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Magnify.net has introduced a plugin for Movable Type and WordPress that attempts to minimize the effort required to add multimedia content to a blog. Magnify.net is a video discovery and broadcast platform that provides a hosted framework for video distribution.

The plugin, called Magnify Publisher, allows bloggers to search and embed content from over a dozen media sites including YouTube and Flickr without ever leaving their blog’s admin panel. Publisher also allows bloggers to upload videos from their computer, and to record clips on a webcam (sort of like seesmic). After choosing a video or picture, users are free to rearrange and resize their media from within their blog’s WYSIWYG editor.

Magnify’s CEO Steve Rosenbaum sees the plugin as a gateway to an online ecosystem where bloggers are the curators of multimedia. While there are a number of other blogging plugins that offer similar functionality, Rosenbaum says that Magnify Publisher is the first to integrate media search, upload, and webcam features. Magnify hopes that this combination will spur bloggers to regularly include more multimedia content in their posts.

I’m a little less optimistic. The plugin works fairly well and is easy to use (though the generic gray buttons really need a facelift), but it isn’t going to pave the way for a media revolution. Bloggers don’t typically include loads of media in their posts because it can be distracting - not because it is overly difficult to find an appropriate photo or upload a YouTube video. That said, Publisher is a handy tool that cuts out tedious steps and will appeal to many bloggers who aren’t tech-savy enough to fiddle with embed codes. Just don’t expect it to change the face of blogging forever.

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The idea of leaving sticky notes on the Web for others to find has been tried many times, but has never really taken off. Third Voice dotbombed with the idea in the late 1990s, then Activeweave tried it with Stickis (only to abandon the idea in favor for an app called BlogRovr, which was recently acquired by BuzzLogic). The missing element was that there was never a social way to share the Web pages and people’s comments about them instantly.

A startup out of Florida called Slingpage thinks it has figured out a better approach. It lets you “sling” Web pages to your friends with one click, chat about them, and annotate them with sticky notes as well. It is just coming out of stealth mode and TechCrunch has private beta invites for the first 500 readers to sign up here. (Warning: only PC users with Internet Explorer 6 or higher need apply).

Being able to leave a virtual sticky note on a Webpage is kind of pointless unless you can tell people it is there to go and admire. Slinpage joins the most recent band of Web annotation startups, including Diigo and Fleck, that have added sharing and “friendcasting” features to their services. With Slingpage, you can send a Webpage to anyone else in your contact list immediately and even start a chat about it.

Slingpage is an extension for Internet Explorer. (Firefox is coming soon). You can import your contacts from Outllook, Gmail, Facebook, or Yahoo. And, of course, you can also build up your contact list one name at a time. You can only sling Webpages with other people who have also installed the application. The company is working on a Sling-to-email feature to allow the application to spread more virally. And if you Sling a page to a Facebook contact, a message appears in their feed. You can also create a public Slingcast, which is a feed of URLs you collect around a certain topic.

“Every sling becomes a vote, if you will,” says CEO Peter Weinberg, who previously was a technology banker at WIT Soundview (before Schwab acquired it). In that sense, Slingpage is also a little bit like StumbleUpon or del.icio.us. Members save and share URLs, except they do it immediately. When you “sling” a page, a little window pops open in the bottom right of the recipient’s screen. Every page you sling is saved and is a lot easier to find than links you send through e-mail or IM. The startup is based in Estero, Florida and has raised $2.2 million in angel funding. The service will be ad-supported.

I’m still not convinced, though, that it is a better solution than StumbleUpon or del.icio.us for sharing and managing Web pages. The lack of Firefox support means that it is ignoring a group of Web surfers most likely to experiment with new apps. It also needs to develop a widget strategy so that users can distribute their Slingcasts anywhere on the Web, and it needs a better mechanism for Slingcast subscribers to respond with their own notes on a page they want to discuss (something the company is working on).

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Dutch startup Scoutle marries different networking ideas to deliver what they call an “Automated Social Networking for Bloggers.”

Scoutle operates via webcrawlers they call Scouts. Users create their own personal Scouts, for example one for their blog, another for their Facebook or similar profile, and the scouts “walk through the Internet,” by meeting other Scouts with similar interests or profiles, creating a contact between both.

