First Law: Virtual worlds are not games, but neither are they a parallel universe (yet). The initial reaction of many business leaders when faced with virtual worlds is to dismiss them as a mere "game" of no benefit to the enterprise and something to be banned for wasting compute resources and time. Many of those that see beyond the gaming elements immediately veer toward questions such as "How do we exploit this as a sales channel?" This reaction is equally incorrect and potentially even more damaging to the enterprise. "Growth in virtual worlds is significant but lower than it appears; the overall population of non-game virtual worlds is still small compared to massively multi-user online games (MMOGs) and the totality of community-oriented and niche-targeted environments," Mr. Prentice said.

Second Law: Behind every avatar is a real person. Gartner said people can't be fooled by the fantasy elements in the virtual world. There are unwritten rules and expectations for behavior and culture are developing. Enterprise users must consider their corporate reputations.

Third Law: Be relevant and add value. Many commercial companies have established a virtual world presence, but none have converted it into an effective, profitable sales channel. There has been criticism of early corporate entries into the virtual world, Second Life, related to the showrooms usually being empty and lacking atmosphere. While there have been a limited number of individuals who have earned more than $5,000 per year from their virtual world businesses, most corporations will see minimal revenue gains in the market at this time. "Do not expect to undertake profitable commercial activities inside most virtual worlds in the next three years," Mr. Prentice said.

Fourth Law: Understand and contain the downside. Enterprises face serious questions, such as "Could activities in the virtual world undermine or influence my organization/brand in the real world?" With significant portions of the virtual economy based on adult oriented activities, questions of appropriate behavior and ethics also arrive. In-world behavior can be a problem in public areas; annoying interruptions can range from unintentional arrivals and erratic behavior from new residents whose avatar control is still suspect to misdemeanors such as graffiti, to more-concerted protest activities designed to disrupt.

Fifth Law: This is a long haul. Today's multiplicity of virtual environments has developed through the convergence of social networking, simulation and online gaming. There are many new entrants, whose stability and scalability are not yet established. There is significant probability that, over time, market pressures will lead to a merging of current virtual worlds into a smaller number of open-sourced environments that support the free transfer of assets and avatars from one to another with the use of a single, universal client.

The firm's president and CEO Leslie Moonves said: "Last.fm is one of the fastest growing online communities out there."

He said Last.fm's strength in building communities around music and syndicating content was "central to CBS".

He added: "Their demographics also play perfectly to CBS's goal to attract younger viewers and listeners across our businesses."

Our goal is to provide you with a home base on the site, a page where you'll be able to both share and track your thoughts over time. When you post a comment to an article or discussion group, you'll be able to get to your MyPost page by clicking on your MyPost ID just above the comment or by clicking on your ID where it appears in the top left corner of the washingtonpost.com home page.

Other readers will be able to browse to your MyPost page from your comments and, once there, view what you've had to say or ask to message you by sending a "friend request". You'll see those requests on your page -- they won't be visible to others -- and may choose to accept them, turn them down or ignore them.

You'll be able to exchange messages with readers you've accepted as "friends" on the site, and those messages will appear on your page. By default, only you and your friends will be able to see them, although you can open them up to any site visitor by changing the settings in the Profile section of your page. You can also tell others about yourself in your Profile by uploading a photo or filling in a brief bio.

MyPost isn't intended to be MySpace or another general social networking site, but a feature that will make washingtonpost.com more useful to you and others. We'll be adding features to MyPost over the next few months and hope you'll email us with your comments and suggestions.

At some point, Twitter-ers came up with their own method of directing updates to one another using an @ symbol. We started supporting this behavior by doing things like creating the in reply to link, confining the reply messages to friends in the loop, and linking the @username to a profile. Another layer of support to this behavior is a feature we launched tonight which collects updates directed at you-just in case you missed 'em.

1. Spam - If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud! Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer). Tag anyone who spams you with the term schmoe. While they have the ability to delete the tag and never see it again, WE can see it internally. As their user account racks up the schmoe tag, we'll investigate their conversations and take appropriate action.

2. Hot Members - Let's allow the users of MyBlogLog to pick Hot Members! Every week I'll dig through the users who are frequently tagged a Hot Member and let you all know about one of them. User chosen Hot Members sounds so much cooler to me anyway.

