com," De Nardo wrote in the letter. "What consumers may not realize, however, is that Scrabulous is an illegally copied online version of the world’s most popular word game, the copyrights and trademarks for which are owned by Hasbro in the U.S. and Canada and Mattel in the rest of the world. We encourage fans to continue to lay down online tiles at sites that have legally licensed the interactive rights to host SCRABBLE fun."

However, licensing attempts could possibly be stymied in the case of Scrabble, because the online rights for the game currently belong to computer game company Electronic Arts.

It would seem that Hasbro has three options: force a take down of the infringing apps, work out a licensing agreement with them, buy them. As Josh Quittner suggests:

"If I were an evil genius running a board games company whose product line spanned everything from Monopoly to Clue, I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win! If I were compassionate, I’d even cut in the guys who did all the work for a percentage point or two to keep the site running."

Are you listening Hasbro?

Sun Microsystems announced today that had entered into an agreement to acquire open source database company MySQL AB for $1 billion in cash and assumed stock options. MySQL is used by many of the web's largest companies, including YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia, and makes up the "M" in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), one of the most popular open source web development stacks utilized by web sites today.

"Today's acquisition reaffirms Sun's position at the center of the global Web economy. Supporting our overall growth plan, acquiring MySQL amplifies our investments in the technologies demanded by those driving extreme growth and efficiency, from Internet media titans to the world's largest traditional enterprises," said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, Sun Microsystems in a press release.

On his blog, Schwartz revealed that Sun would soon be announcing a new set of MySQL support services. "Though many of the more traditional companies use MySQL," he wrote, "many have been waiting for a Fortune 500 vendor willing to step up, to provide mission critical global support." Previously, Sun sold support for competing open source database, PostgreSQL

Schwartz also talked about having "assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet." Sun's open source web development stack now includes Java, OpenSolaris, MySQL, and GlassFish. It would appear that Sun is hedging its future on open source (though the acronym is harder to pronounce than LAMP).

Though many industry watchers see the Sun acquisition as a smart move and great fit, some point out potential difficulties moving forward. Raven Zachary, an analyst at The 451 Group, thinks the purchase of MySQL "raises a whole bunch of issues concerning Sun's close ties to Oracle, as well as their investment in PostgreSQL." And Larry Dignan wonders, "if Sun makes MySQL more enterprise acceptable does that diminish its mojo with startups?"

Everyone loves to get stuff for free. We line up to get a free drink, we sign up for free checking accounts, and we're happy to get a free gift with the purchase of our next car. We love free stuff, even though we all know and understand that free is an illusion. After that free drink, we pay for the next three. The bank is making money by investing what we put in that checking account. The car dealer can afford to give away a small gift because the profit on the car is large. But none of this seems to bother us - free things still have a certain allure. But is the concept of free taking us down a dangerous road?

Marketers long ago figured out the attractiveness of free. For decades companies have been playing tricks using free to lure naive customers. But recently, our obsession with free has given rise to a new phenomenon - where the customer is never asked to pay. How? Because the business makes their money on advertising. Marketers are happy to pay for access to customers, who in turn love not having to pay. So the web plays the glorious role of middle man.

Are we heading into dangerous territory? The paths that we are taking lead to confused customers at best; and monopolistic practices at worst. A culture where consumers think that increasingly more and more services should be free is not healthy.

Does Free Make Sense?

Most online consumer services today are free. That is, people pay nothing to use them and the services make money via advertising. The logic is that the more people who use the service, the more page views they generate and the more ads they are shown - so the happier the advertisers. On the surface this makes sense. After all, newspaper advertising has generally worked this way as well. Well, not quite. Top-shelf papers like New York Times, are not free - you need to pay to get them.

The classic newspaper business is both a subscription service and advertising supported. Subscriptions provide a solid base, and grow if the publication is interesting. Ads are then sold door-to-door by a salesperson with a with a fat rolodex and phenomenal commissions.

But this classic model is no more. In the brave new world, subscription fees are gone and the salespeople are replaced by CPM advertising engines. The problem is, things are just not that simple. When the economy is bad (think 2008), then advertising is the first to be cut. Now if your sole revenue source is advertising, then your revenue gets hit hard. The traditional subscriber base, which helps companies navigate through the economic downturns, is just not there, because it is no longer cool to charge people for the service.

The second problem is, of course, Google. The whole beauty of online advertising is that it is trackable - ROI is easily measured. Google's pay-per-click model (CPC) is far superior to the traditional impressions based (CPM) model. But how many other companies can mimic that? Can the New York Times sell CPC advertising? That remains to be seen. And Facebook is yet to prove itself in that game as well. Getting people to click on ads is still a rocket science on the web.