Results from the Scouts are constantly being compared, delivering a realtime guide that allows users to see which blog on a certain topic, in a certain language or country is most relevant to the user at a specific moment. Users can also create networks based on specific topics or personal groups and see who is best ranked within these networks.

Automation

The interesting thing about Scoutle is not that its another social networking service, it’s the focus on automation. Little input is required from users to make connections, the Scouts do most (if not all) of the work usually needed to participate in any social networking site. Users can sit back and simply choose whether to visit the profiles delivered via new connections.

We’ve seen various link swapping/ promotional/ blog traffic systems before, however Scoutle’s move into social networking is an interesting mix, sort of StumbleUpon based on a shared interests, profiles and widgets. The site launched in beta May 8 and is available in English and Dutch.

Former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley covers tech, pop culture and penguins at The Inquisitr.

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Since I write for TechCrunch from London, and since the rest of Europe is less than a two hour flight away, I am going to do some “Euro-tripping” over the next few weeks, criss-crossing the continent meeting startups and writing about them on TechCrunch (the image is courtesy of Dopplr). But I need your help. I’d like to meet as many startups as possible both informally and at the meetups we’d like to organise. I am also looking for local partners to co-organise them as well as local sponsors. Meetup partners and sponsors will get promoted as such on TechCrunch.com and TechCrunch UK. So here’s how to get in touch and here’s where I’ll be going:

Hamburg
May 15th
next08
Come and say hi, as I’ll be at this premier event for European startups.

Barcelona
May 21st
Startup 2.0
Come and say hi as I’ll be at this great new competition for European startups.

Prague
May 23rd
TechCrunch Prague Meetup
(With Crunch Gear’s very own John Biggs as your host)

Newcastle, UK
Thinking Digital
May 22nd
Major new event in Newcastle, along the lines of DLD, TED

Paris
Seedcamp Paris
June 6th
Come and say hi as I’ll be at this influential competition for French startups.

Berlin
June 11th
Berlin TechCrunch Meetup!
It’s gonna be huge…

Warsaw
June 12th
TMT.communities’08
A great new event in New Europe. Please contact us if you are interested in sponsoring a TechCrunch meetup here.

Rome
June 20th
TechGarage
Come and say hi, as I’ll be at this cool new event for startups and VCs in Rome.

Barcelona
July 4th
Mobile 2.0 Europe
Please contact us if you are interested in sponsoring a TechCrunch meetup at this new European conference for Mobile 2.0 startups and investors.

Dublin
Techcrunch / TechLudd Mashup
June 26th
A TechCrunch meetup held in conjunction with TechLudd (the Irish startup networking event). Watch TechCrunch UK & Ireland for details of the event, to be announced soon. Save the date!

Other TechCrunch Events in Europe:
TechCrunch UK has started organising events, including a recent London Meetup TechCrunch Dinners (our first was with Scott Rafer here). We are looking for other notable speakers for panels and events, so please get in contact if you are going to be in London at some point and we’ll schedule you in.

We are also planning some “TechCrunch Drinks” events in London. And we want to do other meetups around Europe (and I mean all of Europe, including Eastern Europe), so please get in touch about sponsoring and co-organising those with us. Thanks!

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Note: trust me, the picture makes sense once you read the quotes below.

Sarah Lacy’s new book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (goes on sale on Thursday, pre-order here, get free autographed copy here) does a deep dive into the histories of a number of high profile web startups.

But Lacy was also able to uncover a few stories that were never covered in the day-to-day press. One of my favorites: the story of a failed 2006 attempt by Al Gore’s CurrentTV to buy Digg:

At the meeting Gore ran the room. He charmed everyone on the Digg team. He remembered everyone’s name, and if someone got cut off, he was careful to come back to him and ask him to finish what he was saying. It was quite a contrast to the meeting with Murdoch. “It made me feel so good to know this guy is legit,” Kevin says, remembering and still glowing. “You could just tell.”

…

They came back a few weeks later. Gore was there again, with a glossy PowerPoint presentation that showed the CurrentTV and Digg logos coming together. Gore was standing in front of the screen, eyes on Kevin, with the Digg logo projected across his forehead. Kevin was trying his hardest to pay attention to what Gore was saying, but he was focusing at this large Digg logo on Al Gore’s forehead, thinking, “Oh. My. God.” That night twenty-nine-year-old Kevin called his parents. “You’re never going to believe what I saw on Al Gore’s forehead today,” he said.