Online security is an important topic for Google, our users, and anyone who uses the Internet. The related issues are complex and dynamic and we've been looking for a way to foster discussion on the topic and keep users informed. Thus, we've started this blog where we hope to periodically provide updates on recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security. Among the issues we'll tackle is malware, which is the subject of our inaugural post.

Malware -- surreptitious software capable of stealing sensitive information from your computer -- is increasingly spreading over the web. Visiting a compromised web server with a vulnerable browser or plugins can result in your system being infected with a whole variety of malware without any interaction on your part. Software installations that leverage exploits are termed "drive-by downloads". To protect Google's users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search.

Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 websites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%. The analysis described in our paper covers billions of URLs. Using targeted feature extraction and classification, we select a subset of URLs believed to be suspicious for in-depth investigation. So far, we have investigated about 12 million suspicious URLs and found about 1 million that engage in drive-by downloads. In most cases, the web sites that infect your system with malware are not intentionally doing so and are often unaware that their web servers have been compromised.

So what the heck are they talking about? Some Twitter users willingly provided their usernames and passwords to a mash-up project called Twittervision (a service unaffiliated with Twitter except that it accesses our API). They did this so they could be part of the fun and access more Twittervision features. However, Twittervision was not checking to see if any of these folks had marked their updates as "protected." Starting today David Troy, the creator of Twittervision, tells us he'll make sure to check for this.

As a reminder, please note that mash-ups and other experimental projects built using the Twitter API are totally awesome and fun but developed by folks outside of Twitter. So, we don't necessarily test them all out. If privacy is a concern, we remind you to refrain from supplying your Twitter username and password to other people, sites, or services.

UPDATE: It turns out that basically your information wasn't private if any one of your friends had given their details to Twittervision; effectively it was able to go and read private data you'd been given access to, and then build separate user pages for those people. Dave Troy responds: "There was no "glitch" in Twitter's API (outside of the scaling issues we've all witnessed) but rather in the cumulative interaction between our system and theirs." I've now changed the headline from "Twitter glitch leaves 'private' users exposed to the world' to the current version.

More than a third of UK bloggers risk the sack by posting derogatory or damaging details about their workplace, boss or colleagues, a survey claims.

Human resources company Croner, which commissioned the study, warned that such bloggers could be sacked from their job for gross misconduct.

Croner surveyed 2,000 people who keep a personal internet blog or diary and 39% said that they made harmful comments.

Bloggers should consider the potential impact of all postings, Croner said.

In essence, Lucasfilm is going to legitimize and streamline a pastime that has become increasingly popular on the Web. A search for "Star Wars" on YouTube, for example, turns up some 98,000 results, many of them videos drawing on original content from the movies. But on third-party video sites, Lucasfilm executives "can't control it, and they can't monetize it," says Jim Kaskade, Eyespot's chief executive officer.

While Lucasfilm could fight what amounts to the theft of its property, it has now decided to take the opposite tack. In doing so, it is tackling an issue that faces all media companies today: how to keep some semblance of control over intellectual property in the digital age.

"We see what's going on at YouTube," says Jeffrey Ulin, senior director for distribution and business affairs at Lucasfilm, who says the company began to think about allowing mash-ups last summer. "We see what's going on out there on the Web generally. And we wanted fans to come to Starwars.com as the center of fan activity." Currently, he estimates, the site attracts about two million unique monthly visitors; he anticipates the new content will boost traffic significantly.

The clips, which run up to 60 seconds long, will assemble memorable moments from the movies, grouped under categories like "Leia Confronts Vader" and "The Lost Limbs" -- the latter a collection of various characters' limbs getting the chop. One category devoted to a much-maligned lizard-like character from the three "Star Wars" prequels urges fans: "Don't be shy. Here's your chance to edit Jar Jar."

To put it simply, Jezebel is a blog for women that will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our highly sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women's magazine we'd want to read, a magazine that would never actually see glossy paper because big-name advertisers and the publishers who kowtow to them don't much like it when you point out the vulgarity of a $2000 handbag. Women deserve some of the blame here: if men ever bought $2000 handbags, Esquire and GQ might be as bad -- and profitable -- as Glamour and Vogue.

last100 will provide news, reviews and industry analysis on products and services related to the digital lifestyle, with a particular emphasis on how the Internet is being used throughout the home. The site is edited by Steve O'Hear, a London-based consultant and journalist. Steve also writes a blog for ZDNet called The Social Web and wrote and directed the Silicon Valley documentary In Search of the Valley.

