“Why couldn’t someone ‘crowd-source’ a financing for a startup?” he asks. “Why not allow blogs and social networks to play a part in the raising of money? It’s not as though millions of people haven’t been just as impoverished by ‘qualified’ investments and prospectuses as they could ever be by investing in a Twitter financing. Why do we need the government protecting us from ourselves?”

And he raises a good point. What’s more, crowd funding is already a fairly booming business — just not so much for the funding of startups.

• A Swarm of Angels is in the process of raising £1 million to fund the creation of a feature film (and they’re not the first to try that).
• SellABand has tapped the crowd to raise $50,000 each for 24 separate artists to record albums. So-called “believers” who invest $10 or more in fledgling bands own a piece of their investment and make money from advertising on the site and sales of the recorded tracks, and they have the right to open a shop on the site to sell merchandise related to the acts they’ve invested in.
• Last November, a group of football fans at MyFootBallClub in the UK raised money from around 30,000 footie fans and purchased a majority stake (75%) in minor league team Ebbsfleet United for £600,000. Every fan who purchased a share of the team gets to vote on which players to purchase, which to trade, how much to charge for season tickets, and what the club’s weekly budget is, among other operational decisions. In August, the site’s members raised an additional £20,000 to buy striker Michael Gash from rival Cambridge City.

Could this model work for startups? Probably. According to Mashable, Jason Goldberg of SocialMedian — the founder who tweeted the controversial funding announcement — claims to have found 3 legitimate investors within 30 minutes of putting out his message on Twitter. And, the idea of crowdsourced micro-financing via social media seems to be something that other entrepreneurs are interested, judging by the discussion about Goldberg’s tweet unfolding on Twitter.

Last March eBay put itself at odds with many of its most prolific sellers when it instituted policy changes that favored sellers using a Buy It Now (BIN) pricing model — i.e., fixed price sales. Sellers boycotted, and some third-party measures found that eBay listings were down 13% during the time of the seller action (eBay has always denied that the boycott had any effect). That and other changes by the company has caused many sellers to leave the site. 10-year eBay veteran nancybusinraleigh told me in May that eBay was putting themselves through “death by a thousand cuts” and was ignoring sellers at their peril.

This week, eBay announced more policy changes that will favor fixed price sellers. eBay will lower its upfront per listing fee by as much as 75% and raise the commission it takes on successful sales on the back end. That favors fixed price sellers who can flood the site with more listings at a lower initial cost. It hurts sellers who use the auction format, though — those who generally sell unique, one-of-a-kind, hand made, or antique items.

It is in this way that eBay is losing its soul. By chasing Amazon with its new emphasis on fixed price sales, eBay is leaving its original core customers — the sellers who built the site into an auction giant by selling unique items and hand made goods — out in the cold.

eBay’s slogan used to be, “Whatever it is, you can get it on eBay.” But that is less and less the case now. As selling a few collectibles or second hand goods from your attic becomes infeasible due to higher costs, and as competition with the growing flood of fixed price listings (including from corporate partners like Buy.com) increases, those sellers will increasingly abandon eBay.

I pinged nancybusinraleigh for her take on the new eBay changes. “The seller with one unique item, who is not a mass merchandise seller, loses the edge - again - and [the changes] force them to look elsewhere for a selling platform,” she told me. “And eBay further deteriorates the reputation they had for finding anything you might be looking for on eBay. So it’s not just the auction business they’re turning from … they take away the unique array of items people would list.”

At this point, says Nancy, eBay is just “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” They’re nickel and diming sellers, she says, in their effort to chase Amazon. But competing with Amazon might be hard for eBay.

Amazon has almost four times the quarterly revenue and more than double the sales growth, and as Nancy points out, the changes eBay is making might increase its total listings as more fixed price sellers flood the site, but it will likely decrease the variety that the site is known for. With less variety, no “Amazon option” that offers free shipping, and no value added content like customer reviews, author blogs, product wikis, etc. competing with Amazon in the fixed price market is going to be seriously difficult.