CurrentTV ultimately made an offfer “at least in the range of $100 million,” but Rose and Digg CEO Jay Adelson walked away due to issues of control going forward.

Digg has been the subject of nearly constant buyout speculation, starting with a $4 million offer from Jason Calcanis in 2005 and a rumored $30 million deal with Yahoo in January 2006. More recently we reported their recent efforts to sell through investment bank Allen & Co. The complete history is here.

At the time of the offer, Digg had just 1.3 million or so monthly unique visitors according to Comscore. Today, Comscore says they have 13.3 million worldwide monthly uniques (this is almost certainly lower than actual). But sources have been telling us that they’ve been unable to get to their desired $200 million offer and may be raising money instead.

Office productivity suite Zoho removed the need to create an account to use their services today - you can now log in to any of their products using a Google or Yahoo account. Sign in is completed via Yahoo’s and Google’s authentication APIs.

I asked Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna why they don’t just adopt OpenID to handle authentications instead. He says they will, soon, but also want to integrate directly with the most requested third parties to address users immediate needs (and it is still a pain to log in with OpenID). Vegesna also says they may integrate directly with other third parties, such as Microsoft and Facebook, in the future as well based on user requests.

The goal, Vegesnu says, is to get users to try Zoho with as little hassle as possible: “One thing we noticed is, when users try both Zoho and Google, more than 70% of them prefer Zoho. It made sense for us to do this. We want more users to try our apps.”

This certainly accomplishes that. In a matter of a couple of clicks, new users can get in to Zoho and start creating and editing documents. My guess is this works out well for them.

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A week ago Wired Magazine voiced its displeasure over our syndication partnership with the Washington Post. Wired’s Betsy Schiffman wrote “We’ve got nothing against TechCrunch, but it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about. But what do we know.”

When I read this I thought “WTF?” (with an emphasis on the “F”). Wired is a competitor to TechCrunch, but we’ve been on friendly terms with them for years now. Editor-In-Chief (on the print side) Chris Anderson and I were on Charlie Rose the same night a month ago, and Chris wrote some nice words about me in his post about the show. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein also wrote an awesome profile of TechCrunch in 2007.

So back to Wired’s slap at us. They seem to be concerned that I have personally invested in a handful of startups (all disclosed here) and we occasionally cover those startups and their competitors. And even though I disclose those relationships, Wired’s position is that the Washington Post should terminate the syndication relationship with us.

I responded to the article as succinctly as possible here (written after a night of heavy drinking at the Time 100 party) and then followed up with additional Twitter messages suggesting we hold a Wired burning party. I chose Twitter specifically for this response to make sure Wired knew I wasn’t happy with the post, but I specifically didn’t write about it on TechCrunch or even CrunchNotes to keep things relatively calm (I have 16,000 or so followers there, v. TechCrunch’s audience of 3 million or so plus feed subscribers). I also then let the matter drop, as I had made my point.

Emails to people I know at Wired went unanswered. Schiffman emailed me on May 9 with further attacks and a request for comments and details but I didn’t respond. Frankly, she’s proven herself to be a troll, and so anything I write might as well be public here on TechCrunch. And, as I said, I let the matter drop.

But then today Schiffman wrote a follow up article on the same issue. No new facts, she just wanted to reiterate how much she dislikes the partnership, I guess.

And if anyone thinks this is just something between Schiffman and TechCrunch, it isn’t. I have never met her and don’t know her at all. And her editor Dylan Tweney defended her when questioned by Valleywag about it. He was asked why Wired is now tagging every post about TechCrunch with “Buttmunch,” and if it is the way TechCrunch is referred to generally around the office and he responded “I don’t think it has come into general usage around the Wired.com office. We can always hope, though.”

My Response:

TechCrunch has financial conflicts of interest via advertisers and via companies that I have invested in. I’ve disclosed my personal investments - and as I’ve said many times in interviews, the grand total of the four active investments is less than I make per month in income from TechCrunch.