Where does the name last100 come from? It refers to what industry insiders call the "last 100 feet" problem, which is the gap between the typical home's computer and its living-room TV set. While the digital living room is a primary focus of last100, the site will also cover other areas of the digital lifestyle (VoIP, portable media, mobile web etc).

Mr. Troy predicts businesses will be able to mine people's tweets for valuable customer data.

For his next project, he plans to craft a universal translator to allow him to pry into the thoughts of foreign Twitterers.

"It's sort of a Babel kind of thing," he said.

Just don't expect any greater profundity from overseas.

"I've been seeing all the Japanese posts and I didn't know what they mean, and I translated them and they were just as stupid," Mr. Troy said, laughing.

On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users' networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.

For instance, an online retailer could build a service in Facebook to let people recommend music or books to their friends, based on the relationships they've already established on the site. Or a media company could let groups of users share news articles with each other on a page inside Facebook.

Previously some companies have had pages within Facebook, but they didn't interact with the Web site's user networks. This move is significant because it could turn Facebook into a central hub for Web users, akin to an Internet portal like Yahoo Inc. Rather than using Facebook only to keep in touch with friends and going elsewhere for other content, users could now gain access to that content inside Facebook. That could keep people on Facebook for longer periods of time, which would also appeal to advertisers.

It's unclear how exactly Facebook plans to make money from the platform strategy, but one person familiar with the matter says the firm currently has no plans to share revenue with the companies that develop services to run on Facebook's platform. In that case, the main draw for companies that put their services on the site would be visibility and access to users of the Facebook site.

A huge rumor is floating around the UK this weekend, topped off with articles in the British Sunday papers: Yahoo is said to be in talks with Bebo about a $1 billion acquisition.

The site, launched in 2005, has been the source of many acquisition rumors - most notably with Viacom - but this one has the strongest signal, having been picked up by the mainstream press. Incidentally, Viacom has also shown interest in buying Last.fm, another success in the UK (see Viacom-Last.fm).

If it goes ahead, the acquisition would be almost twice the size of News Corp's $580m MySpace buy, but cheap compared to Facebook, for which Yahoo was prepared to pay $1.6 billion at one point (Facebook is now worth much more). Bebo has around 25 million users, and founder Michael Birch has previously said that he’d like to keep the site independent - a Bebo IPO may even be possible.

Text ads in feeds receive so little attention from readers that Google, which pursued its own trial, abandoned the experiment. Feed readers, the applications and sites on which geeky internet users scan news items, often do not support the graphical ads which brands prefer, closing off that avenue for a broker such as Feedburner.

So, why would Google pay such a high multiple, about 10 times revenues, for the startup? Probably, for the same reason it has developed Google Analytics: it is another way for Google to tie in independent online publishers. Feedburner provides an array of services to sites, such as email newsletter publishing, and the integration of external news and photos. It is more valuable as a publishing service than an ad broker.

MySpace will acquire Flektor, a just-launched service that allows users to create widgets from photos, video and text, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. This comes right after the news of MySpace’s pending acquisition of Photobucket last week for $250-$300 million. This will be a much smaller deal, in the $10-$20 million range, possibly with an earnout.

Flektor competes with more established startups like Slide and RockYou, and launched only a few weeks ago. Still, insiders say that the company has developed a killer set of tools to create slide shows as well as much more elaborate widgets that include audio, video, photos, text, effects and transitions. In our testing v. Slide and RockYou, Flektor came out way ahead in usability and features.

It's an odd acquisition, though, since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.

Well over the last four days, Twitter has been non functional more than it has been in the past. It's been constantly loosing tweets, or missing tweets in the feed, or the servers have just been down (those cats seem to be have been a constant problem). This is Twitters longest period of technical trouble. Maybe I’m seeing more of it; having access when the rest of the world is asleep, and a good period for downtime adjustments, but it has been very flaky.

This has lead to a fair number of people, who are new to Twitter to just abandon it really before they got started. This is not good for any startup company. Or as Miles Burke has suggested maybe a name change in jest, is the way to go. The longer term users of Twitter are also starting to suggest that maybe they should be looking for a better alternative (remember people tell that Gen-Y is fickle).

