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On Monday AOL will announce the acquisition of San Diego-based Goowy, a startup founded in late 2004 and which launched, incidentally, in my living room in late 2006 (we had a TechCrunch party where Goowy, Meebo, Sphere and other startups launched). The size of the deal is not being disclosed.Their first product was a Flash-based webtop or alternative operating system. But later they went into the widget space with their YourMinis product, and that is the reason AOL has acquired them.

AOL SVP of Social Media, Messaging and Homepages David Liu said this was a deal they’ve been considering for the last nine months, and that they plan to integrate Goowy’s technology into both user-facing AOL products (to widgetize them) as well as their Platform A advertising network. Expect Platform A to launch significant new advertising products in the widget space soon, Liu says

The Industry Standard—the once high-flying, and then hardest-falling, magazine of the dotcom era—is relaunching today in a public beta, nearly seven years after the original media outlet went bankrupt. It would be all too easy to write this off as a counter-indicator signaling that the current Web 2.0 mania has peaked. And perhaps that is exactly what it is. The brand carries with it so much baggage that it may be difficult to move beyond what it stands for in the collective consciousness: the excesses of Silicon Valley.If its parent, IDG, had not bought the assets of the original Standard out of bankruptcy court for about $1 million half a dozen years ago, the site would have been called something completely different and the comparison would never be made. But they weighed that baggage against the potential boost they hope the site will get from the brand recognition the name still commands even after all of these years.

This time around, though, The Industry Standard is a Web-only property with decidedly less ambition and a new twist on generating content from its audience. The site will cover some of the same ground as its predecessor (Internet businesses, online media, venture capital). But it will focus more on analysis than news, and involve its audience in making collective predictions about industry and company trends through a prediction market set up as a simple betting pool.

So you want to ditch your corporate cubicle and join the ranks of web workers? But you have a mortgage, maybe a dependent or two, and a taste for Venti Mochas from Starbucks? You can make money in the new economy, though it might not be as easy or cushy as keeping your old economy job.I’m not talking about advertising or affiliate marketing or selling your junk on eBay. Those are so last millennium! I’m talking about the new new economy.

1. Offer your professional expertise in an online marketplace.These days, you can do more than just sell your old books via Amazon and your old Coach handbags via eBay—now you can sell your professional capabilities in a marketplace. No longer are you limited to looking for a permanent or contract job on Web 1.0 style job sites like Monster or CareerBuilder. The new breed of freelancing and project-oriented sites let companies needing help describe their projects. Then freelancers and small businesses offer bids or ideas or proposals from which those buyers can choose.

Elance covers everything from programming and writing to consulting and design, while RentACoder focuses on software, natch. If you’re a graphic designer, check out options like Design Outpost or LogoWorks–you don’t have to find the customers, they’ll come to you. Wannabe industry analysts might sign up for TechDirt’s Insight Community, a marketplace for ideas about technology marketing.

2. Sell photos on stock photography sites. If people regularly oooo and aaaaah over your Flickr pics, maybe you’re destined for photographic greatness or maybe just for a few extra dollars. It’s easier than ever to get your photos out in front of the public, which of course means a tremendous amount of competition, but also means it might be an convenient way for you to build up a secondary income stream. Where can you upload and market your photos? Try Fotolia, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and Big Stock Photo.

3. Blog for pay. Despite the explosion of blogs, it’s hard to find good writers who can turn around a solidly-written post on an interesting topic quickly. GigaOM is always looking for bloggers with great content ideas and solid writing skills. How do you get noticed? Comment and link to blogging network sites. Write blog posts that are polished and not overly personal (although showing some personality is a plus).

4. Or start your own blog network. If you like the business side of things–selling advertising, hiring and managing employees, attracting investors–and have the stomach to go up against the likes of Weblogs, Inc., GigaOmniMedia, b5media, maybe you should make an entire business out of blogs. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll get a lot of time to write yourself though.

5. Provide service and support for open source software. Just because the software is free doesn’t mean you can’t make money on it–just ask Red Hat, a well-known distributor of Linux that sports a market cap of more than four billion dollars. As a solo web worker, you might not want to jump in and compete with big companies offering Linux support, but how about offering support for web content management systems like WordPress or Drupal? After getting comfortable with your own installation, you can pretty easily jump into helping other people set them up and configure them.

6. Online life coaching. Who has time to go meet a personal coach at an office? And don’t the new generation of web workers need to be met by their coaches in the same way that they work: via email, IM, and VoIP? You could, of course, go through some life coaching certification program, but on the web, reputation is more important than credentials. I bet Tony Robbins isn’t certified as a life coach–and no one can argue with his success. For an example of someone building up their profile and business online as a coach, check out Pamela Slim of Ganas Consulting and the Escape from Cubicle Nation blog.

