Respectance, which is unique among social networks since it's dedicated to remembering those who have died, has taken $1.5 million in a series A funding in a round led by Solid Ventures and Big Bang Ventures. The site also launches officially today, and says it has taken funding at a "pre-user" stage.

With the MySpace, Bebo and Facebook pages of the dead already becoming shrines of a type - with friends leaving comments for the deceased - it's an idea that may generate interest.

The social networking website MySpace has reported a four-fold increase in the number of convicted sex offenders using its service.

The company found more than 29,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States had profiles on MySpace - up from a figure of 7,000 given in May.

MySpace said it was pleased it had identified and removed the profiles of the offenders.

Critics of MySpace call for new laws to make such sites safer for children.

No one seems to know what went wrong. Maybe 365 Main's backup generators came up but didn't stay up. Maybe there were other problems because power didn't just drop off, but fluctuated. No doubt a lot of questions are being asked.

But it's yet another wakeup call for businesses that rely on the Internet (and that's getting to be just about all of them): Co-hosting isn't perfect. Backups need backups. Contingency plans need contingency plans.

And, most of all, trust has no place in the technology business.

Even though users can submit their own questions, CNN is ultimately in charge of picking the questions that are going to be asked. Still, this is a promising development. According to an article on CNN.com, there is a small committee at CNN that is in charge of selecting the questions. David Bohrman, Senior VP for CNN and a member of the selection committee said, "There are questions that we, the journalists, we, the mainstream media, would never think to ask in the presidential debate."

The fact that this debate is even happening just goes to show the enormous impact that user generated-content has had on society. Ten, even five years ago, something like this would have had no chance of happening. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out and hopefully this type of debate becomes more typical in the future.

Blogathon is an annual event in which participants like me will post a new blog entry every thirty minutes for twenty-four hours for charity.

This year I'm also going to be broadcasting LIVE for the entire 24 hours on "Blogathon TV" which will be a webcast in which I take a look at what is happening during the Blogathon.

Nearly ten percent of companies have fired an employee for violating corporate blogging or message board policies, and 19 percent have disciplined an employee for the same infractions, according to a new survey from Proofpoint, a messaging security company.

Almost a third of companies "employ staff to read or otherwise analyze outbound email," while more than fifteen percent have hired people whose primary function is to spy on outgoing corporate email. A quarter have fired an employee for violating corporate email policies. Twenty percent of the companies and almost thirty percent of companies with more than 20,000 employees had been ordered by a court or a regulator to turn over employee emails.

After the 14-hour plane ride from the Dominican Republic, it feels good to be on the ground again. I'm also delighted to be back in South Africa. It's been nine years since I was the first U.S. president ever to travel to this wonderful country. On that first visit, Hillary and I laid a brick at a women's center in Johannesburg, marking the beginning of my personal commitment to help rebuild a new South Africa. Since then, I've tried to return as often as I can. Almost a decade later, my Foundation carries on this commitment through its work here and throughout the continent, and I'm eager to see firsthand the progress we're helping to achieve.

Johannesburg is one of the cities partnering with my Clinton Climate Initiative to perform energy'saving renovations to their buildings. These simple, cost-effective measures, which we are working on in 16 cities around the world, will have a tremendous impact on lowering carbon emissions from urban areas while actually saving money for the buildings' owners and creating jobs.

Based on all the scientific evidence, it's impossible to deny that our planet is warming. Africa stands to suffer the most from global climate change, so it's only right that we partner with cities like Johannesburg to help them do their part to stop these alarming trends. By implementing eco-friendly policies and deploying green technologies, African countries have a remarkable opportunity to emerge as leaders in the fight against global warming.

Throughout our trip, my staff and I will be keeping an eye on what supporters like you are saying on our blog, so please share your thoughts with me. I look forward to reading your responses as soon as I have a chance. Until then, I hope you'll support my Foundation and the important work we have begun. It's a great day to be in Africa.

We are launching our latest blog - Earth2Tech, a site devoted to the business of clean technologies, its innovations and everything else. While there are many sites that help consumers live "greener," we are focusing our energies on the business of clean and green.