That might come as a downer for CenterNetworks author Allen Stern, who has been routinely posting hilarious videos with his take on tech news. But Allen may not have to worry, because there could be a slight flaw in the spin Zarrella put on his report.

Zarrella surveyed 420 web users gathered via Twitter, blog posts, Craigslist, and email. The majority of his respondents shared content at least once per week and with less than 50-100 people.

The most frequently used source of one-to-few content sharing (i.e., sharing with one or just a handful of people) was email, and the most likely sources of content being shared was blogs, followed by mainstream news sites, social news sites, and emails from friends.

Zarrella found that in general, frequent users of sharing technologies like Twitter, social news sites, and forums, tend to share more often and have a farther reach than those who use that type of site less frequently. He also found that frequent users tend to share more news content, while occasional users opt to share more humor content. Could that mean that early adopters are more serious than mainstream users?

Those who use social media sharing technologies less frequently also tend to rely more on email and mainstream news sites to find the content they share than do their more social media savvy counterparts. That could indicate that blogs, Twitter, and sites like Digg still don’t have much penetration among mainstream users.

In his CenterNetworks post, Zarrella said his results indicated that news content was more likely to go viral than humor. That might not be true outside of social media sites, though. Zarrella’s report found that prolific sharers (likely early adopters) share more news and non-prolific sharers (likely mainstream users) share more humor, and his report indicated that viral sharing technologies like social media sites, blogs, and Twitter were still the domain of early adopters.

But because so many of his respondents came from Twitter, it might be biased toward the early adopter set, so his overall numbers might be a bit out of whack. Things don’t go truly viral very often without the help of those mainstream sharers. I.e., the ones who still use email and prefer humor content over news. If you’re looking to have something go viral over email — where the mainstream audience plays — you still might have a better shot if it’s humorous.

His report also doesn’t seem to deal at all with video sites like YouTube.

Zarrella’s complete report is available for free on his site (though registration is required) and could be helpful for anyone looking to figure out where to target specific types of content for the best viral impact.

Stone said that the UK, which accounts for 2% of all users on Twitter, was receiving 4% of all SMS messages, and disproportionately affecting how much it costs to run the service. For those that can’t wait for Twitter to set up new local numbers in those countries and negotiate better rates, two new third party services let you pay for SMS messages and get your Twitter-fix.

Australia-based TwitSMS and UK-based TweetSMS will let text message starved users pay to get SMS updates from Twitter. TweetSMS hasn’t yet launched, but plans to start its service in the UK only and expand from there. The site doesn’t list SMS costs, but promises that it “is likely to be at a fraction of the cost of a standard text message.” TweetSMS also says there are plans to eventually offer a free, ad-supported SMS delivery service for Twitter in the UK once they ramp up to scale.

TwitSMS is already available in 8 countries/areas (Australia, Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, and the UK), and offers new users 5 free SMS updates to prove that the service works. Both services let you define which of your friends you want to receive SMS tweets from, and TweetSMS plans to allow users to receive digest updates of tweets every hour or once per day.

We’ve included the price chart for TwitSMS below. Because they use PayPal for payment processing, the company requires that users purchase SMS messages in blocks of 100 (they also offer larger blocks, but oddly don’t give volume discounts).