Wallstrip - the Wall Street web video program featuring Lindsay Campbell trying to make the Nasdaq hilarious - is being snapped up by CBS News, we're told, for something in the $5 million range. An announcement is expected early this week, perhaps Monday. Part of the deal involves Campbell being the next Amanda Congdon: frontin' for CBS' web initiatives.

Soldiers serving overseas will lose some of their online links to friends and loved ones back home under a Department of Defense policy that a high-ranking Army official said would take effect Monday.

The Defense Department will begin blocking access "worldwide" to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other popular Web sites on its computers and networks, according to a memo sent Friday by Gen. B.B. Bell, the U.S. Forces Korea commander.

The policy is being implemented to protect information and reduce drag on the department's networks, according to Bell.

"This recreational traffic impacts our official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge," the memo said.

The armed services have long barred members of the military from sharing information that could jeopardize their missions or safety, whether electronically or by other means.

The new policy is different because it creates a blanket ban on several sites used by military personnel to exchange messages, pictures, video and audio with family and friends.

1) The biggest news is that there will be a rebranding of MyBlogLog. The exact timing and new brand were not revealed. (YahooBlogLog or MyYahooLog? Time will tell.)
2) A complete site redesign is on the way!
3) A new "Widget 2.0" is coming with some hover features.
4) Yahoo! is hard at work to remove the offensive photos so that MyBlogLog would be palatable to more conservative business blogs.
5) Some sort of method to turn off your presence for some types of sites will be added.

Oh great. Just what the world needs. Another lame-ass corporate-owned movie blog that doesn't know a freakin' thing about ... just kidding! We're actually quite happy to share the news that MTV Movies is now offering a brand spankin' new movie blog. Or at least I'm happy about it, and here's why: I'm a big fan of MTV's movie coverage. For the last year or so, they've done some really solid stuff. Aside from the clunky interface and long load times at the website, those guys do a damn good job with the scoops, the news and some consistently excellent interviews. So it's not like a "new" blog as much as it is an upgrade. A much more aesthetically pleasing and bandwidth-friendly upgrade.

Welcome to the MTV Movies Blog, updated throughout the day with exclusive movie news, trailers, interviews and more. Our team of film experts joins with celebrity contributors - from Eli Roth to Judd Apatow - to ensure that when it comes to the hottest flicks, you'll hear it first.

Welcome to the Google "geo" blog. As web mapping (dare I say "the geoweb"?) matures, we're finding that we have a lot more to communicate about new developments in Earth, Maps, Local, and our APIs. The tools are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and more interrelated -- not only to each other, but also to the web at large and to things like search. Things are changing so fast we thought a blog focused on this topic would be the best way to communicate with you, both about our products and about the overall development of geo on the web.

So... what is the "geoweb"? Some people will scratch their heads and call it buzzword proliferation. Others, including Mike Liebhold, who has a long history of thinking and writing about this area, have a very well defined notion of what they believe it is (or should be). I don't think that there is agreement on what the geoweb is, but I think there is a lot of enthusiasm and energy across many fronts to make it happen. I expect the "it" will evolve substantially over the next few months and years as we (the geo ecosystem on the web) collectively figure out how "earth browsers," embedded maps, local search, geo-tagged photos, blogs, the traditional GIS world, wikis, and other user-generated geo content all interrelate. Those of us who work on geo products and services at Google believe we have an opportunity to make the web more useful -- and ultimately, to improve people's lives through better information and understanding.

"Every day, we are hit from all sides with negativity," said Mark Hager, founder of Happy Posts. "We wanted to create a place where anyone from any background could tell about the good things that happen to them. We're not concerned about where you’re from, what you do or what you believe," Hager said when asked about their target demographics. "We're looking to create a grass-roots movement with the sole purpose of creating the world’s largest repository of every day miracles."

"Yahoo Photos will get a lot of Flickr features, and there are a lot of other areas around Yahoo that will also be Flickrised where Flickrization would be good," Fake said in a blog post about the acquisition. "Yahoo Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs, and will remain separate for the foreseeable future."

Since Flickr IDs were merged with Yahoo IDs, I've seen problems at Flickr that I hoped wouldn't invade. My photos have been faved by people intending to use them for their own profit, trolls have driven by some of my favorite groups and taken a shot, and hackers played some serious games with people’s heads and accounts at the end of March. I attribute a large part of this disruption to the accessibility that the Yahoos had when their ID worked seamlessly with Flickr, since it was concurrent with the merge.