One part clean tech startup coverage - (a quick look at clean tech venture numbers shows the growing ranks of startups in hot areas like solar and biofuels); One part reviews of tech giant's eco-initiatives (is Google's carbon neutral initiative more marketing or responsible plan?); One part a resource page for entrepreneurs and Valley types looking for green tech [tools, rules, tips] - LBS meets ethanol?

It took a bit to convince Om to go GigaGreen - read his rendition here. But if investors and founders like Sunil Paul, and the oft-quoted John Doerr, and Vinod Khosla, are all aiming at energy over IT and the web, then he felt we're in pretty good company. It might be a bubble, even mainstream pubs like NPR and the Economist are now debating that fact. We're agnostic. As always, through bubble or boom we'll keep the same GigaOM skepticism on this new site.

Travel blogging is becoming popular with both those documenting their travels and those who want to sample foreign countries before they set off. Newcomer Trippert, based in Palo Alto, doesn't want to be a totally open travel blog platform: instead, they're focused on users offering expert travel guides, with more focus on timeless content than the passing observations of travel bloggers.

Tagging makes articles easier to find, and profile pages aggregate your articles in reverse chronological order: it's essentially a blog. Users can also write articles together in a wiki format. For us geeks: RSS feeds of a writer's posts.

He saw traffic on the blog, I Can Has Cheezburger, which he runs with his partner, "Tofuburger" [she refuses to disclose her real name] double each month: 375,000 hits in March, 750,000 in April, 1.5 million in May. Cheezburger now gets 500,000 page views a day from between 100,000 and 200,000 unique visitors, according to Nakagawa. The cheapest ad costs $500 for a week. The most expensive goes for nearly $4,000. Nakagawa, an accidental entrepreneur who saw his successful business materialize out of the ether, quit his programming job at the end of May: "It made more sense to do this and see how big it could get."

Cheezburger's story is unusual in the upper reaches of the blogosphere in that the time between launching and reaching a critical mass of readers who sustain the site is so compressed. But many of the most popular bloggers have similar tales of starting out with a niche idea -- an inside joke, a particular obsession -- and watching it explode. Of course, most blogs linger in obscurity and are read by only a handful of people, and few ever reach the level Cheezburger has. What about a blog like Cheezburger lets it break away from the pack?

The initial appeal of the blog may have been a fluke, but its growth since then has been part of a tightly controlled experiment to help answer that question. Nakagawa and his partner constantly tweak the site to see what draws readers and what leaves them cold.

"We basically have a playground where people keep coming to play, so we're trying to create new games all the time,"Nakagawa says.

In a way, Zillow is attempting to combine its real estate data with the citizen journalism movement, encouraging people who live in select neighborhoods to upload photos, events, news and other information.

The idea is that people will not only visit Zillow to learn about homes, but -- one could imagine -- local restaurants, recent crimes or the history of the neighborhood. With this feature, you could also see Zillow moving down the path of trying to link people together in certain neighborhoods to share a lawnmower, sell a grill, host a fundraiser or, perhaps, find a date. And if that occurs, the real estate information and Zestimates offered by Zillow today might just be a Trojan horse into other lucrative advertising markets.

No one's more surprised at this robust Web presence than Paul himself, a self-described "old-school," "pen-and-paper guy" who's serving his 10th congressional term and was the Libertarian Party's nominee for president in 1988.

"To tell you the truth, I hadn't heard about this YouTube and all the other Internet sites until supporters started gathering in them," confessed Paul, 71, who said that he's raised about $100,000 after each of the three debates. Not bad considering that his campaign had less than $10,000 when his exploratory committee was formed in mid-February. "I tell you I've never raised money as efficiently as that, in all my years in Congress, and all I'm doing is speaking my mind."

That means saying again and again that the Republican Party, especially when it comes to government spending and foreign policy, is in "shambles."

But while many Democrats have welcomed the young and fresh-faced Obama, who's trailing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in most public opinion polls, Paul is barely making a dent in the Republican polls.