When Free is Dirty

While it is not clear that a lot of businesses in an economy can be supported only by advertising, we already know that free can be a powerful weapon in the hands of big companies. Consider this recent example: IBM used free to practically destroy the Java software tools market. One day, someone at IBM was likely sitting around and thinking about how to sell more of the company's Blade servers. In a single eureka moment he figured out that by giving away the integrated development environment (IDE), IBM could kill its competition, open all doors, and sell its most expensive product.

Eclipse and the surrounding set of tools for debugging, testing and profiling Java code are not great. But they are good enough because they are free. Companies could no longer justify paying for products from, for example, Borland and as a result, IBM's strategy worked beautifully. All of this was executed over the course of just a few years, under the mantra of open source, so practically no one could see IBM's ploy. The sad consequence of IBM's victory is a lack of innovation in the software tools space. After all, who wants to compete with free?

From Free to an Empire

Of course, IBM is not the only big company that discovered the power of free. The king of the web, Google has been expanding its sphere of influence using exactly the same strategy. In a stroke of brilliance, Google made their web's best search algorithm free to consumers, by supporting their search engine with advertising. Elegant and fair, we all get access to the world's information for free. Thanks!

The next move, is slightly less elegant, but still legitimate - GMail. Google wanted us to have better and simpler email. The solution was to deliver it with advertising. It is strange to see ads next to our email, but we learned to ignore them just so that we can use the software. Fine.

But the next move - Google Office - is unfair. In its endless quest to organize the world's information, Google is also looking to kill off its archrival Microsoft. Just like Microsoft is going after search, Google is after one of Microsoft's juiciest markets - Office. And to play, Google is giving it away for free. Well, almost. For consumers, Google's online office software is free, and for businesses, they have made the software so cheap that it is practically free (Google can't make enterprise tools completely free because companies would freak out).

The point is that Google can afford to give away everything for free because of its success with search. This is being done openly now and it is just plain wrong. It is a dangerous poker game, where Google can raise stakes because it has a huge pile of cash. What happened to fair competition and not being evil? This is an evil way to break into the market. Of course, we all prefer the light Google Docs to Microsoft's heavy desktop software. This is not the point. The issue is that this kind of free is absurd. If Google wanted to break into eCommerce, it could afford to put Amazon out of the book business by giving away free books. How would we react to that?

Generation Free

Sadly, a lot of people would probably see free books from Google as a great thing. After all, as a society, we now expect information to be free, so it wouldn't be a leap to have free books as well. This is a misleading point of view, but it is spreading. We are raising a generation of kids who do not want to pay monthly subscriptions for anything. Give me stuff for free and stick some advertising on it.

This is also dangerous for another reason. Teens are growing up with not only a sense of expectation of free, but sense of entitlement to free. Of course my social network is free! But why? The phone is not free, television is not free, clothing, food, house - everything else is not free. Is this not a paradox?

Just a few decades ago, people had low expectations and worked hard to make living. They did not know free and never expected it. Now, the opposite trend is happening, with free becoming expected online. Will the new generation, the one that expects something for nothing, work as hard to maintain the high standards of living that we created?

Conclusion

The bottom line is there is no free lunch. When you go on vacation and see a sign that says Free Lunch you know that the timeshare sales pitch is going to accompany it. The free on the web is not free either. We are receiving the services in exchange for our time and attention, in exchange for the opportunity to be advertised to.

Yet, there is a lot complexity surrounding the issue. From the effectiveness of advertising to monopolistic market plays, free is making a lot of people nervous. The libraries are free because we pay taxes, but Microsoft Office is not free and probably should not be free.

Do you see this as an issue? This is an interesting topic and we would love to see the debate here on ReadWriteWeb! Sound off in the comments below.

Image credit: Top images from Reasoned Audacity.

Besides being the day that Macworld crashed Twitter, today was also Wikipedia's seventh birthday. In the 7 years since Wikipedia was publicly launched on January 15, 2001, the online encyclopedia has put up some impressive numbers. The flagship English language version now has 2,174,371 articles (as I write this), is the 9th most popular site on the Internet (according to Alexa), and has spawned 6 side projects (Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, and Wikiversity).

Wikipedia's projects span over 250 languages, with 9.4 million articles, 1.5 million images, and 10.3 million registered users (75,000 of whom are active contributors). All in the public domain.

WikiCharts, which keeps track of the top 100 Wikipedia pages in terms of page views (the main page gets 53 million of those per day), shows that the most popular thing Wikipedia does these days is define itself.

Wikipedia can also tell us things about pop culture, like that Harry Potter, Halo, and YouTube are more popular than sex (though sex related topics do seem to be very popular at Wikipedia -- who knew people used the Internet for that?). Or, if Wikipedia usage is a good indication of something's popularity, then it looks like JJ Abram's has a hit with his new film Cloverfield, which opens later this week -- the movie's Wikipedia entry has averaged 261,000 page views per day over the past two weeks.

