It has been reported today that Wikipedia’s cloak of anonymity will soon be put to an end with the free Internet encyclopedia planning to ask contributors who claim certain credentials to identify themselves. It’s about time Wikipedia does something like that. They should have done it a long time ago as that may have minimized the controversies and the slandering practices we have seen lately.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in interviews by phone and instant message Wednesday from Japan that contributors still would be able to remain anonymous. But he said they should only be allowed to cite some professional expertise in a subject if those credentials have been verified.

“We always prefer to give a positive incentive rather than absolute prohibition, so that people can contribute without a lot of hassle,” Wales wrote.

Full Article [Associated Press]

Performancing.com was acquired by SplashPress Media and David Krug (of 901am) today. SplashPress Media, who owns several sites including the popular site The Blog Herald will be acquiring the bloggers’ community and Performancing Metrics. ScribeFire (their Firefox plugin) and the Performancing Partners Network, has not been sold. Performancing will run as a separate division of SplashPress and will be headed by David Krug.

You can hear the full Performancing podcast interview below. (Courtesy of Technosailor)

Performancing has been been in chaos in the last couple of months with server problems, the failed acquisition by PayPerPost, leading to them closing their advertising network and metrics tools, rebranding their Performancing tool (now names ScribeFire) and CEO Nick Wilson resigning.

Background

Performancing.com is a site that gives information and bloggers a change to read more about the subject of blogging professionally. It had an advertising network (Performancing Partners Network) that allowed blogs to sell advertisements, the perfomancing metrics tool (a free blog analytics service), Performancing Exchange (an online classifieds for bloggers) and the ever popular Firefox Perfomancing tool (a blog editor plugin for Firefox). At its high, Performancing had a community of over 28,000 professionals since it launched in 2005.

News [Performancing]
Podcast Interview Source [Technosailor]

With the sudden social network craze, Cisco Systems (a worldwide leader in networking equipment) has announced that they are getting into the social networking game too i.e. by acquiring Five Across, as social network software company based in San Francisco. The acquisition was announced late yesterday and the deal is expected to close within the April time frame. Financial details have yet to be revealed.

Cisco’s plan is not to compete against the big giants out there like MySpace and Facebook. Instead, they plan to use it to create a way to better connect enterprises with their customers. With that, Cisco service providers will be able to build services with the social networking technology and sell them to their business customers as a value added service.

Five Across is known for their software platform Connect Community Builder which includes features that allow enterprises to build a web presence for their customers. These features include creation of profile pages, friend lists, discussions, automatic blog postings, video and podcast implementation. NHL Connect, a site for the National Hockey League launched a platform last year with Five Across Software.

This acquisition brings about a first in Cisco’s business model of expanding into the consumer and media markets. It seems like a good move - the opportunities are huge and there aren’t too many social networking systems for the enterprise in the marketplace at the moment. This is most likely the best time to break into the enterprise market segment as it is surprisingly unsaturated.

Tired with mobile ad revenue to Google and Yahoo!, seven global cell phone operators have joined forces to create their own mobile search engine. The seven operators are Cingular, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Vodafone.

Given the operators’ tendencies to create “walled garden” approaches to content, there’s doubt as to whether the operator consortium can pull off a victory. With seven different businesses participating in this project, it is unclear if they’ll develop one engine that is white-labeled to each brand or create an advertising clearinghouse that search services could use to access subscribers.

It remains to be seen how this would succeed as they will be looking to succeed where others have failed, like Microsoft. Some critics have questioned the necessity, as most phone and hand held devices have the ability to search directly from Google or Yahoo! pages. Google as the undisputed leader in the Internet search, has since announced plans to include ad links to all mobile searches, claiming to make their services profitable by 2008.

GigaOM is having a giveaway a lot of invites and goodies today but most of it is gone. However, there is still the offer for a free WIFI Router from FON. They have 1500 available so hurry and sign up. Free means no shipping too - so you’ll have to pay a grand total of $0.00. This is the fastest way to get around their “invite only” promotional strategy.

All you have to do sign up and let them know where the device needs to be shipped. Usual disclaimers apply, so please read it before signing up.

Signup page [FON] Via [GigaOM]