Allow me to explain what I mean. I used to play air guitar with a band called Deep Purple. My playing was perfect, I had attitude and I even smashed my air guitar at the end of the number. The reason I played air guitar is that I couldn't play real guitar very well so I was forced to dwell in this fantasy world where my guitar playing meant something only to me. I should point out that this was years ago when I was still young and foolish. These days I play air tenor saxophone, which is far more challenging.

Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They're cobbled together by people who wouldn't stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say. It's rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.

It's even sadder when someone reads them.

Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors. As with most things in life, something that costs nothing is usually worth nothing and that puzzles me. Are there really 70 million bloggers out there hoping that their writing talents will be recognised, or is this just another example of modern narcissism?

On Fri. May 4th, we updated Technorati.com to include the Technorati Authority for blogs listed on the Blog page and in search results. This update changed the earlier references of "N blogs link here" and "X links from Y blogs" with the single Technorati Authority number. On the blog page, we also show the Technorati Rank.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.

Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

Since at the lower end of the scale many blogs will have the same Technorati Authority, they will share the same Technorati Rank.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

"This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has -- it's most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced."

The WSJ story says "Yahoo doesn't appear interested in a major deal with Microsoft, say people familiar with situation."

In one blog entry, Heald tells of a passenger who was upset that the shops in Naples, Italy, refused to take U.S. dollars. "I explained that in Europe the euro was the accepted currency, but this lady was adamant that the dollar is accepted all over the world," Heald writes.

In another entry, Heald recounts a passenger's anger that John would encourage tours of Istanbul's mosques. "The passenger felt that for various reasons it was wrong and that I was promoting terrorism -- he left by calling me "the Sperm of the Devil." Heald says he's seen a lot of things over the years, but was unprepared for both this man's wrath and his reasoning.

It turns out Heald is a multi-media guy, and some of his best blog entries recount stories from his daily TV show, which is broadcast each morning to all the staterooms aboard ship. In addition to shipboard news, the show features passenger requests and questions. One such request came from a passenger whose luggage had been lost by her airline. The woman, who was quite large, was able to find some clothes that fit, but she couldn't find a comfortable pair of plus-sized underwear. She begged John to help, so he put out a panty call to everyone watching the show. Result: seven pairs of underwear from sympathetic fellow passengers. Heald sent each of the kind ladies champagne with a thank-you note.

The weather was fine today but the smell was not. No, you do not need glasses, I did say smell. There are natural gas reserves in this area of Greece and today those reserves were being...well...less than reserved. The sea smelled like it had eaten 1 million eggs for breakfast and was giving our guests the resulting good news.

The initiative starts today with the launch of social networks for seven contemporary hit radio stations across the country. KYLD-FM (WILD) San Francisco bows The Wild Space, WKSC-FM (Kiss) Chicago introduces The Mob, WHTZ-FM (Z100) New York has the Z-Zone, WIHT-FM (Hot 99.5) Washington D.C. has the Hot Spot, KDWB-FM (103.1 KDWB) Minneapolis is launching Connect, KHKS-FM (Kiss) Dallas bows Kiss Nation and WLDI-FM (WILD) West Palm Beach also is introducing a network called The Wild Space.

The sites will be individually managed by each station but share a common format and architecture. Onesite.com, a provider of social networking technology solutions to third parties, is handling the back-end for the networks. Onesite, a subsidiary of web hosting company Catalog.com Inc., provides similar services to the likes of NBC Universal's iVillage. Evan Harrison, executive VP of Clear Channel and head of its online music and radio unit, sees the local element of the sites as an important differentiator between other social networking destinations.

Not only can Clear Channel monetize the sites with targeted online spots from local advertisers, he says but also people using the networks have a better chance of making lasting connections with other users because they will share more regional affiliations. By contrast other social networks are focused on national and even international audiences.

***

Clear Channel plans to drive traffic to the social networks via the "listen Live" Web radio streaming area on the flagship sites of the stations. As part of the initiative, each station that has a social network will introduce a new chat feature in the web radio player that will feature profile pictures of members of the social network who are participating in the chat.

Users will be able to click on the user profiles in the chat area to enter and explore the social network. Stations will also promote the social networks through on-air plugs and special stunts and promotions centered around the sites.

Each social network will have a user experience similar to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and others offer. Users can create profiles, customize them with HTML codes and widgets, upload photos, music and video, blog, and add friends.