WRT advertisers, we do not specifically point out when we write about a company that has advertised with us, because no one does and frankly it would be nearly impossible given how many advertisers go on the site over time. We’ve created an ethical wall between editorial at TechCrunch and all revenue activities, which is run by our CEO, Heather.

The Washington Post obviously got comfortable with our policies, since they are syndicating our content.

Glass Houses

I question Wired’s intentions in posting about this, specifically now that they have posted twice. As a competitor they are clearly conflicted when writing about us, and attacks like these, including the childish tagging issue, appear to be little more than attempts to disrupt our deal with the Washington Post. And yes, that means that by the very act of attacking us and this deal, Wired is engaging in the exact behavior it says is unethical. Worse, they don’t even point out the conflict.

We’ve caught Wired in ethical lapses before (they subsequently added a disclosure to the article). And even the big guys are caught with the occasional hand in the cookie jar. I don’t believe we have ever engaged in unethical behavior of any kind on TechCrunch, not even the kinds of lapses seen at Wired and the NYTimes.

I have a lot of respect for many of the writers and editors at Wired. But as far as I’m concerned Wired.com, from Editor-In-Chief Evan Hansen on down to Betsy Schiffman, has clearly crossed an ethical line here. Perhaps they are giving up the fight to write relevant content and are resorting to sensationalist trash like this to generate page views. If that’s the case, it is a shame. I used to love that magazine.

Update: I’ve asked Hugh Macleod to do a cartoon for this fight, and have put a placeholder in until he responds. This is meant to point out how ridiculous this whole dispute is.

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Dash Navigation is opening up its in-car GPS device to outside developers through an API program. The Dash already lets consumers create Yahoo map mashups on teh Web which theycan then send to their car. (Read my earlier review). Now, companies that want to create specific applications for the device, which includes a two-way data channel through GPRS as well as WiFi, can join the API program.

The company’s API launch partners include:

—Coldwell Banker (real-estate listings application)
—Funambol (personal calendar access)
—Mediaguide (identifies names of songs playing on the radio through the Dash’s microphone)
—Trapster (shows drivers speed traps and lets them warn other Dash drivers)
—WeatherBug (live weather condition)

I have a feeling the Trapster app is going to be a big hit. Companies or developers who want more information about the APIs can send an e-mail to developer [at] dash [dot] net. (I guess putting the APIs on a Website is too advanced for them). But opening the device up as a platform should get a lot of cool apps on there.

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Restaurant review sites have long been plagued by polarized opinions - most of the people that take the time to write something have either loved a place or hated it. These sites also have to deal with reviewers who share their opinions, regardless of if they’ve ever visited the restaurant in question. Today OpenTable, the web-enabled restaurant reservation manager, has introduced a new set of restaurant rankings that they hope will skirt most of these issues.

The new rankings, called “Diners’ Choice”, are based off of surveys that OpenTable distributes through email to recent diners. OpenTable says that visitors to their site tend to take a certain amount of pride in food, which will motivate them to complete the reviews, even when they might not feel particularly strongly about a restaurant.

While this assertion is debatable, OpenTable does offer something that is unique to the review space: confirmation that every review came from someone who actually dined at the restaurant. This is made possible by OpenTable’s unique reservation system, which can monitor which patrons have actually been seated.

Unfortunately, OpenTable is currently only displaying the results of these reviews as ranked lists - there is no way to see what each individual reviewer had to say (only the restaurants themselves receive this data). This is surprising given the site’s purportedly increased accuracy, and it may lead many readers to turn to more thorough review sites like Yelp instead.

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Given the popularity of FriendFeed, it’s surprising that we haven’t seen many memetrackers appear for the site. Today French developer Michael Mortchelewicz has unveiled FriendFeedLinks, which attempts to fill that void.

Compared to other memetrackers like TweetMeme and RSSMeme, FriendFeedLinks has a very spartan interface. There are no summaries or discussions to speak of - just a link to each story and an expandable list that shows which members have linked to it. Users can search for keywords to filter the stories, but this is only helpful if the desired word is included in the story’s title.

FriendFeedLinks is a good start - it lets users quickly find popular stories and serves as a nice alternative to Digg. But unless it integrates more features in the near future, it probably won’t see much use.

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Facebook will announce soon on its developer blog that it’s working on a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. The interface will allow users to talk to their Facebook friends using any Jabber-enabled desktop client.

