HealthCentral, the website that collects online condition-specific consumer health and wellness experiences, has acquired Wellsphere, a health technology company, adding nearly four million monthly unique visitors to HealthCentral’s audience.

The acquisition combines HealthCentral’s high-quality, condition-specific interactive experiences, content and audience with Wellsphere’s aggregation of over 1,500 health and wellness bloggers and unique Health Knowledge Engine technology that deciphers highly specific health information. HealthCentral also will leverage Wellsphere’s health community enterprise technology which powers Stanford University’s BeWell@Stanford to deliver valuable health information and wellness tools for Stanford employees. The deal raises HealthCentral’s audience of its owned properties to ten million unique visitors per month, and makes the company the largest organic aggregation of online health and wellness communities.

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Network Solutions announced the launch of LinkTogether, a community created specifically for web designers and developers to grow business, leverage tools to increase productivity, and save money on products and services.

One of the major benefits of LinkTogether is the ability to connect with other developers and designers for discussions, advice and tips. Members can also increase their own knowledge base with educational resources that include whitepapers and video tutorials, and improve client conversations using the site’s Smart Guides and professional educational videos.

LinkTogether members are provided the opportunity to win even more work by creating a profile on the site, which in turn allows web designers, developers and other professionals to display portfolios of their work. Each profile is optimized to be found by searches on that member’s services and expertise. Once a member has joined, he or she can download apps, web site templates and other items shared by others in the community. Members can post their own original content for peer review.

In addition the free membership, LinkTogether also offers a Pro Membership for a monthly subscription fee of $19.99. Pro Members can access over 7,000 web site templates, 300 turnkey web sites, 100,000 graphical elements, more than 40 customizable legal and business documents, and receive exclusive pricing on services from Network Solutions.

WhatAreKidsSaying.com, a new website for kids and teens, announced that it is going to pay the college tuition of the first three members of its website to reach 50,000 points.

Founded by University of Michigan graduate and former NFL Linebacker, Ian Gold, WhatAreKidsSaying.com offers kids and teens a platform to express their thoughts and opinions, without fear of judgment or criticism. Kids and teens can participate in a variety of creative writing contests. They will also be given their very own time capsule, where they may store personal writings, photos, and music, rediscovering their treasures for years to come.

Adding to a growing list of his “off the field” endeavors is NFL superstar Wide Receiver, Greg Jennings. The Green Bay Packer is the WhatAreKidsSaying.com National Spokesperson. Jennings, a self-proclaimed poet, is excited about the opportunity to begin encouraging kids and teens to let their voices be heard.

The first faith-based multilingual online community has launched in time for Christmas. Providing an online community for people who want to impact their world, the new Cross.tv combines the best of social networking with high quality HD streaming and a multilingual communications platform; making it the first faith- based social media community in the world to support multilingual interaction and communication.

Users upload videos, upload pictures, publish blogs, add friends and even develop their own sub-networks for their families, churches, ministries or projects. They can also communicate with others and raise awareness of different causes using cross.tv’s unique “cross pollination” functionalities which allows them to publish content in multiple languages.

Disaboom, the online community for people with disabilities, has achieved one of its key benchmarks ahead of its projections– a million unique visitors per month.

• Over 1.3 million monthly unique visitors to the Disaboom Network for the month of November 2008, or 98 percent growth versus October 2008.

• 67 percent average monthly growth in visitors to the Disaboom Network for the period August – November 2008.

• 103 percent growth in monthly unique visitors for the Company’s flagship site www.disaboom.com for the month of November 2008 versus October 2008.

• Over 275 percent growth in return visits for the month of November 2008 versus October 2008; total return visits during November 2008 surpassed total return visits for the period July through October 2008 combined.

Universal Music Group (UMG) and Meebo have entered into an agreement to provide Meebo users with ad-supported videos from many of the most popular chart-topping artists in the world. The agreement will kick off by Meebo featuring artists Kanye West, Ludacris and The Killers at Meebo.com, where users will be able to view videos from the artists to promote their new albums. To augment the promotions, UMG will embed Meebo Rooms on official artist pages to enable real-time social interactions among fans.

The agreement with UMG creates opportunities for Meebo users to enjoy premium content and gives UMG access to premium promotional space to create significant online buzz for their artists. In addition to featuring new, hit videos on Meebo.com, UMG will utilize Meebo Rooms to enable real-time social interaction for fans visiting UMG artists’ official web properties. In the past, UMG has used Meebo Rooms to power a number of popular events, including an online listening party for Kanye West’s Graduation album and a live chat with hip-hop icon LL Cool J.

Imeem and Jive/Zomba announced the premiere of Circus, Britney Spears’ highly-anticipated new album, on social music service Imeem.

Fans can visit imeem.com/britneyspears to listen to Circus, 13 tracks in total, in its entirety, one week before its official release. Fans can also check out videos and playlists of Britney’s hits, including her latest single, “Womanizer.” Using Imeem’s embeddable music playlist widgets, fans can easily embed Circus on their blogs, web sites, and profiles on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking services. Fans can also pre-order the album from the iTunes Store via Britney’s Imeem profile.

imeem’s exclusive premiere of Circus comes one week before its release on December 2nd, Britney’s 27th birthday.

PowerBar, Inc. has launched the new PowerBar web site. A comprehensive online destination for sports nutrition and training information, the new site also serves as a global communication tool for athletes and experts to engage and share experiences through user-generated content.

Visitors can create a customized “My Performance” homepage complete with its own unique URL address and outfitted with information important to their personal sport interests, such as personalized training programs, sports nutrition articles, expert Q&A and tips from world champion athletes in that discipline. There are 17 sport communities to choose from including cycling, running, soccer, basketball, football and racquet sports. Each community features a leader who maintains a blog and event schedule and shares articles relevant to their sport.

KickApps announced that the New Orleans Hornets have launched a social network for fans of the team powered by KickApps. The website is a destination for the supporters to gather online with other fans to share their passion for the Hornets and NBA basketball, create, share and discover fan submitted photos, videos and blogs, and interact exclusively with official club content.

Using social media, the Hornets capitalize on an opportunity to increase their connection with fans by extending the Hornets experience beyond the basketball court. The new website features its own social network with video and photo sharing functionality, forums, and the ability for members to take video and photos from the site to other social networks, blogs and websites using Hornets branded video and photo widgets.

To tip-off participation and activity on the site, the Hornets are holding a competition for fans to name the social network. Fans simply join the network and leave a comment with their proposed name and why they chose it. Additionally, the team has uploaded behind the scenes videos of the Honeybee cheerleaders and press conferences, with additional unique programming planned.

The New Orleans Hornets joins the Phoenix Suns’ Emmy Award winning PlanetOrange.net, New York Knicks, Phoenix Mercury, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, New York Rangers and Arena Football League, as teams that have embraced the KickApps Platform.

coComment have reached an agreement with JS-Kit to track comments from all sites enabled with JS-Kit Commenting. Brand owners can now easily follow consumer opinions on more than 600,000 sites.

coComment and JS-Kit confirmed that all existing users of coComment’s Site Comments engine will continue to be fully supported and will not be inconvenienced.