8.30 – Despite its popularity, there’s plenty of people who don’t know of the news rating site, www.digg.com The concept is quite clever. You read a story, you like it, you ‘dig’ it like a 1970’s roller derby loving 60’s throw-back pothead. You dig?

Stories with big ‘diggs’ get popular enough to jump to the front page. I joined Digg in the hopes of continuing to deliver good news stories regardless of Diggs up or down. Submitting a story involves a screen name, a link to the news story and your summary or opinion of the news at the link. This simple process caught fire within the community of folks who get news and share news via the Internet.

This story is disregarding the validity of any original story that’s linked to and instead focusing on the race to be Dugg. Case in Point, Google and eBay just joined forces to ad advertising a la Google to auctions a la eBay. You discover on searching eBay that a 1971 Mustang convertible is for auction. Thanks to Google, advertising for matching floor matts or Edlebrock carbs will appear discreetly in the margins.

The real story is the monstrously large companies merging and bringing advances into popularity faster than ever before. Although e-mail has been around for thirteen years, it’s only lately that the understanding has become common-place. Although Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is struggling with FCC mandates like proper 911 calls, the Internet-based telephone system has been adopted strongly by early users.

VOIP’s success is eminent, you just don’t know it yet. The progression is logical from the Pony Express to teletype to faxes and telephones to e-mails to instant messages to video mail and telephones (again, but over the Internet wires). The progression of time will stamp out all the good arguments against VOIP just as time stamped out all the good arguments against the Pony Express (really).

Just as the Pony Express was replaced with something better, so too will VOIP be replaced or revolutionized of upgraded. The sooner everyone jumps on the VOIP bandwagon, like not waiting thirteen years to finally try it, the sooner we get to more good toys! And Google combining with eBay to deliver advertising to auctions gets better. If a seller from an advertisment provides a telephone number, current VOIP users can press Click-To-Call.

DEPLOY THE FUTURE

So the real story in Google’s team-up with eBay is the immediate advancement and promotion of VOIP via eBay. With such an easy shopping, auction and communication system that’s so high profile and in such common use is sure to do for VOIP what Howard Stern did for Sirius Satellite radio. And THIS is the point I happily wished to get Dugg. VOIP will blow in faster and stronger and its next of kin will ALSO blow in faster and stronger as a result.

When I tried to submit the article, I was told that all the links I was selecting as my “source” were already in use. The summaries that other Digg users had written had no bearing on the lofty boost VOIP, Google’s Click-To-Call and the Tech-loving public could possibly get from this merger. So this story right here, as far as I can tell, is the sole story hailing the advancement of VOIP through Google’s use of it within the confines of eBay.

One story about the likelihood of Google’s Click-To-Talk being a failure is from BloggingStocks.com. They site the eBay culture as one of anonymity and the ability of talking to actual people not fitting in anytime soon. It’s a good counter-point. Additionally, the idea of “ deploy[ing] the future,” is one that Yahoo isn’t ready to commit to. Yahoo’s decision to delay re-designs and postpone techno-role outs to keep stride with Google sent Yahoo stocks downward recently reports, TheStreet.com

Some initial news of Google’s crossover advertising with eBay auctions, like InformationWeek.com article, were snapped up by ‘diggers.’ A search at DIGG.com for “Google and eBay” reveal five pages of results where members are actively looking for your digg. It’s not a bad way to bombard yourself with tons of news. You just have to hope that the summaries are accurate enough to get you where you want to go.

By the way, visit the five pages and DIGG the “Click-To-Talk flop within eBay’s anonymity?” story that I did manage to finally get diggable after a day of rejection….

8.09 – I just gave an oped piece on AOL suggesting how they could stay on top and stay alive. AOL seems to have misunderstood me and published the search terms of a half million users. Search terms can be figured out by evil-doers to lead to some bad, identity thieving results. Although user names were covered with random numbers, people tend to search themselves thereby revealing their identities.

Any other company that gave away so much personal data would be fined a huge amount of money to cover the cost of clients re-securing themselves. Consider this extrapolated data found within the AOL paper that it sent to R&D professionals:

Hmm, i find it fascinating that user 545605’s searches are “shore hills park mays landing nj”, “frank william sindoni md”, “ceramic ashtrays”, “transfer money to china”, and “capital gains on sale of house”. I wonder how Mr. Frank William in Sindoni, Maryland will feel about being included in your publicized data.

So here’s the fastest of it…

The entire file (nearly 500MB of it) can be downloaded here as of publishing this article. Information in the download is already resulting in articles like, “Top 50 Search ‘Words’,” and more horrifically, How to Kill Your Wife from AOL user 17556639 – Remember that User ID’s have been disguised. But even we have downloaded the entire contents. Finding 17556639 might not be a challenge.

Every news organization (including AOL TimeWarner) is scrambling to cover this and get the latest. initial reports on the facts and data itself are chilling and popping up like weeds on the green fields of AOL’s utopic Internet. The legal fights Google has had with the USA government over the privacy of searches have just been dashed by AOL who uses the Google search engine to operate.

News making AOL users: No. 4417749 and No. 927 No. 927’s link is straight AOL data.

No. 17556639 spelled decapitated wrong too probably prolonging his wife’s life. If you’re a hitman, you may have just found a client if you get to him before his wife’s family does a little ‘house-cleaning’…

DINARIUS Bryan's old Digital Interest blog