It will also enable Facebook users with such desktop clients to see which of their friends are online, view friends’ profile pictures, and set their status messages. This will all be possible after users authorize their applications to securely connect and communicate with Facebook Chat.

This is a welcome, albeit not terribly surprising, move on Facebook’s part. The company has recently shown a great willingness to open their data up to other applications and web services. And it’s smart for them to stay ahead of the data portability curve, since they’ll be able to maintain more control over just how data flows in and out of their system (it’s bound to happen anyway).

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MySpace has informed us that on Monday it was awarded $234 million in statutory damages, the largest anti-spam sum ever made under CAN-SPAM and apparently ever under any law. This is also the first time damages have been awarded under the California Anti Phishing Act.

The case was won against two notorious spammers, Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines. Wallace earned the nicknames “Spamford” and “spam king” for having sent as many as 30 million spam messages per day during a period of time in the 1990s.

Wallace and Rines spammed MySpace by creating their own accounts and stealing the passwords of others. They then went on to mass message users an estimated 735,925 times. Each of these messages warrant up to $300 in damages under the 2003 federal anti-spam law CAN-SPAN because they were conducted “willingly and knowingly”.

The case was brought against Wallace on March 23, 2007 and subsequently against Rines on September 25, 2007 when it was learned the two were working together.

MySpace has yet to collect the actual award and may very well not ever do so; it appears as though they don’t even know where two spammers are (the judgment was made in their absence after they failed to show up to court). Even so, they are charging ahead with another pending case against Scott Richter who also used stolen passwords to spam MySpace users.

The News Corporation-owned social network issued has issued the following public statement:

MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site. The Federal District Court in Los Angeles awarded MySpace $233,777,500 under the federal CAN-SPAM Act and $1,500,000 under the California anti-phishing statute. User engagement is up 32 percent year over year while spam is significantly decreasing, proving efforts like this are working. We thank the court for serving justice upon defendants Wallace and Rines and we remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.

We’re told that the second largest award under CAN-SPAM was much a lower figure: $2.9 million, paid by ValueClick to the FTC in just March of this year.

Additional details for this MySpace case can be found through the Associated Press.

Below is the court order:

Cort Order - Upload a doc Read this doc on Scribd: Cort Order

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Following the lawsuit eBay filed against Craigslist two weeks ago, Craigslist is punching back today. In a countersuit (complaint embedded below), Craigslist wants back the 28.4 percent of its shares that eBay bought in 2004. It also wants the court to award Craigslist eBay’s related profits, and punitive damages on top of it all. Craigslist is accusing eBay of:

unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty.

The complaint details how former eBay CEO Meg Whitman sweet talked Craig Newmark into the deal after it nearly fell apart, and then goes on to allege that eBay used its position as a large minority shareholder to try to learn competitive secrets from Craigslist, while launching competitor Kijiji in Europe. Now that Kijiji has entered the U.S. and is going straight for Craigslist, the gloves are off.

eBay filed first, though. So it has the legal advantage. But Craigslist has the reputation and publicity advantage. Everyone loves to root for an underdog. This legal brawl could lead to a customer backlash for eBay if customers decide to take sides.

In the complaint, Craigslist details eBay’s strong-arm tactics both during the negotiations for its equity stake and afterwards. One of the reasons Craigslist agreed to the deal was because eBay founder Pierre Omidyar was named to Craigslist’s board. But he only served a year, and was replaced by Joshua Silverman, the executive in charge of eBay Europe (who oversaw Kijiji). Silverman was quickly replaced, speculates the complaint, because of “antitrust” concerns.

The complaint also describes how eBay tried to undermine Craigslist by buying Google ads for keywords such as “Craigslist.org” and “Craigslits.com,” which then redirected to Kijiji. Oh boy, this is going to get ugly.

craigslist vs eBay - Upload a doc Read this doc on Scribd: craigslist vs eBay

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Add billionaire and activist shareholder Carl Icahn to the list of investors who want to pressure Yahoo to go back to the negotiating table with Microsoft. According to CNBC, he is considering a proxy fight and may be buying up as many as 50 million shares. (That would be about 3.6 percent of the total). He would find good company in Yahoo’s two biggest outside institutional shareholders, Gordon Crawford at Capital Research and Bill Miller at Legg Mason. Those latter two each own a little more than 6 percent each of Yahoo at last count. Add the three together, and that’s 15 percent of a proxy vote right there.