• Traineo - Graph fitness and weight loss goals and get motivation from family and friends who receive updates on your progress.
• Gimme20 - Find or build a workout that works for you, and then track your progress.
• PEERtrainer - Weight loss and fitness community where members help each other stick to their goals.
• My Food Diary - Food diary and exercise log tracks your calorie and fat intake and how much you’re burning.
• Gyminee - Workout and diet tracking in a community environment. Users also share workout programs and challenge one another to fitness challenges.
• FitLink - Fitness community that matches people to workout together and keep track of their progress.
• DietTV.com - Build a free personalized diet and exercise program using advice from experts.
• Skinnyr - A simple app that tracks your weight loss on a graph.
• SparkPeople - A healthy lifestyle social network where people share recipes, create diet plans, track calories and fitness goals, share exercises, and health information.
• FatSecret - Compare diets, share recipes, ask questions, track your progress, and keep an online journal at this site.
• FitDay - Diet and weight loss journal that has long term analysis tools to figuring out how successful your diet and fitness efforts are.
• WeightLossWars - Compete against others to lose weight. Feel like you’re on one of those weight loss game shows and let that be motivation to keep trying to shed pounds.
• TheDailyPlate - Nutrition information for over 100,000 food items. Keep track of what you eat and how good (or bad) it is for you.
• Inpower - Rate your overall well-being, set goals, create a plan, track your progress, and share your experiences with the community. (Not just limited to weight loss, but to all health issues — such as smoking cessation.)
• RunFatBoy - Simple site that creates a customized workout plan you can print and bring to the gym. Also food tracking and a journal.
• iTrainHarder - Track fitness and nutrition goals. Tools not only for individuals, but also for personal trainers and gyms.
• Wellsphere - An online “healthy living community” that encourages people to be more active and eat healthier.
• DailyStrength - Online support groups for all sorts of things, including weight loss and dieting. (Not limited to just those topics, though. This site has support groups for everything from depression to parenting to cancer.)
• Project Weight Loss - Create a diet and weight loss plan, then track your progress. Menu planning, calorie counting, and body mass index figuring are all part of the package.
• TweetWhatYouEat.com - One of the most simple food diaries on the web. Just tweet (or IM or enter via the web) what you’ve eaten, and TweetWhatYouEat.com will keep track of your weight and calorie intake. Unfortunately, not as good at automatically knowing how many calories food items have as other calorie counters, such as a Calorie Counter.

Have you tried any of the sites above? Let us know in the comments. Also let us know about other sites that we didn’t include on the list.

Ockham’s razor as it informs design decisions in software and web application development can perhaps be best embodied by the 37signals Getting Real approach, which counsels developers to underdo the competition. “Do less than your competitors to beat them,” says the company in their book Getting Real. “Instead of oneupping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.”

37signals explains that, among other things, less means “less features” and “less options/preferences.” The idea is that simplicity will yield technology that is easier to use and more elegant. But Northwestern Professor and former Apple Vice President Don Norman disagrees. Writing for the Association for Computer Machinery’s Interactions magazine, Norman argues that simplicity is not the answer and does not necessarily lead to better design.

“Simplicity is not the goal. We do not wish to give up the power and flexibility of our technologies,” writes Norman. “The garage door opener may be simple, but it hardly does anything. If my cellphone only had one button it certainly would be simple, but, umm, all I could do would be to turn it on or off: I wouldn’t be able to make a phone call.”

People actually want more features and functionality. They also want ease of use, he says, but there is a popular false dichotomy that equates simplicity with ease of use, and features with capability. Norman lays out the following, which he says is an implicit assumption:

• Features ==> Capability
• Simplicity ==> Ease of use

“These two statements translate into simple logic,” says Norman. “Everyone wants more capability, so therefore they want more features. Everyone wants ease of use, so therefore they want simplicity.” But Norman argues that this is false logic. “The arrow goes left to right: this says nothing about the right to left direction. So extra capability does not require more features. Similarly, ease of use does not require simplicity.”

People very likely do want more capability and easier to use products, but to deliver those things doesn’t require that designers succumb to feature creep or make simplicity a design rule. Norman lays out some design rules to create better products that are easier to use but don’t sacrifice capability in the name of simplicity.

• Modularization - Break up big, complicated tasks into smaller, more manageable ones.
• Mapping - The relationship between actions and the results they bring about should be clear.
• Cohesive conceptual models - People should understand what they’re supposed to do, what doing it makes happen, and what’s expected of them. “See any Apple product,” says Norman.

