Following our coverage yesterday of Jason Calacanis’ Project X, we’ve received some inside information on the Project.

The working name, as now reported at ValleyWag is Kokua, although ValleyWag suggests the final name will me Mahalo.

The Project itself is not Wikipedia meets Google as some reports have suggested, but rather Wikipedia meets podcasting.

Each major wikipedia section: cars, video games, news, etc.. will have a paid host that does a daily show and builds a community that will populate the Kokua/ Mahalo Wiki which will have fan/expert based editorials.

Fans will be encouraged to send in their videos on subjects a bit like correspondents, similar to what Rocket Boom currently does (where our insider believes Calacanis credits the idea) and the fan who gets picked for the show that day gets paid $50 or $100, an idea which our insider says Calacanis picked up from Al Gore’s Current.TV

Our mystery insider continues:

Calacanis thinks he can make passionate VIDEOS and highly-ranked wikipages that capture not only Google Adsense [revenue] but video revenue, the videos will be placed on every video service and Jason has two studios built. So if you become a great correspondent you can get to work out of “the studio” as he referrers to it sort of like winning on a game show… you get promoted to be a cast member (like Howard Stern or Flavor of Love–his two favorite examples)

We also had some links to screenshots of the new service provided however the links are now dead.

Having read this I’m going to revise what I said yesterday, this isn’t a Topix Clone, this is a Weblogs Inc clone with a focus on Podcasting/ Videocasting as opposed to blogging to get around the AOL NDA.

More if and when we get it, and of course thanks to our mystery insider for the tip.

The Googlebot just got bigger. Question is, does it have teeth? is it more like a Labrador or a Pit-Bull, both have ravenous appetites, but only one bites?

Google has announced a new partnership with the US States of Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia that will see public information and data from all 4 State Governments indexed and available via Google.

To quote Search Engine Journal (source) quoting Google:

These partnerships developed as both Google and officials with the four state governments recognized that the public is increasingly turning to search engines like Google to access government services, but that a significant share of the information on state agency websites is not included in its index of information sources on the web.

As a result, many online government services can be difficult for the public to find.

According to SEJ, the States will be using Google’s Custom Search Engine.

Valleywag has the scoop: (or should that be rumor?) Jason Calacanis, best known for his time starting Weblogs Inc, is entering the search game:

the next venture is a search engine. Calacanis, we hear, has already hired about 20 engineers to work on the project. Begun in the poolhouse of his Santa Monica home, it recently moved to an office nearby. Sequoia isn’t merely giving him shelter while he comes up with a new idea; Roelof Botha, Calacanis’ patron at Sequoia, has already committed the funds. Former associates of Calacanis, such as Mark Cuban and Jonathan Miller, his former boss at AOL, are also backing the venture.

They go on:

It’s a cross between Wikipedia and Google. Calacanis’ new site will create more digestible search results for popular queries such as the names of Hollywood stars, and tech products. The pages will be seeded, initially, with content gathered automatically from the web and other sources. But they will be open to contributions by readers. Sounds like Wikipedia? Yes: except Calacanis will employ paid editors to oversee the pages.

Sounds a bit like Topix to me, lots of content, initially from external sources, then added to by humans, great content for other search engines. The search part only comes into play if the content on the site becomes authoritive to the point that people will actually visit the new site to search for things. It logically cant be a search only play if it generates its own content, search engines don’t generate content, they index it.

One to watch.

Bad news for Adam Curry, content from the Podshow network is being dumped from Sirius Satellite Radio from May 1.

There is no word yet as to why the previous arrangement was not renewed.

Paul Colligan believes that the decision means that Satellite Radio “Becomes Even Less Important”, and that 10.5 million iPods sold last quarter is proof of the potential audience size for podcasts.

A new survey from Scansafe has found that 80% of blogs contain “offensive” content, ranging from “adult language” to pornographic images.

In a report at Ars Technia, ScanSafe says that it discovered the “offensive” nature of blogs by analyzing more than 7 billion web requests coming from their corporate customers.

Further, 6% of blogs were also said to contain some sort of malware.

Now I know that MySpace blogs aren’t pretty, but does bad layout and bright graphics make for offensive content, or is it just that ScanSafe’s Corporate customers have a predilection for porn?

