As you can see in the graphic below, you can setup the Sobees web application with as many panels as you would like. The panels can be setup as Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (soon) and real-time searches. For example, I could have one panel for my @centernetworks Twitter account, one for my @cloudcontacts Twitter account, a search for “web blogs that don’t link”, a search for “great web startups”, etc.

Sobees is based in Switzerland and competes with London-based Tweetdeck (which moments ago announced a new round of funding in the amount of 2 million pounds) and valley darling Seesmic. Seesmic has been talking about a browser-based version for a while now but it hasn’t launched as of yet.

The big issue with Sobees in the past was that you needed a windows machine and some runtimes to get the service to work. With this new web-based version, you need only Silverlight which works on both Windows and Mac in any browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.).

The tool also offers an anti-spam function which allows you to enter a variety of terms that will be blocked in your timeline and/or search results.

My only real suggestion for the Sobees team is to consolidate their product names - get rid of bDule and just offer Sobees Web, Sobees Lite and Sobees Full. I think it’s a bit confusing that bDule = sobees Web.

Update: Seesmic Web client is now live as well - read a very in-depth review by Frederic Lardinois at Readwriteweb.

Now wiki provider Wetpaint has announced the launch of news feeds. This option allows owners of Wetpaint-authored wikis to embed feeds from any source online. From the Wetpaint blog (backing up what I said above), “Feeds can display content from all over the web around anything really, so now you don’t have to worry about having enough new and relevant content to keep people coming back to your site right from the get go!”

Wetpaint authors only need to grab a RSS feed link, or can use a search result to create a new section of content in their wiki. The embedded items display links to the original source and part of the content (similar to SocialMedian). Most popular stories are displayed on the wiki’s front page. Naturally they allow commenting which is similar to Friendfeed and if you read CN regularly you know how I feel about comment stealing. I am quite certain this new aggregation option will be heavily used by Wetpaint authors.

Here’s a video on how the external feed option works:

Content can be submitted by email or Web and the form for submissions is customized by each Tumblr blog owner.

This type of content submission has become popular. Many blogs are taking “contributed posts” more and more. Another example, comment service Disqus allows bloggers to take comments left on their site and turn them into full posts. We will see more of this type of submitted content in the future.

Today Amazon has announced their third annual “Startup Challenge” which offers startups that are using AWS a chance to win a variety of prizes and service credits. Startups in United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Israel are eligible to enter and the entry period ends on August 25th. Also, startups must have earned no more than $5 million in annual revenue and/or raised more than $5 million in venture capital funding.

The top prize is $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits, mentoring sessions from an AWS technical expert, and premium gold support for one year. There are a variety of other winners as well.

What’s great about the Startup Challenge is that unlike many startup contests, it doesn’t appear that Amazon is taking any equity for the prize amounts (of course you should check the rules to verify). My take is simple - if you use AWS in any form, submit your entry because, at a minimum, you get a $25 credit (which for CN is like 6 mos free service).

Online advertising marketplace BuySellAds has put together their “3 Golden Rules to Selling More Ads”. They discussing pricing models including eCPM pricing.

Ad placement is the second rule — different locations can mean placement premiums.

The last rule is content - as we know the better your content, the more you can charge.

If you are new to selling your own ads, you might try reducing the price a pinch below what you think is a fair price to check interest levels. Then as you get advertisers buying ads, increase the price little by little until you meet resistance. Also remember that many advertisers will want to negotiate so if you start low, you will wind up going even lower.

Share your pricing tips in the comments and I will add them to the post.

Today, Svetlana Gladkova (she is editor of the Profy blog) is launching a similar program to support bloggers and remove ads at the same time. CancelAds hopes to offer readers a quick and easy option to remove the ads on a blog or website for a specific period of time. I think of it as the next level of “tipping”.

From the release, “CancelAds is based on the idea that all the online publishers are compensated for their content by their visitors and users: some pay for premium services while other visitors watch ads. The much-criticized trend is that the vast majority of web publishers rely on advertising as their only source of revenue. This is exactly where CancelAds offers a solution as the startup is intended to ensure the badly needed diversification of revenue sources.”