“The argument is not between adding features and simplicity, between adding capability and usability,” Norman writes. “The real issue is about design: designing things that have the power required for the job while maintaining understandability, the feeling of control, and the pleasure of accomplishment.”

When Yahoo! Buzz opened in February, it was limited to submissions from just a handful of publishers (about 100). Only invited/approved sites that were part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network (Yahoo!’s contextual text ad network) were able to join. The number grew to 400 sites, says Yahoo!, and reports of the Digg-killing traffic that Buzz was able to send started rolling in. Yahoo! released the following early stats to prove Buzz’s effectiveness at sending traffic back out to publishers.

Early Publisher Results - Yahoo! Buzz Beta (Feb 27, 2008 - Mar 10, 2008):

• Salon.com reached over 1 million uniques in one day for the first time in the company’s 12-year history, after Yahoo.com linked to one of their highly “buzzed” stories (they issued this press release)
• US Magazine: In part due to a Yahoo.com link, February 27th was the second highest day in overall Usmagazine.com traffic since its launch in June 2006. Referral visits from the Yahoo! homepage accounted for 32% of total visits that day.
• When Yahoo.com linked to one of their stories, The Smoking Gun received approximately 1 million additional page views over their average traffic, with over 275,000 visitors coming from the Yahoo! homepage.
• Portfolio.com (part of Conde Net) received over half a million referral visits from a Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link.
• HuffingtonPost received over 800,000 unique visitors from Yahoo.com in one day.
• Dallas Morning News’ traffic spiked as a result of their Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link, making the featured story their most viewed single story on dallasnews.com that day.
• Imaginova: Space.com and LiveScience.com articles were featured and linked to directly from Yahoo!’s homepage and both sites saw significant increases in daily visitors and traffic after being featured for just 2 hours.

TechCrunch bragged that a Yahoo! link caused their highest traffic day ever, and comScore reported in May that Yahoo! Buzz overtook Digg in terms of unique visitors and was pulling in more mainstream traffic.

But opening up to so many sites may rob Buzz of some of what made it so special. One of the great things about Buzz was that it was somewhat curated. Yeah, it was perhaps not as democratic as Digg — you can’t submit a link unless the site is a member of Buzz, and until now not all sites could be members — but it meant that theoretically there was more quality stuff hitting the front page of the site. More signal and less noise.

Buzz will still be curated — at least in terms of which sites are promoted to the Yahoo! front page — but the site’s upcoming section will be as littered as Digg’s with silly submissions. It will also now be more open to attempts by less scrupulous publishers to game the system. The point is that Yahoo! Buzz is now no different than Digg, except for the prospect of major traffic if an editor picks your link out of the bunch to be featured. And competition for those feature spots just got a lot tighter.

Andy Beal says that in the three weeks he was part of the Buzz beta before it opened up yesterday he saw no significant increase in traffic as a result. At ReadWriteWeb, while I was there, we only ever had one post get major Buzz traffic, to my knowledge. (Sarah Perez’s post about Wikipedia did get a good deal of traffic from Buzz and over 160 comments.) With more people competing for those few front page promotions, it will be less likely that your site will get major traffic from Buzz (of course, if you weren’t accepted into Buzz previously, then your chances certainly have increased!).

So, Buzz is really just a Digg clone now.

All that said, there’s no reason why any publisher shouldn’t add Buzz button to their posts. Buzz may now be a Digg doppelganger, but in social news as a publisher you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Get your content onto as many sites as possible and reap the benefits.

But one thing is clear, at least in my mind: filtering is the future of news. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham recently called news filtering sites like Digg and Reddit “just the beginning” of the next evolution of news delivery web sites. Graham challenged web innovators to come up with a new type of news site that will push news dissemination forward. “News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the web,” he wrote.

Two sites think that the next wave of news filtering will be based less on popularity, and more on measuring credibility. The problem many users have with social media sites like Digg and Delicious is that they reward popularity rather than necessarily highlighting the best content. Two startups NewsCred, which is supposed to launch tomorrow, and NewsTrust, which is actually a few years old, aim to sort news based on the credibility and reliability of the source rather than its popularity.