Another fun Wikipedia tool to check out in honor of the site's birthday is Wikirage (which we reviewed in August). Wikirage keeps track of edits to determine the most popular (or most disputed) entries on the site. Not surprisingly, the most edited page today is that of the MacBook Air.

Of course, if the sheer size and scope of Wikipedia overwhelms you, one of the 250+ versions of the site can help: the Simple English Wikipedia. It sports 24,000 articles, each using a simplified version of the English language confined to 1500 English words.

Just compare the entries for Harry Potter in the full English Wikipedia:

"Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the eponymous adolescent wizard Harry Potter, together with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, his best friends. The story is mostly set at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, an academy for young wizards and witches. The central story arc concerns Harry's struggle against the evil wizard Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry's parents in his quest to conquer the wizarding world."

And the Simple English Wikipedia:

"The Harry Potter books are a popular series of fantasy books by J. K. Rowling. The character Harry Potter is the hero in the stories.

In the books, the fantasy is about magic. Harry Potter is born with the power to do magic. He soon discovers that there is a whole lot of magic people in the world, living unknown to most ordinary people. When he is eleven, he is invited to go to a boarding school for young witches and wizards. Each book tells about one year of his life at school, about the people that he meets there, the things that he learns, and his adventures."

That's more or less the entire entry -- the regular version cites 106 footnotes and carries on for over 7,000 words.

So, happy birthday to Wikipedia. Whether or not Wikiedia is as accurate as traditional encyclopedias, it is certainly more expedient than traditional texts (I'd like to see the day when Britannica has a detailed entry about a new computer product while it is still being announced), and for that reason it will remain a very useful online tool.

Even with the home mortgage meltdown in the US theatening to pull the econonmy into a recession, analysts feel confident that the online ad market will remain healthy. "We believe the secular growth of the Internet will enable Internet fundamentals to outperform," wrote Piper Jaffray senior research analysts Aaron Kessler and Gene Munster in a report last Monday. "Whereas Internet advertising budgets were the first to be cut during the market crash in 2000, we believe the proven high ROI of online advertising today will make online advertising resilient even with a recession in the United States."

But whether the Internet remains recession-proof or not, the mortgage crisis will affect the world of web advertising in very real ways.

Last week, Larry Dignan pointed out that the recent $4 billion take over of Countrywide by Bank of America will be felt in the wallets of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Countrywide, it seems, has been the web's second most prolific advertiser over the past two months, spending over $57 million in November, and $38 million in December.

"It’s highly unlikely that Bank of America will spend so lavishly on online advertising," writes Dignan. "Simply put, Countrywide’s penchant for advertising will disappear. To Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis Countrywide’s willy nilly ad spending will just be more fat to cut."

The good news for Google, et. al., is that help may be on the way from an unlikely source: the Hollywood writers strike. As the strike drags on, and original primetime TV content dries up, advertisers may begin to jump ship for other mediums. Chrysler, the third-largest automaker in the US, already has, choosing to run ads on sports and the Internet instead of primetime television.

The strike "is changing the whole broadcast model," said Chrysler marketing cheif Deborah Wahl Meyer. While analysts don't think Chrysler's move to jump ship from primetime TV advertising is an indication of a television industry in crisis, it could certainly signal the potential start of a trend. Many striking writers have already turned to the Internet as a place to ply their trade and with advertisers on board, the strike could hasten a paradigm shift in the media landscape that sees content shift from television to web distribution.

Related: Online Ad Spend to Jump in 2008 Thanks to Sports, Politics

Probably the most anticipated announcement that Apple CEO Steve Jobs made at the annual Macworld expo this morning was that of the MacBook Air: a 13.3", LED backlit notebook computer that pushes the concept of "thin" to its boundaries. But the one that Jobs spent the most time on, and seemed the most excited about, was the announcement of the iTunes Movie Rentals store in conjunction with the revamp of his maybe-no-longer-a-hobby-project Apple TV.

iTunes Rentals and Apple TV 2

We all knew iTunes Movie Rentals were coming, all that was left for Jobs to announce were the details.

The iTunes Movie Rental store launches today in the US (later this year for the rest of the world), with rentals costing $3.99 for new releases, and $2.99 for library titles. Renters have 30 days to begin watching a movie, and then 24 hours to finish watching it once they do. Every major studio is on board, and Apple's rental store launches with over 100 titles (1000 promised by the end of February), with new releases appearing 30 days following DVD release (which perhaps indicates some hesitation on the part of studios to embrace a new format -- no surprise there).

At first glance, Netflix would appear to have a leg up on Apple. Unlimited streaming for a little as $8.99 per month is probably a better deal for most consumers than $4 per movie strapped to a 24 hour viewing window. But where Apple's system shines is in its convergence with other devices. Whereas Netflix can only stream to Windows PCs, Apple can stream or download rented movies to both the Mac and PC, as well as to any current generation iPod, the iPhone, and the Apple TV.

