GigaOm is reporting that Joost will discontinue its desktop P2P client and replace it with a small plugin that would embed itself in the browser. That plugin will reportedly provide files with the help of the company’s P2P technologies that are already in place.

Joost, which launched to considerable fanfare, has fallen off the radar as of late as the company has been plagued by a shortage of content and, well, users. And as the inertia of the online video business moves away from desktop clients and to the Web, it seems Joost has finally seen the writing on the wall and will launch an online video service of its own.

Although Joost has not confirmed the report, it is expected to make an announcement shortly. It’ll be interesting to see how it fares in an already crowded lineup of offerings headlined by Hulu, Amazon, and Fancast.

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As a concept, Veritocracy is actually quite simple.  At its heart, social news site pulls together some of the better qualities of Techmeme — targeted stories and related posts to an original story — and Digg. Once you get to the front page, you’re immediately presented with a nice layout of highly-targeted stories on topics ranging from politics and technology to business and entertainment.

The site collects what it deems to be the best perspectives on various subjects from around the Web, groups them together by topic, and lets its users decide which is best through the use of a voting system. As a user votes on different stories, Veritocracy becomes more personalized to that specific user’s tastes. And as long as that engine works well, Veritocracy claims publishers will be able to find the ideal target audience and readers will find stories that fit their interests.”The ultimate objective,” says CEO Lee Hoffman, “is to create a truly meritocratic content distribution system where each article a writer publishes finds its way to the individual readers that will actually want to see it.”

Before that can happen, Veritocracy has a long way to go. Right now, the site is in private beta and is slowly working its way towards a wider release later this year. If you want to check out Veritocracy for yourself, Veritocracy sent us 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. To redeem your invite, type “techcrunchlove” into the invite box, sign up, and start using it.

After trying it for a while, it quickly becomes apparent that if users find reasons to use this site and the company can deliver on its lofty promises, Veritocracy could become a destination for news junkies.

In each category, you’re presented with a story — “Palin takes the stage on night two at the convention” for example — that can be clicked on. Once you click that link, you’ll drill-down into perspectives on the Vice Presidential nominee’s speech last night at the Republican National Convention. Some say it was great, others are more suspect of its success. From there, you can click on the links to be brought to the respective article or you can vote them up or down based on your own opinion on the subject.

As votes start accumulating, Veritocracy promotes the better stories to the top. At the same time, each of your votes is recorded and remembered to help create a more enjoyable experience the next time you come back to the site. In other words, if you continually vote stories by conservative pundits down in the politics section and you tend to enjoy stories that are more “cranky” in the technology section, Veritocracy will tailor your experience based on those votes.

As CEO Hoffman points out, “Veritocracy isn’t a popularity contest, so voting up all of your friends’ content will only cause you to see more of their stuff, and the stuff they like.”

That in mind, the success of Veritocracy depends on the honesty of its users. The name “Veritocracy” is derived from the concept of meritocracy: those stories that deserve to be best will be. If users vote for those perspectives that deserve to be promoted, the site should run as designed: the best stories on each topic will rise to the top, and the greatest number of users will have a personalized experience.  How will Veritocracy fight people trying to game the rankings?  Hoffman explains:

We do this by learning how effective each user on the site is as an editor for you by comparing your vote histories. Unlike other personalization/recommendation systems (think Amazon, and Digg’s new recommendations) our system significantly ramps up the accuracy of these predictions by using a market based design layered over the standard personalization algorithms.

If you submit crap, miscategorize your articles, or even vote for other people’s crap, readers won’t be voting for the same things you are (and may even vote down things you vote up) and thus the the system will uncorrelate you from everyone (or won’t correlate you to them in the first place). This will make sure your content and votes have less chance of effecting what other users see in the future. Of course, a lot of the time “crap” and “quality” are entirely relative, and that’s where the system really shines because it learns to distinguish this for each user, based on the same design principal.

Veritocracy also lets the original authors of stories submit them on different topics. (Veriticracy funnels all stories into consistent topics instead of tags).  After a specific topic is identified, users can upload their own stories, which will then be placed as a perspective on the given topic. Once there, other users can vote it up or down based on its quality and relevance to the topic.

But because so much of Veritocracy’s success relies on its community, it’s tough to say how well it will perform—for now, few even have access to it. But the site has promise. It just needs more participation.

CrunchBase Information Veritocracy Information provided by CrunchBase

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NetSuite, a company that touts itself as a provider of solutions that can help companies run almost every aspect of their business, announced Friday that it will be the first business application provider to provide native support for Google Chrome.

According to the company, Chrome’s browser is an ideal candidate for NetSuite products. Because the browser is optimized for Web 2.0, the company’s AJAX-powered features in its products should work much better on Chrome than any other browser. NetSuite was quick to point out, though, that its products can still be used on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

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Now that convention season is over and the candidates have about eight weeks before they find out who will lead the United States for the next four years, it’s time we compare each candidate’s attention online as we head into the final stretch.