Apparently, any blog that contains the F word is considered offensive by Scansafe, which pretty much means this blog, along with every over blog I read would be marked as offensive, at least at one point in time. I suppose it could be worse, they could find terms such as “freedom online” and “surveys are stupid” offensive as well :-)

The defense of the well regarded Statsaholic (previously Alexaholic), currently on the receiving end of law suit from Amazon for the crime of daring to use Amazon’s open API’s and render Alexa data better than Amazon was, has just hit the mother of all spanners, according to TechCrunch, Statsaholic’s owner, Ron Hornbaker, is a convicted extortionist.

But wait, it gets better, because as well as serving jail time for extortion, Hornbaker wasn’t just your garden variety, every day extortionist, he was an internet extortionist as well, frequenting AOL Chat rooms trying to extort money from wayward husbands. Yep, he’s 1996′s version of Michael Crook.

Knowing this, a lot of people have got egg on their faces, including yours truly, for going in to bat for a chap who well…just doesn’t play cricket, if you know what I mean. Time to remove my name from the online petition against the legal action as well, and apologize to Amazon. Sorry Amazon, I’ll do some digging before acting against you in the future.

Techcrunch has the scoop: eBay has acquired social networking meets random surfing outfit StumbleUpon for $40-$45 million.

Valleywag does the figures and works out that whilst the deal is obviously good for the folks behind StumbleUpon.. they only ever took $1.5m in funding and never had a full venture capital round; the price means that sites like Digg may only be worth $100-$150 million, and the entire sector worth no more than $500million, which is probably significantly less than the sum total of funding that has gone into startups in Silicon Valley alone.

Terrible, terrible business. I could start on the stupidity on American Gun Control laws (or lack there of) but this isn’t the time nor place.

In an internet sense though, is the Virginia Tech Massacre the tipping point for Facebook?

Did anyone see coverage of the whole thing on MySpace?

Articles like this at Reuters are reflected through out the MSM and the blog world: the response on the ground was covered nearly exclusively on Facebook. We know that Facebook had its day in the past, and was passed over by MySpace, and yet as a destination Facebook of late has become the new MySpace, the new in destination amongst a fickle user base, literally Facebook is experiencing a second coming, a new resurgence of popularity.

I’ve literally just signed up for Facebook today, and a bit like MySpace, I don’t fully get it yet. It reminds me of LinkedIn but with the ability to post stuff.

I’m yet to take the time to find/ read the VT Massacre coverage, but I will be shortly, as no doubt many others already have.

It’s a terrible thing to suggest that a site/ service succeeds off the back of tragedy, but in the same way that blogs came of age during the 2004 US presidential elections, the VT Massacre could be the tipping point for Facebook, the day that a rapidly growing social networking service finally hit the spotlight, a day that shall be remembered not only for the appalling loss of life, but also for a day that Facebook became the new MySpace, the new black.

Now if only they’d do something about the proliferation of guns in the United States.

Google has acquired Tonic Systems, a Silicon Valley based firm with roots in Australia as well, that has in its kit bag of goodies a java based Powerpoint clone.

The acquisition sees Google now officially announcing that the missing leg in the hat trick of Office functionality will soon be available at Google: Google Presentations, an online Powerpoint style service that makes working online all that much more appealing to the business world.

The dollar figure of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Mark May 15 in your diary. It’s the day Internet Radio in the United States will cease to be.

In an outrageous move, the US Copyright Royalty Board has refused to consider complaints from industry representatives against it’s earlier decision to implement the RIAA supported new royalty structure for online radio. The new fee structure, that will commence May 15, sees internet radio stations having to pay a per song, per listener rating that worse still in being implemented retrospectively back to the beginning on 2006.Currently internet radio stations pay a portion of profit for each station paid in royalties. On top of this, there will also be a minimum fee of $500 per channel per year.

The move won’t drive all internet radio stations offline, after all, not all internet radio stations are located in the United States, but it is going to see a pile of US based stations either shut up shop, or move to other countries, with a fair bit of talk about the place of a number of operators looking at moving to Canada.

Sites such as Pandora are urging users to write to their Congressman, if you’re in the US I’d encourage you to do so.