The founder of blogger social network MyBlogLog, Eric Marcouillier, which sold to Yahoo last year for about $10 million, plans to launch a new site called Gnip, CNET reports.  According to TechCrunch, Marcouillier has already raised $1 million from the Foundry Group and Softtech VC for the site.  Few details about Gnip have been released aside from having “Web 2.0 infrastructure.”

Digg is a great experiment in web “democracy” — a site where ANYONE can submit links to content and vote on links to their favorite content. The positive outcome of the Digg experiment has been demonstrating the power of “networked human intelligence” to filter the vast sea of content on the web and allocate attention to content on a scale only rivaled by search. But Digg has also demonstrated that a completely open network will be subject to so much gaming and manipulating that it’s not possible to maintain that openness.

NYTimes.com wasn’t the first traditional media brand to aggregate third-party content — and it certainly won’t be the last. But the New York Times, once considered the national newspaper of record, represented one of the last bastions of the traditional media approach to content, i.e. we produce it ALL ourselves.

San Francisco - Web 2.0 companies raises more than $464 million during the first half of 2007, the highest half-year total on record for the sector and more than 7% more than in the same period last year, according to a new report from Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young.

Several years ago I wrote a two hundred page thesis for a Masters program all about user interfaces.  The premise was that simplicity and usability were guiding principles to making any online site successful (seems obvious, I know, but it didn't use to be).  Since the late nineties, the importance of usability had slowly been getting more and more important. 

Think about all the different relationships in your life — parents, children, siblings, extended family, close friends, casual friends, acquaintances, closely collaborative colleagues, professional contacts, superiors, subordinates — our lives are an intricate web of relationships. Yet on the Web — with its capacity for near infinite complexity — these relationships have been reduced to a uni-dimensional descriptor: FRIEND.

This is a guest posting by Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, a company that enables people to buy homes online. He offers a counterpoint to my posting about how easy it is to make millions of dollars with "user-generated, long-tail, Web 2.0, social-networking, open-source content" - sites that can be started and run by people sitting at home tapping away on their computer in their underwear.

I believe in the power of the people.  Not in a political way, because I'm not after your vote for anything.  But in a social way that is changing how we find information and how marketers communicate with their customers.  Technology is an enabler, but the real shift is in people collaborating and sharing an authentic voice.  It is why I have written about human filtered search in the past instead of algorithms.  It is also why I am writing a book dedicated to exploring the idea of injecting more personality into marketing.

Poor newspapers. Their cash cow service, classified ads, is probably about to break a record for facing more competition from free services than any other in the history of paid services. Faceboook recently piled on to the Craigslist disruption of the newspaper classified market with a free classifieds marketplace. Now eBay has launched a free classified site call Kijiji in 220 U.S. cities:

The most common question about by Truemors post (besides “How could you be so dumb as to think this could be a real business?”), was about what I got for $4,824.13 in legal fees. The fees covered the following:

Because of Truemors, I’ve learned a lot about launching a company in these “Web 2.0” times. Here’s quick overview “by the numbers.”

Washington - While 85% of Americans use the Internet or cell phones, and many also have broadband connections, digital cameras and video game systems, just 8% are creating user-generated content or participating in "Web 2.0" communities, according to a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

In the industry I work in, it's easy to get overly passionate about all of the new sites emerging every day that fit into this Web2.0 classification the industry has created.  The majority of these sites are willing to trade short term revenue for the prospect of building up a user base.  New users have become a metric that seems valued among these sites more highly than revenue.