Jobs said in his keynote that many companies have tried to figure out how to stream movies from the PC to the TV -- Apple tried, Microsoft tried, TiVo tried, VuDu tried. All of them failed, according to Jobs. In fact, even though Jobs touted the 125 million TV shows and 7 million movies sold so far via iTunes as miles ahead of competitors, he still said they missed their sales goals. That is one of the reasons, according to Jobs, that Apple embraced the idea of rentals, and one of the reasons they revamped the Apple TV so that it could rent and stream video directly from iTunes.

Image via TechCrunch.

Jobs demonstrated the ability to browse iTunes and rent movies with a single button click directly through the Apple TV. The device can also download and stream podcasts through iTunes, sync with computer content (as before), connect to YouTube, and grab photos from Flickr and .Mac.

The Apple TV updates will be pushed to current owners as a free software update. To entice new buyers, Apple lowered the price of the device by $70.

MacBook Air

The other major announcement we all knew was coming: the Macbook Air. Speculation that Apple would release an ultrathin notebook has been flying all weekend, and Apple delivered today with one that redefines the meaning of "thin." Clocking in at just 0.16" (at its thinnest end, 0.76" at the thickest), the 3 lbs. Macbook Air sports a 13.3" LED backlit screen, 1.6-1.8 GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, a 80 GB HD (64 GB SSD option), 802.11n + Bluetooth 2.1/EDR, a reported battery life of 5 hours, and no optical drive.

Drawing oohs and aahs from the crowd, the Macbook Air also has a multitouch track pad that allows for a lot of new gestures -- like rotating photos by pivoting your thumb and forefinger.

While Jobs was clearly tickled by just how thin the Air is (he introduced it by sliding it out of an envelope and then showed a TV commercial playing off that quality), he was also clearly proud of the steps that Apple has made to make the production of the machine more environmentally friendly. It is the first Apple product with a fully mercury and lead free display, BFR-free circuitry, and due to its form factor, it can ship with 56% less packaging.

Image via TechCrunch.

All that's remaining is to find out of the MacBook Air can help my vertical leap... (sneaker joke... anyone?).

iPhone/iPod Apps and Time Capsule

Jobs made two other major, albeit less buzzworthy, announcements at Macworld. After briefly mentioning his excitement over the iPhone SDK coming next month, he announced a handful of new apps for the device. These include an improved mapping application (with location finder), webclips (like bookmarks for your phone's home screen), and multi-SMS. The new apps are all available as a free software update for iPhone users.

The iPod Touch also got some love with the announcement of five new applications: Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes. Inexplicably, while the iPhone gets a free update, the iPod apps (which already exist on the iPhone) will cost users $19.99. That prompted engadget's Ryan Block to chide Apple for being, "SO weak." Agreed.

The first new product Apple announced at Macworld 08 was a wireless external hard drive. Time Capsule, as it is called, comes in 500GB and 1TB flavors and syncs wirelessly with OS X Leopard via its 802.11n base station to back up your files. The device will ship in February.

Although the name is clearly meant to recall that of ubiquitous video portal YouTube, YouTorrent upon first reading sounded more like an accusation than anything else: You Torrent. Although some of us hesitate to admit it, we do torrent.

Yes I know there are many legitimate reasons for doing so, but that's not always the reason for hitting up sites like The Pirate Bay.

Unfortunately, upon visiting many of these torrent sites, you're bombarded with ads - most of an unseemly nature, making you feel like maybe you are doing something naughty after all. In comparison, what's notable about YouTorrent's site is how uncluttered it is. In fact, there are no ads to be found anywhere. On the homepage, you simply see an entry box, a search button, and a list of popular searches below. The results pages are also ad-free. Since the site is brand-new, something tells me that this won't last; still, it's nice to enjoy it while you can.

When you begin a search on YouTorrent, you'll see the engine work in real time to display the results. The date, size, seeds, peers, and engine are listed for each torrent. By default the results are ordered by popularity (seeds and peers) , but you can quickly sort results by any of the other options just by clicking on the column header.

YouTorrent searches all the top torrent engines, including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, SumoTorrent, myBittorrent, Monova, Vuze, BitTorrent, LegitTorrents, SeedPeer, and BTjunkie. On the results page, you'll see a green check next to the ones where torrents were found. Underneath the listed engines, a related searches section can help guide you by providing similar queries to try.

Since the site has just launched, you can expect to see new features in the future like Boolean searches, advanced search, more engine selections, and a Firefox plugin (can't wait for this!), and maybe they will even finish their FAQ.

YouTorrent's design and clean user-interface makes this site one of the best torrent search sites I've seen. It's definitely worth checking out...just remember to buy the DVD later.