CancelAds provides bloggers with a line of code to add to their template and buttons to allow readers to purchase blocks of time that the ads will be “cancelled”. Payment is made via PayPal and after the payment is made, readers surf ad-free for the purchased time period.

Naturally not every reader is going to use CancelAds, in fact my guess is that the percentage will be relatively low. But it’s an additional option and the service costs nothing to install. Bloggers and CancelAds share in the revenue generated from each purchase. There are a variety of content topics where I think CancelAds could work (early adopter blogging isn’t one of them) and overall I like the idea of a potential additional direct revenue stream for blogs. I’ve been a fan of blog revenue models that layer instead of replace.

Editor’s note: Svetlana is a friend.

Shareaholic is also using their own proprietary data within the real-time results. The topics cover news, videos and blogs. What’s interesting with today’s announcement is that users can also share the interesting trending topics on any of the 60+ services that Shareaholic supports which includes Digg, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn, ping.fm, etc.

Mozilla reports over 1 million activations and the service works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Flock, Safari and Songbird.

Today, New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, outlined the city’s plans to boost the media industry in NYC in a variety of ways as part of MediaNYC 2020, which was originally announced in February.

Most notable and relevant to us, of course, is the effort to build a “Hive” space for independent media makers and other independent workers. The overlap with our ongoing efforts with New Work City and the Runway Project is obvious, so seeing the city make an increasing effort in this area is exciting for us. This, in combination with the city’s announced efforts earlier this year at fostering entrepreneurial growth, is beginning to add up to a real, noticeable effort on the part of the Mayor’s Office, the EDC, and others to foster healthy entrepreneurial growth in the city.

Creating an entrepreneur-friendly ecosystem

Effective spaces do two things: they help new businesses get connected and grow, and they provide a fertile ground for new partnerships to be discovered an evolve. We’ve already seen that progress in our community, where members have formed partnerships to start new initiatives such as LaidOffCamp and Zeitheist, among others. Freelancers, too, have found work in meeting and working alongside their colleagues, and through referrals that we pass along.

Our members also started and run the Runway Project, a community-driven education effort aimed toward people starting new businesses in the wake of the recession, and have helped dozens of newly independent New Yorkers get connected, educated, and on their feet in short order. All of this has sprung out of an environment designed to facilitate this sort of healthy activity.

Creating Sustainable Entrepreneurial Growth

The main challenge to establishing city-sponsored workspaces has been the fact that they have been historically temporary– reliant on below-market leases during bad markets which, when the markets rebound and prices go up, end up folding without external support.

At New Work City, we’ve been making lots of progress toward sustainability on our own. Our aim is to strike the balance between keeping membership rates low enough so as to be accessible to early-stage businesses and independent workers, while still maintaining enough cash flow to run a profitable business that gets everything at fair market rate.

For the new efforts the city is making in establishing spaces, my hope is that any new spaces that are established are done so in a way that creates long-term, sustainable economic growth. That means not relying on subsidy but on a sound business model that will survive tidal changes in economics and politics.

With the city increasing its emphasis on new and small businesses, I look forward to helping the city find ways to create this healthy growth in a city that is very much ready to take its place as a friendly place to be an entrepreneur.

Today Zeer has announced the launch of “Zeer Select” which is a product directly specifically targeted to gluten-free foods. The service is launching with a database of 30,000 products with 500 new products added each week. Subscribers can search or browse the entire database to find specific products or browse by categories such as entrees, condiments, sauces, etc. The service also helps you find gluten-free alternatives for your favorite foods.

The service is offered at $14.99 a month. They should have noted the pricing details in the launch blog post as the post makes it seem like the Zeer Select service is free like the rest of the site.

