With the explosive growth of Twitter, all the similar me-too services come as no surprise. According to Kristen Nicole, Jaiku is Twitter’s most relevant rival. Check out her very thorough interview with the co-founder of Jaiku, that covers the conception and future of the service and attempts to trace the general path of online behavioral trends.

We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness.

David Sifry has issued the next installment of his report on the state of Technorati.

Robert Scoble compares Technorati to Google Blog Search, and asks his readers which one they think is better.

Andy Beal thinks that Technorati might be looking to sell.

In what is being labeled as the next step towards improving user experience and bringing value to advertisers, publishers, and partners, Google has announced today that they are launching a trial-run of Google TV ads.

Users spend a lot of time watching TV so improving the relevance of advertising information on that medium is important…Working closely with our partners, EchoStar and Astound Cable, we are currently running a trial to deliver better ads to viewers and help advertisers, operators and programmers more efficiently buy, schedule, deliver and measure ads on television.

Check out the press release.

Royal Pingdom has just released a report that measures the Alexa top 20 websites in terms of the downtime their users experienced in 2007.

    Site		Downtime
 1  yahoo.com		   0m
 2  google.com		   7m
 3  myspace.com		1h 0m
 4  msn.com		2h 45m
 5  ebay.com		   6m
 6  youtube.com		4h 44m
 7  facebook.com	   25m
 8  wikipedia.org	2h 23m
 9  craigslist.org	1h 9m
10  live.com		1h 48m
11  amazon.com		   21m
12  blogger.com		4h 47m
13  go.com		   8m
14  aol.com		   3m
15  microsoft.com	   13m
16  cnn.com		   22m
17  comcast.net	   	   3m
18  imdb.com		   29m
19  flickr.com		   30m
20  photobucket.com	1h 23m

According to Macworld UK , Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs is set to appear at a joint EMI and Apple press conference at 1pm tomorrow.

The invitation reads: “Please join EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli at EMI’s headquarters on Monday 2 April at 1pm London/8am New York time to hear about an exciting new digital offering, with special guest, Apple CEO Steve Jobs.”

Could this mean that EMI heard Steve Jobs’ plea to drop Digital Rights Management? I wonder how The Sex Pistols would react.

Read more [via Mac Rumors]

Fuzzy Future has a great article that adapts 10 elements you whiteness in Frank Miller’s 300, and applies them to a successful online business.

1. Know your surroundings, and choose the battleground that most suits your strengths
2. A handful of well trained soldiers can out-perform thousands of weak ones.
3. A few good friends is better then an army of acquaintances.
4. The gods aren’t always right, do what’s best for yourself, above all else.
5. Keep your skill set sharp, cause you never know when you might have to defend yourself.
6. Never retreat, never surrender.
7. Constantly adapt to your changing situation, it’s the only way to survive.
8. Never be satisfied with your past accomplishments, it might just get you kicked down a bottomless pit.
9. Even a man-god can bleed.
10. Even if you’re a hideous, misshapen troll, the right networking can get you riches and women.

Learn more about how you can/should use these principles for your online business.

Amsterdam, one of the landmark business in Second life, modeled on the city’s red light district, and specializing in adult content, was sold for $50,000.

The previous owner, whose avatar is called “Stroker Serpentine”, says he sold the iconic virtual destination “to focus on a new, bigger adult business”. Little is known about the city’s new custodian, except that he is — perhaps appropriately — from the Netherlands.

Amsterdam is one of the first places that most first-time players visit in Second Life, mostly due to the ‘titillation factor’.

InformationWeek has more on this titilating development.

I mentioned Google’s new pay-per-action scheme about a week ago. Since then, the announcement raised more questions than it answered, and so Google ventures to answer some of them for you.

1. Do pay-per-action ads show on Google.com or on sites in the search network?
2. I am an advertiser using My Client Center (MCC) and am interested in the pay-per-action beta test for my clients, as well as for my own business. What are my sign up options?
3. Is it possible to set a cost-per-action (CPA) value (i.e. the amount I’d like to pay for a specific action) as a percentage of the amount of the purchase rather than as a fixed amount per purchase?
4. I am also an AdSense publisher and would like to participate in this test. How can I sign up?
5. I am not a US advertiser, and wonder when pay-per-action will be available in my country?
6. Although I am not a US advertiser, my campaigns do target US customers. Can I participate in the beta?

And then of course there is the official pay-per-action advertising FAQ.

The ICANN Board today rejected a proposal to create web addresses ending in .xxx in a vote ending 9-5 (1 abstention), and sent a broader message that ICANN will not accept the role of content regulator on the Internet.

ICANN, had been asked to allow the creation of web addresses ending in .xxx to specifically indicate sources of pornography and adult entertainment, and in effect create a virtual red light district on the internet.

Vint Cerf, the Google Inc. senior executive who is also chairman of ICANN, said the board’s decision had nothing to do with the actual content of the sites in question. Rather, the rejection came because the proposal could be seen as ICANN creating rules effecting Internet content, which is at odds with its mandate to oversee the way Internet operates in order to ensure open and fair participation by all.

MarketWatch has more.

Ardent fans of the patent system are fond of legitimizing the system based on the mantra that ‘patents encourage innovation’. However, evidence continues to mount that patents are accomplishing exactly the opposite and are one of many reasons that innovative technologies fail to succeed.

The latest example, covers VoIP patents.

The problem, of course, is that tons of companies (some big, some small) all claim patents on various aspects of VoIP — creating the very definition of the “patent thicket.” That is, there are so many patents around the very concept of VoIP that no one company can actually afford to offer a VoIP service, since the cost to license all the patents is simply too prohibitive.

Read the entire dirt.