Republican strategists point out that libertarians, who make up a small but vocal portion of the Republican base, intrinsically gravitate toward the Web's anything-goes, leave-me-alone nature. They also say that his Web presence proves that the Internet can be a great equalizer in the race, giving a much-needed boost to a fringe candidate with little money and only a shadow of the campaign staffs marshaled by Romney, McCain and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

This past weekend's worldwide Live Earth concert might eventually impact the rising water level caused by melting glaciers, but it has already been a "watershed" for simultaneous video streams.

By Saturday afternoon, MSN said it had set a new record for the "most simultaneous viewers of any online concert ever," with 10 million streams.

The event represents a "milestone in live Internet broadcasting," said Joanne Bradford, MSN chief media officer. She predicted "an even greater number of streams" as viewers return to watch on-demand footage of the performances of about 100 artists, which will be available at LiveEarth.MSN.com for the next several weeks.

I'm not denying that the thought that one of those bombs could have gone off, bringing Baghdad-style carnage to the streets of British cities, was playing in the back of my mind as well. As I suggested earlier, were that to happen, a blog, updating every 20 minutes or so, rather than a conventionally crafted news story, could well be the best way to do justice to such a disaster.

Thank God we haven't had to blog on that sort of news event. But we have launched "Making News" in an understated, sotto voce sort of way. It is, in that deathly phrase, something of "a work in progress". And, already, we've drawn some conclusions from the first few posts and made some changes.

For one thing, users shouldn't have to click to "read more". They should be able to read as much of the post as possible from the blog's home page. So brevity and minimum use of pictures, unless they actually enhance the story or there is relevant video to be embedded in the page, will be the order of the day.

From 1 pm - 5 pm EST, our bloggers will be at work, chatting about the action on the TV screens. Feeds will come in from around the world, and we'll throw some opinions out there. Who rocks harder, Foo Fighters or Fall Out Boy? Who has more stage presence, Madonna or Shakira? Figure it out and get back to us on Saturday.

Hey everyone! I'm back from my much needed vacation in Maui. It was so beautiful and relaxing. But its good to be home again. I just want to thank you all for your letters of love and support. I am doing my best to respond to each and every one with the letter I wrote--that message was for fans like you who have supported me through it all.

I wanted to let you all know that I'm going to be updating my myspace and writing in more cause I haven't done it in awhile. The past month has inspired me to move forward with some exciting new projects, so I will keep you all posted.

Happy 4th of July everyone, and remember to be responsible and have a designated driver! Just looking out for you all. I love you and have an amazing summer!

xoxo
Paris

But while videos on the CAP and road safety are barely getting touched, a clip of sex scenes from European cinema has become a runaway success.

Titled Film Lovers Will Love This!, it shows men and women having sex in different ways and places, and ends with the words, "Let's come together."

Supporters say it celebrates European cinema, but others term it "soft porn".

British Conservative MEP Chris Heaton-Harris told BBC News the European Commission was wasting taxpayers' money.

"They do have an image problem but I think cobbling together 44 seconds of soft porn on the internet is not a brilliant way of solving it," he added.

The weblog, which is being run by Gamasutra and GameSetWatch writer Leigh Alexander, has been set up because "...the staff at Game Developer Research will be launching multiple reports on the state and future of online worlds over the next few months." Thus, the new blog will report on virtual worlds as the staff compiles information on this increasingly important market.

The importance of online worlds to the game industry is explained in a recent Gamasutra interview with Raph Koster, in which the MUD and MMO veteran notes:

"Consider the statistics. Webkinz, 2.5 million uniques in December; you buy a plush toy. Runescape: we still don't think of Runescape as being part of our industry, but it's probably the most popular MMO in the world, more popular than WoW. Toontown is up to more than 2.5 million uniques now. We never talk about Toontown because it's web deployed.

Then of course there’s was Club Penguin, with 4.5 million uniques in December alone...When you compare the numbers, all of those are larger than the number two MMO in the western world, every single one of them. So yeah, I think people are missing something."

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You'll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.