Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion - and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia - sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as most social networks, for the less professional profiles.

New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Anyone can be included. And anyone can edit any page, like on Wikipedia. For now, that’s it. The founders say they’ll add more structure over time, and give dedicated places to add bio information (schools, work, etc). Here’s my page.

Biographicon will have a significant hurdle to overcome - until it gets traction people won’t for the most part bother entering in their information. But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch. We’ll check back in in a couple of months and see how their doing.

NASA has just released new imaging data from the moon’s south pole—the area they believe to be best suited for future landings and even colonization. Gathered from a 70-meter radar dish, scientists assembled a precise topographical map of a 400 by 250 mile area (we’re not certain how much of that we see here). In the first video (above), NASA recreated a day passing on that spot by adding shadow detail to their model. (It looks neat, we promise.)

But to see what it would look like to actually land there, check out their second video:

Even with some of NASA’s cheesier image effects, it’s pretty freaking cool that we can see the real terrain where we would land…if we were only lucky enough to have grown up to be astronauts (though baseball players might have been nice, too). [NASA via io9]

TiVo is officially saying bye-bye to their rewards scheme, and any unused points must be spent by April 28, this year. To get the reward points blowout well underway, TiVo has added a few extra choices to the scheme, including a My DVR Expander drive, (28500 points); TiVo Rewards Entertainment Package (120,00 points) and a TiVo Rewards Ultimate Entertainment Package (150,000 points.) The entertainment packages will both offer TiVo HD with lifetime service and a TiVo Wireless Adapter, whilst the Ultimate package will come with a My DVR Expander drive, too.TiVo Lovers, the blog responsible for breaking this story, has said a replacement rewards network is in the pipelines. It sure makes sense, and we would be totally bummed if there wasn’t something in the works to commend our undying loyalty. We want rewards, dammit. [TiVo Lovers via TiVoBlog]

YouTube for dance videos DanceJam has launched into open beta today after several months of private testing.

DanceJam offers dance battles where users dance off against each other, with viewers voting on the best video. DanceJam also offers general dance videos, including locally uploaded content and videos from external sites such YouTube.

DanceJam was founded by M.C. Hammer, and Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young from Flock. The company has taken $4.5 million in funding over two rounds, with investors including Ron Conway, Alex Algard, Michael Tanne, Geoff Ralston, Alex Welch, Ariel Poler, Rustic Canyon Partners, Softbank Capital and Michael Arrington.

You can see an example of a “Dance Jam” here.

Disclosure: Michael (as noted in the post) is an investor, I’m not.

Google has financially backed a project from a Harvard University scientist to unlock the secrets of common diseases by decoding the DNA of 100,000 people.

The project will be the largest human genome sequencing project in the world, and may lead to new cures for disease.

According to Bloomberg, the project will begin in the U.S., U.K., China and Sweden this year, initially deciphering the genetic makeup of 1,000 people at a cost of $50 million.

The new investment takes Google further towards its quest to index any and everything on the planet, having invested in genetics testing company 23andme last year, and more recently preparing Google Health for launch.

Through a variety of sources we’ve confirmed that Technorati is making plans for a major shift in it’s going forward strategy, and is also considering a number of corporate development transactions.

First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising - their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised a total of just over $20 million, and given that they have 25 employees, it’s time for another round. But we’ve also heard that they’ve hired Montgomery & Co. to shop the company to buyers, simultaneous to their funding pitches.

What’s more interesting, though is what we’re hearing on the product front. Technorati, under new CEO Richard Jalichandra, recently changed it site to focus more on its core blogging audience.

That change foreshadows the upcoming shift - which places the Technorati site itself as an anchor in a new blog advertising network.

Advertising networks are popular right now - Glam recently raised $85 million after transitioning, seemingly overnight, from a small web property focused on women to selling advertising for a variety of similarly-focused publishers. And John Battelle’s FM Publishing, an advertising network focused on technology blogs, recently hired investment bank Savvian to help them raise money or sell after turning down a $100 million buyout offer.

Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. This self-service model looks a lot more like Adbrite than Glam or FM.

Technorati tags, which are very often used to describe blog posts with keywords selected by the author, would also be a natural way for Technorati to target advertising more effectively.

Technorati has also considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. But our understanding is that they’ve gone with the ad network idea, and are currently focusing engineers on finalizing the product.

After Google’s stock took a hit based on reports that Google ads are not being clicked on as much as they use to be, comScore is reporting today that the market may have got it wrong.

The evidence suggests that the softness in Google’s paid click metrics is primarily a result of Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and, therefore, the opportunity for paid clicks to occur.

In part this might be right, but what’s being ignored by most is a little decision in November that changed the way Google ads worked:

Google has made a small change to AdSense that may make a big difference in cutting out errant clicks and even your AdSense revenue. They’ve redefined the clickable region for Google AdSense from the entire boxed region, to just the text link.

I’ve been hearing first hand reports since then from publishers who have experienced a big downturn in CTR and Adsense revenue since that change was implemented. Well regarded online marketer Jeremy Schoemaker even recently told me in a podcast that Adsense was dead as a monetization strategy. It’s happening to big sites and small sites. Markus Friend from Plenty of Fish, one of the more famed and bigger free-making money from Adsense sites (January):

The CTR on text ads declined about 60% in the last 2 months with googles changes, Image ads on the other hand stayed the same. If you take a screen shot of a text ad and then run it as an image ad it will get 2 times the click thru rate.

You read that right, image ads with double the CTR of Google ads when showing the exact same thing.

SEO BlackHat gets it right February 27:

4 months later, that little back and forth in the Google Rec Room shaved about $85 Billion (with a B) in market capitalization.

But it wasn’t as stupid an idea as it might seem. You see, Adsense works in a Quasi-market place environment. The market will bid up the cost per click once the adjustment for accidental clicks is readjusted. Right now, marketers should be getting a better value per click as a higher percentage of the clicks are ‘real’ or intentional. That will lead to higher bids per click and ultimately should be close to a break even for GOOGs bottom line.

The short story: the changes to the clickable area in Google ads has resulted in a decline in accidental clicks, resulting in the overall click rate to decline. If Google is seeing a decline in CTR it’s at least in part due to its November decision.

Microsoft has been in acquisition discussions with email startup Xobni, we’ve confirmed through multiple sources. The company, which launched at the TechCrunch40 conference last year, currently offers an outlook plugin for Windows users that significantly improves the desktop email experience (particularly search).

Microsoft may have first approached the company months ago and floated an offer of sub $20 million, which was apparently rejected. But the company, which recently hired notable Yahoo’er Jeff Bonforte as CEO, is now back at the table with Microsoft corporate development.

Xobni currently only works with Outlook, although the company has said they will extend to integrate with other email clients, instant messaging applications, and social networks in the future. The current product creates an information profile for each person you interact with, and surfaces historical information that is relevant to what you are working on. Xobni displays contact information, threaded conversations, attachments, related people, email usage statistics, and information from the web. See our post from January with a more detailed overview of the service.

The company was founded in 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina, with early funding from Y Combinator. Other investors include Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Ron Conway and Baseline Ventures, Atomico Investments, Paul Buchheit, Ariel Poler, Saar Gur, and Tom Pinckney.

Xobni has not yet responded to our request for comment.

Remember the U.S. Military ray gun that makes people feel like they’re on fire, well 60 Minutes sent out a reporter to see if he could take the heat. Standing in plain view of the ray gun made his body feel like “scolding water”, so David Martin attempted to hide behind a piece of plywood and later a mattress with little success. Some claim they can only take the heat ray 4 - 5 seconds, so when David tried it we think he only made it 2 seconds, even if he did say, “ONE ONE THOUSAND TWO ONE THOUSAND THREE ONEEEAAHHHHRRHHR” [CBS via TechEBlog]

Expert rendering
Of my Angelfire page.
You had a good run.
[BBC]