Here’s a chart comparing the Zeer free and select services:

There are a variety of popular forum tools including vBulletin and phpBB. I’ve been using vBulletin on the HTMLCenter web development forums for nearly a decade. vBulletin isn’t free; a license costs $180 for life plus $60/year for product upgrades and updates. The software is very powerful, administrative panel is easy to use and the email support is always very responsive. There’s only one real issue with the software - it hasn’t moved into 2009. The software still looks and acts as it did 1,2,3, 5 years ago. You can always tell when a forum is using vBulletin without even looking at the footer. They continue to add improvements and bug fixes which is great but it’s time to update the look and the usability to today’s standard. The same can be said for phpBB and most of the other forum software packages.

This is where FriendFeed comes in. They have an awesome opportunity to take over the forum world. While forum software isn’t as sexy as creating a Twitter app, there is a real market opportunity which could be there for the taking.

Naturally FriendFeed would need to create a self-hosted version of their tool and modify it to allow for better “forum-like” thread creation. FriendFeed forum owners could also opt to allow their content to be indexed into Friendfeed’s new search engine. Take a moment to think about how much more “real-time” data would be included in the FriendFeed search if thousands of popular forums were included/indexed.

The FriendFeed forum service would also allow for better integration with Twitter, naturally Friendfeed and all of the other services FriendFeed will push to in the future. What this means is that forum owners would have new ways to get traffic to their forums.

In addition, there are loads of developers who build apps for vBulletin and my guess is that they might switch to building apps for the Friendfeed forum service. It could be a way to get developers excited about FriendFeed.

I know I would switch my forums over to this new offering and would pay the same price I do to vBulletin. Create a tie into Wordpress and it could became an even sweeter offering.

Featured Jobs:

• Online Advertising Sales Manager, DMO - TripAdvisor at TripAdvisor
• Director Front-end Web Development at POP
• Web Developer at Toth Brand Imaging
• Technical Director at Your Majesty
• Project Manager at Modea
• Technical Services Analyst - New York at Google
• Senior Brand Strategist at Red Lever Inc

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Now we’ve learned via Thomas Marban that the Technorati service hasn’t updated their “breaking news” home page in more than four days. Oddly it appears that blog posts are still indexing as my post about the Disney Monorail crash is listed as a “rising” story way at the bottom of the page.

There is news going on across the world (Palin, missiles, hot dog contests, etc.) so not sure what’s up with the homepage not updating in the better part of a week. It sure would be nice to get some positive news out about Technorati one of these days!

Here’s what the home page looks like currently - note the arrows pointing to the time:

James Thomas discussed his life without Google - could you do it?

Guhmshoo also recently revealed who he is and why he picked an alias to use when posting his cartoons.

Happy 4th of July to everyone in the U.S.!

Since then we’ve seen major public companies post for new employees that have a minimum of 250 followers on Twitter.

But the HUGE news this evening is that Microsoft and Linux have made love on Twitter by exchanging tweets. While there are 10,000 startups that wish they got coverage, instead a twitter message gets mad coverage.

The Microsoft/Linux tweets are nothing compared to our BREAKING NEWS that a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan have exchanged Twitter messages. Typically this is banned - for example, as a Yankee fan, I am banned from the entire state of Massachusetts.

After 100 years of the most heated rivalry in all of sports, there just might be a new day dawning for two of the most storied teams in baseball. Will this conversation continue? Will Yankee fans eat baked beans and will Boston fans finally realize that the Yankees are the better team? I don’t know but I can assure you this…. if it happens on Twitter, we will break it!

TC50 founder Michael Arrington has doubled the amount of advertising. He says whatever DEMO offers, he will double it.

Arrington notes, “Our ads will be on our various TechCrunch networks sites and via our terrific sponsors, who are going to be adding their own inventory as well. We’ll give half to the top two winners, and half to everyone else who launches.”

It seems the silly wars appear to be on yet again this year. 

I think it’s great that both DEMO and Techcrunch50 are offering bigger prizes - anything to help the startups that present past the initial buzz is a good thing. Let’s just hope Jason, Heather, Mike and Matt remember the end goal and don’t get back to last years “TC50: 1 - Demo: 1 - Startup: 0“.