Both sites work essentially the same way — users rate news based whether or not they think that news source is credible and reliable. This is different from other social media sites, where news is voted up or down based on whatever criteria people use personally — it could be credibility or it could be “coolness” or because the voter’s friend wrote the story.

“We firmly believe that a transparent and credible media industry is vital to the health of the world democracy,” says the NewsCred about page. “We’ve also done our research, and there are hundreds of surveys and papers that show that the public continues to fault news organizations (both traditional and online) for a number of perceived failures, with solid majorities criticizing them for political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes.”

Each site works basically the same, but NewsTrust has a much more comprehensive voting mechanism. While NewsCred opts for the simple approach — every article fed into the site from pre-approved top news and blog sources can be either ‘credited’ or ‘discredited’ and the site then figures out a ‘credibility’ score for that article — NewsTrust takes a more extensive approach. On NewsTrust, stories are rated on one to five star scale in 11 categories, including fairness, balance, context, importance, style, and trust. The individual ratings are combined and averaged for an overall rating on the story that, in theory, reflects all of those factors.

On both sites users are allowed to comment on stories and add additional information and sources. NewsCred also lets users customize which sources are given priority when creating the main page, giving users an extra set of filters to cut down on the flow of information.

Of the two sites, NewsCred is certainly the slickest designed with the lowest barrier to entry for users — the simple credit/discredit voting system is easy to pick up, especially for converts from other social media sites which have similar voting systems (Digg, Reddit, Mixx, etc.), and the site’s design mimics mainstream news outlets. But NewsTrust probably has the better system. NewsTrust specifically asks users to weigh in on articles according to specific criteria, so they’re much more likely to get accurate results than is NewsCred — whose system could be treated by users as no different than Reddit’s up/down voting system. Even though NewsCred asks people to consider things like credibility, accuracy, bias, and quality when rating stories, it never defines those terms. What I may think is quality, you may think is rubbish.

That same problem of personal definitions might affect NewsTrust as well, but probably to a lesser extent because the site clearly defines the things that it wants people to consider when rating stories. And its more granular rating system is also superior — I can see that a story might be, for example, considered by most readers to be well-written and interesting but not particularly fair. That might mean it is worth reading, but on NewsCred, the story’s tendency toward bias might sink it.

In general, NewsCred and NewsTrust represent an interesting new approach to social media sharing and could yield a better way to cut the noise from the signal than traditional up/down news voting sites.

Today, Tim O’Reilly wondered if self linking is on its way to becoming the norm across the web. O’Reilly pointed to media sites like TechCrunch and the New York Times, which less and less often link outside of their own property lines. TechCrunch, for example, links to a site it owns called CrunchBase for further information about the companies it covers.

As far as I know, gadget blog Engadget pioneered the internal linking strategy that many blogs nows use, whereby links almost always refer to other content on the site rather than send users outside to the rest of the web. In this post for example, about Google’s “Free the Airwaves” initiative, Engadget links to a tag search on their site for “whitespace” and three previous posts (two linked from organization names, rather than linking directly to those organizations). The only link to Google’s actual blog post about the subject — arguably the most important link — appears at the very bottom of their post with a tiny “Read” link.

Internal linking is seen at large media companies as well, and even at search engines. Google, for example, was recently seen giving its Merchant Search home loan comparison site, special treatment in the UK. They tried something similar a couple of years ago in the US called “Google Tips” that would push links to Google content first and foremost. (Tips was pulled just a few weeks after it debuted.)

The reason for this type of internal linking is easy to fathom: the more you can keep people on your site, the more money you can make off them by serving them advertising. But it can also be dangerous for the web, as it leads to the creation of information silos that decrease the utility of the web for users by exposing them to only one point of view and data source.