But if they want to nominate a new board of directors, they had better hurry because there are only two days left to file an alternate slate. Once Icahn gets involved with a company, though, he finds all sorts of ways to exert helpful pressure on the companies he wants to change. (Not that it always works—his efforts to change things at Time Warner went pretty much nowhere).

(Photo by Sam Lustgarten).

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Love her or hate her, BusinessWeek journalist and Tech Ticker co-host Sarah Lacy has written a new book called “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good”. It’s about the rise of Web 2.0 in Silicon Valley post dot-com crash.

The book will be officially released on Thursday but we already have 10 signed copies to give away to our readers for free. They will go to those who leave the best comments explaining why this book will help them the most.

Bonus points will go to commenters with the most creativity in their submissions. And leaving a video comment can’t hurt; we like to see all your shining faces, and it’ll demonstrate that you’re willing to show your face on TC to get this book.

If you don’t make the cut, you can always preorder from Amazon.

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Palo Alto-based mobile startup Mozes has secured an additional $11.5 million in Series B funding from lead investor Maveron, as well as existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

Mozes powers online communities for musicians that fans can join by texting special keywords to designated phone numbers. Once fans have opted into, say, the Death Cab for Cutie “mob”, they can keep track of that band through the Mozes website, their social network profiles, and messages sent right to their phones. Fans can also respond to their favorite artists by sending them text messages and other media like photos and voicemail.

This is just a sample of the services Mozes has built around SMS. The company also provides text-based voting systems, which we used at the TechCrunch40 conference last year to collect responses from attendees.

This Series B round brings the company’s total to $16.5 million, with a Series A of $5 million having been raised in February 2007.

Update: We spoke to Mozes CEO Dorrian Porter and got some more details. Jonathan Fram from Maveron will be joining the board (he also sits on the board of Video Egg). Since launch last year, 1.5 million fans have participated on Mozes, with about 45 percent opting to receive ongoing messages in subscription form. There are 4,000 bands that market through Mozes, and anywhere from 10,000 to 150,000 messages a day are sent through the service.

Most significantly, Porter will try to move Mozes beyond just bands. He wants to position Mozes away from being seen as simply a music social network. Instead, he wants to it also to be known as a mobile marketing platform for sports teams, retailers, lifestyle brands, and even conferences. To that end, he will be launching a newly designed Website in early June that appeals as much to marketers as it does to music fans. (We are waiting to see how he does that). But the polling and messaging features of his service could certainly be applied to other forms if mobile marketing.

The thing is, Porter needs to hire someone to lead Web development for Mozes. He is so desperate that he is offering his employees major incentives for any referral that leads to a successful hire. And he is extending the offer to TechCrunch readers. So if you know someone who can lead a Web development team, refer them to Mozes, and Porter hires that person, you will get:

$10,000 cash
$500 Starbucks Gift Card
Two airline tickets to Hawaii
Sony Bravia 60-inch 1080p Rear Projection HDTV

Candidates can even refer themselves. Send the referral by email to tcweb [at] mozes-inc [dot] com. The only caveat is that the person must stay for at least 90 days.

Extravagant? Maybe. But with $11.5 million in his bank account, he can afford it.

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If you go to Google Maps, you’ll notice there is now a “”More” button right next to “Street View”" and “Traffic.” If you click on it after getting a map, you will be given the options to tick “Photos” or “Wikipedia.” Ticking the first option populates teh map with geo-tagged photos provided by Panoramio. Ticking the second gives you geo-coded Wikipedia articles. For instance, I found entries on a New York City map for the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Station, the New York Yacht Club, and other landmarks.

The more that Google can populate maps with data, the more useful they become. I’d like to see geo-coded Flickr photos on there as an option. Maybe Jerry Yang can negotiate that as an extra if any search deal goes through. Yelp reviews would also be cool. What other data overlays should Google add to the “more option? What other buttons would readers like to see as well?

Update: Google has also integrated real-estate listings if you click on the “show search options” link. you can search by real estate, businesses, locations, user-created content, and mapped Web pages.

