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]

One of the most respected blogs on the web is up for sale, BusinessLogs.

BusinessLogs was established in May of 2004 and has about 50,000 visitors a month and a PR7 ranking. They are asking $55,000 for it but offers are accepted within their auction sale.

Here is what you’ll get:

+ All blog entries written by the current owner Mike Rundle since May 2004.
+ A new design for the site to begin upon finalization of the sale. Normal blog design projects for clients start at $4,000 but this is included in the price.

It does not include:

- Continuation of the 9rules affiliation which accounts for <4% total referral pageviews.
- The work portfolio of Mike Rundle (currently located at businesslogs.com/work).

The package doesn't come with the tag team of Mike Rundle, chief designer and Paul Scrivens ... so you'll most likely have to hire one or do it yourself if you are design savvy enough. Bear in mind, you'll be paying for the name and a lot of credibility too from the likes of Christian Science Monitor, RedState.com, PBS.org, Mozilla, Microsoft, and many more well-known Web 2.0 startups.

The asking price is a little pricey and I can't see a $55K price tag justification. Even if you purchase it, everyone would know that Mike isn't there anymore to do the great designs that the company is known for. I might be wrong but I see the bulk of the clientèle and the blog credibility following Mike where ever he goes. It also doesn't include the 9rules affiliation (which is a huge negative) and the actual blog only takes in about $750 in standalone revenue every month. Pretty hard to sell a design company if its priced assets (the designers) doesn't come with it. Interesting to see how this progresses.

Business Logs Auction Page
Business Logs Site

Yahoo had launched it’s own version of Digg’s like site two days ago. Called Yahoo Suggestion Board, it does in fact look very much like Digg, causing annoyance to the loyal Digg community. Over at the Yahoo blog where the announcement was made, it had attracted a total of 289 comments at the time of my writing, a lot of them posted by disgruntled Digg’s loyalists.

Here are some of the comments:

“Shame on Yahoo! Auto for copying Digg’s interface completely. Where’s your originality? Oh wait! You guys have no originality what so ever!”

“Wow, ripping off Digg UI? How low can Yahoo and it’s employees get? Grow a back bone and design something original.”

“Aren’t you afraid of being sued by DIGG.com regarding your blatant and admitted copying of their site? Hell, your user interface graphics are almost identical. Me personally if I was to plagiarized, I wouldn’t mention the source and I surely wouldn’t boast about it.”

“You literally stole the design from Digg.com. How is that even remotely okay? If another company stole Yahoo!’s design, you’d file a lawsuit to protect your intellectual property (and you have!). Why is it okay for you to not just steal the visual design of another site, but their voting system as well? This is disgusting.”

It is interesting to see what would happen next. How would Yahoo defend itself against the accusations? How would Digg respond to Yahoo’s latest site? Over at Digg’s blog, I found no mention of Yahoo’s Suggestion Board yet by any of the bloggers but it’s probably a matter of time before that it would be discussed there. It certainly takes two to tango.

Blog [Yodel Anectodal] Via [CyberNet]

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.