“When this trend spreads (and I say ‘when’, not ‘if’), this will be a tax on the utility of the web that must be counterbalanced by the utility of the intervening pages,” says O’Reilly. “If they are really good, with lots of useful, curated data that you wouldn’t easily find elsewhere, this may be an acceptable tax. In fact, they may even be beneficial, and a real way to increase the value of the site to its readers. If they are purely designed to capture additional clicks, they will be a degradation of the web’s fundamental currency, much like the black hat search engine pages that construct link farms out of search engine results.”

O’Reilly lays out two rules for anyone to consider before linking to previous content or special made content on their own site:

1. Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.)
2. Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide.

My own link policy for blog posts at SitePoint (adapted from the policy in place at ReadWriteWeb while I was there) is something like this:

1. Always link out to as many sources as you can to provide the reader with further reading and to strengthen your argument.
2. Only link internally if the article provides the context you are looking for (i.e., don’t link to yourself solely to give your content a link — only do it when it makes sense).
3. Never link to an article about a company rather than the company itself — readers don’t want to click on a company name and be brought to previous coverage, they’re clicking on that link to get to the company’s web site, so get them there. (For larger companies, like Google, or companies that are mentioned only in passing and aren’t a focus of the post I may forgo linking altogether.)

How much internal linking you do is important for any site that brokers in information to consider. Information silos are bad for the web and web sites should link to each other as much as possible, rather than just to themselves.

Consider that the types of sports NBC is willing to stream live on the Internet are not the most popular events among US web users. The NBC television broadcast will air another 1,400 hours of live and tape-delayed event coverage that won’t be available online until after it has already been shown on television. NBC was so afraid that the Internet would cannibalize its lucrative television coverage, it imposed strict limits on the amount and type of content it was willing to make available on the web.

That, however, is probably a mistake — and one that NBC and other broadcasters have even started admitted to making.

“We’ve learned that wherever you are, you watch on the biggest screen you can,” said Robert Bowman, the CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, in the New York Times today. Bowman knows a thing or two about streaming content online — his firm streams as many hours of professional baseball games in the US each week as NBC is streaming video for the entire Olympics. Bowman said that fears that the web will eat into television viewing have been unfounded, and he hopes to do away with local market blackouts for web coverage in the coming years as well.

According to Bowman, before the TV to web debate, people were worried that putting games on television would keep people from visiting the ballpark. Yet, baseball has been setting yearly attendance records this entire decade.

Jason Kint, the GM of CBSSports.com, which this year webcast the entire NCAA basketball tournament, said that the decision to put the final games online as well as earlier rounds was a big win for the company. Putting the final games on the web, “only added to revenues and therefore profit,” he said. Only a small percentage of users watched those final games on the web, and those were likely people who were not able to get access to a larger screen.

The initial numbers for NBC’s Olympics seem to bare that out. Over the first few days of Olympics coverage just 0.2% watched solely online (that number may have jumped a bit once the work week began and people logged on from work).

“The streaming will not diminish the ratings,” sports-media consultant Neal Pilson told the Wall Street Journal last week. “It encourages viewers and provides them with information. There will be no dilution or fragmentation of the national audience.” Pilson advised the IOC on negotiating broadcast rights.

And NBC might actually be getting the picture. “The Internet hardly cannibalizes; it actually fuels interest,” NBC’s President of Research Alan Wurtzel told reporters last week. “If you watched the Olympics in high definition on a big screen, you are not going to watch it online. So that is why there isn’t going to be a cannibalization.”

That’s exactly the sentiment described by Kint and Bowman. People watch video content on the biggest screen available to them, and complete coverage online will only fuel the offline coverage. “If I watched a great event live, I’ll e-mail 55 people to say watch this on TV,” Bowman told the New York Times.

What this means is that in the future, we should expect more parity between web coverage of live events and television coverage, and better selections on web-based TV catchup services like a Hulu and the BBC iPlayer. That’s certainly a big win for consumers.

Update: Techdirt notes that some big media companies are even starting to realize that they can benefit from their content being illegally uploaded to YouTube by fans.