7. Virtually assist other web workers. Freelancers and small businesses desperately need help running their businesses, but they’re not about to hire a secretary to come sit in the family room and answer phone calls. As a virtual assistant, you might do anything from making travel reservations to handling expense reimbursements to paying bills to arranging for a dog sitter. And you do it all from your own home office, interacting with your clients online and by phone. You can make $20 and up an hour doing this sort of work, depending on your expertise.

8. Build services atop Amazon Web Services. Elastic computing on AWS is so cool… and so incredibly primitive right now. Did you know that you can’t even count on your virtual hard drive on EC2 to store your data permanently? That’s why people are making money right now by offering services on top of AWS. Make it easier for people to use Amazon’s scalability web infrastructure like Enomaly has with elasticlive, a scalable web hosting platform built on AWS.

9. Write reviews for pay or perks. If you blog for any length of time on a particular topic–parenting, mobile phones, or PCs, for example–you will likely be approached to do book or product reviews. You can get free stuff this way, but are you selling your soul? Is there any such thing as a free laptop? These are decisions you’ll have to make for yourself, because no one agrees upon what ethical rules apply to bloggers. Even less do people agree on services like PayPerPost that pay you to write reviews on your blog. Check out disclosure rules closely and see whether such a gig would meet your own personal standards or not.

10. Become a virtual gold farmer. A half million Chinese now earn income by acquiring and selling World of Warcraft gold to gamers in other countries. If you’re not a young person living in China, this probably isn’t a viable option for you. But what’s intriguing about it is the opportunity to make real money working in a virtual economy. People are making real-world money in Second Life too.

Source: http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/02/22/10-new-ways-to-make-money-online/

During this holiday shopping season, a heck of a lot of people are using the Internet to indulge their consumer tendencies. Some others, including my wife and I, are trying to use technology in a different way– to turn against consumerism.

Lisa and I first heard about the Compact, a group of people who swore off buying nearly any new products for a year, on public radio. But the group, which launched about a year ago, has spread its anti-consumerist message through a blog and a super-active e-mail discussion list.

The group’s founders started it for a number of reasons: to simplify their lives, to reduce waste and clutter in their lives, and to strike back against the modern throw-away culture, where even expensive products like computers, television sets and kitchen appliances get discarded after a few years. The group wanted to “go beyond recycling in trying to counteract the negative global environmental and socioeconomic impacts of U.S. consumer culture, to resist global corporatism, and to support local businesses, farms, etc.,” according to the Compact blog.

San Francisco - Facebook is suing seventeen people and a Canadian Internet porn company for allegedly trying to mine the popular social networking site for its users’ personal details.

Facebook alleges that in June servers controlled by the defendants used automated scripts to make more than 200,000 requests for personal information stored on Facebook’s site. The allegations are contained in an amended lawsuit filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California.

The company first filed suit back in June, but amended the complaint this month after obtaining court orders to identify who controlled the servers trying to access its site.

Experts have warned people against publishing too much personal information on social networking sites for fear it could be collected and then abused by fraudsters.

Facebook, one of the most-used social networking sites after MySpace, said the automated scripts caused error messages to be generated, but the company did not say if user information was successfully collected.

One of the driving forces of Web 2.0 has been the concept of bringing applications that were once the exclusive domain of the desktop to the web. There’s no shortage of examples; online email negates the need for a desktop client such as Outlook or Mac Mail, Google Docs, ThinkFree and Zoho are suppose to negate the need for Microsoft Office. And yet many, many people still prefer their old school desktop software. Fluid is a Mac OS X tool that helps bridge the gap between online and desktop applications.The idea behind Fluid isn’t new. We’ve covered gOS previously, a Linux distro that comes with a dock that is full of icons that open online apps. However with gOS those links simply open Firefox and brings the page up. Fluid on the other hand attempts to make the online application appear as though it is a desktop app by hiding the usual URL bar and buttons that would appear with a browser, instead offering a clean “Site Specific Browser” that shows the app requested.

Setup is dead easy. Open Fluid, type in the URL of the app required and the name of it, then it creates a shortcut that can be easily dragged onto the Mac dock. Click on the newly created icon and up pops the app/ page like it was a normal piece of software.

Those readers who frequently use online applications in a browser as though it was second nature may not find Fluid appeals, but for those still using desktop apps who are looking for an easier way to make the switch to online alternatives, Fluid may be a winner.

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