(Hat tip to Google Maps Mania).

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Omnisio has launched a tool that presenters will find very useful for conveying their messages to online audiences.

The new presentation tool takes slideshows uploaded in PDF format or to SlideShare and synchronizes them with videos uploaded to YouTube, Google Video or Blip.tv.

The synchronization allows viewers to jump around within presentations by clicking on particular slides, which show up in an area below each video that operates much like the dock on Mac OS X. As you watch a presentation, you’ll see the current slide sitting alongside the video so you can refer to it just as you would when watching a presentation in real life.

Publishers can create these video-slideshow compilations with a fairly easy drag-n-drop tool provided for free on Omnisio’s site. In addition to syncing slides, they can add markers for people and highlights that show up within a video. These too can be used to jump to particular spots during playback, such as when your favorite celebrity appears or a particularly good joke is made.

This is Omnisio’s second video compilation tool. The first, which debuted in March, lets you take multiple videos found on the net and stitch them together into new mashups.

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Seattle based wiki startup Wetpaint has always been ahead of the pack in terms of design and usability. Now, a couple of years after launch, they’re starting to see real usage traction as well.

The product isn’t just about wikis - they also have social features (profiles, friends, etc.), and added things like forums and, more recently, photo uploads, over time. In many ways they are more like Ning, which allows users to create social networks easily, than other pure wiki sites like Wikia.

The company has raised just $14.8 million in capital. Compare that to $104 million for Ning. But in terms of user adoption, the two are much more similar.

Comscore says Ning had 3.8 million monthly unique visitors in March, compared to 3 million for Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 900,000 wiki sites and are adding 2,000 more per day - Ning has just 263,000 social networks. Wetpaint says they also have 3 million pages of content.

Ning’s traffic as reported by Comscore is still way above Wetpaint’s - 90 million monthly page views v. 18 million. But Wetpaint also allows users to put wikis under their own domain names, for free (Ning also allows this but charges a monthly fee). Most of Wetpaint’s biggest sites are under custom domains, they say, so a lot of their traffic isn’t reported by Comscore. They are probably still a lot smaller than Ning in terms of page views, but they are growing rapidly nonetheless.

Wetpaint has 70 sponsored sites now - wikis created by or for partners to promote specific brands or events. One example: HP has a community wiki on Wetpaint. Another: Showtime hosts wikis for all of their shows, like this one for The Tudors.

Given Ning’s success in raising capital and growing the number of networks on their platform, it isn’t surprising to see Wetpaint position themselves against them. Part of what makes Wetpaint different from other social networking sites, says CEO Ben Elowitz, is that people gather there under niche communities and do more than just share photos or videos - they create content around the things they are passionate about.

Wetpaint is also working on some other projects - including an embeddable wiki product called Project Balco, which we wrote about earlier this year - but won’t disclose many details yet.

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Before Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, he launched Facemash, a short-lived HotOrNot-like site that almost got him kicked out of Harvard. Now Facemash is back as a Facebook app called ULiken. Written by two developers in New Jersey , Sam Bensalem (22) and Mike Woods (23), ULiken was inspired by Facemash—in particular from parts of Zuckerberg’s diary that came out during the UConnect lawsuit that describes how he came up with the idea of Facemash. Excerpt (full journal entry embedded below):

9:48pm.I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland facebook is open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive. It’s not such a great idea and probably not even funny, but Billy comes up with the idea of comparing two people from the facebook, and only sometimes putting a farm animal in there. Good call Mr. Olson! I think he’s onto something.

11:09pm. Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals…), but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very Turing feel, since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The other thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures. Unfortunately, Harvard doesn’t keep a public centralized facebook so I’m going to have to get all the images from the individual houses that people are in. And that means no freshman pictures…drats.

Uliken let’s you compare people, celebrities, cars, colleges, sports teams, pets, politcal candidates, Websites, or YouTube videos and vote for which one you like best. It also works a standalone site, but if you log in through Facebook you can put your friends’ pictures up for a challenge and any faceoffs you submit are sent to you and your friends’ feeds.

Mark Zuckerberg’s online diary - Upload a doc Read this doc on Scribd: Mark Zuckerberg’s online diary

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