According to Google Trends data, Republican candidate John McCain is quickly gaining ground on Barack Obama and witnessed a spike in searches the day he announced Sarah Palin as his running mate. However, Obama witnessed an even greater spike at the same time, perhaps due to his convention speech the night before and some comparative searches pertaining to Palin.

As online attention has shifted from Obama to McCain (and especially Sarah Palin), Hitwise is reporting that news and media outlets are also doing the same. According to Hitwise research, McCain’s coverage has jumped considerably in the past few days and more media outlets are sending readers to the candidate’s page. And although he still trails Obama, that gap is tightening each day.

For all the attention Obama and McCain are receiving though, neither has captivated the Web audience like Sarah Palin. According to Google Trends data, Palin’s search volume is more than double McCain’s and Obama’s, even after her initial spike.

Just because people are traveling to a specific candidate’s site or searching for them online, it doesn’t mean they will vote for them. But with such a contentious election underway that pits the red against the blue, it means at the very least that John McCain is gaining ground on Obama in the race for people’s attention.

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Wonder where Hurricane Ike will hit or when Tropical Storm Hanna will pass? Hurricane season has lots of people glued to the Weather Channel to catch the latest updates on developing storms. But why wait for the weatherman to tell you what is going on when you can check for yourself online? One of the best places to do that is Stormpulse. (Google Earth is another one). Stormpulse shows active hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic. And the graphics are better than TV because you can play around with them.

You can turn on layers to show projected paths and historical tracks. The severity of the storm is color coded from Tropical Depression to Category 5 Hurricane. You can see all active hurricanes at once, drag the map around, or click on a specific storm. The site also offers satellite pictures and storm news.

Data is pulled from the National Hurricane Center and other places. The site has storm data going back to 1851, soyou can see the paths and intensity of previous hurricanes. There is even an API for embedding Stormpulse maps on other sites.

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You’d think that with the FCC conducting so many wireless spectrum auctions, that all that spectrum sold off for billions of dollars would be all used up. The sad truth is that many companies who win spectrum at auction end up sitting on it. All of this “fallow” spectrum is a big problem. A Florida startup called Spectrum Bridge today launched a marketplace to address this problem.

Companies that own spectrum can use Spectrum Bridge to find buyers and sellers for portions of spectrum they own that they don’t need. The marketplace has $250 million worth of spectrum listed, which is not that much considering that companies spent $19 billion on the last official FCC auction. But at least it is a start. The secondary market for spectrum is grossly inefficient today, mostly consisting of side deals between telecom companies.

Before the last big FCC wireless spectrum auctions, one of the rules Google proposed addressed this problem:

Open services: Third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms.

That rule was never adopted. Maybe Spectrum Bridge will have better luck.

Spectrum Bridge has raised $2 million from Milcom Venture Partners, True Ventures, and the government-funded Telecommunications Development Fund (FCC chairman Kevin Martin sits on its board). The management team comes from Motorola’s Mesh Networks.

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Although buying products from your desktop at home has become just as customary as buying products at the store, few have found reason to buy products on their cell phones. In an attempt to buck that trend and make it easier for consumers to buy products from their cell phone, Billing Revolution announced today that it will offer a ’single-click’ billing and payment service that will streamline mobile purchases.

Once consumers are ready to buy something from the Web from a vendor that employs Billing Revolution’s service for payment, they are taken to Billing Revolution’s purchase page where they input credit card information from their phone. Once complete, Billing Revolution automatically sends an SMS receipt to their phone, which contains a link. After clicking that link, authentication is complete and with all future purchases, consumers will need only to click ‘buy’ for a transaction to be completed.

Billing Revolution is taking a risk with this platform that may or may not pay off. Right now, mobile purchases are just a small segment of online commerce and few consumers are willing to buy a product with their cell phones. But if Billing Revolution’s beliefs are right that all it takes is a simple process and the ability to buy products with a single click, it’s in a prime position to capitalize on what it believes is a booming market.

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That old Blather favourite, the Bosnian Pyramid, is back in the news. TDG have a blog post covering the latest installment in the ongoing saga which stems from the "First International Scientific Conference on the 'Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids'" taking place from August 25th to 30th.

It seems that the conference found that there are some questions that need answering. From TDG:

'To cut a long story short, the "Committee for Recommendation" concluded that there were important questions that should be answered about the site. This Committee had a number of archaeological heavyweights involved, including Egyptologist Dr Nabil Swelim, Dr Hassan El-Saady (historian and vice-dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Alexandria University) and Dr Mostafa El-Abbadi (historian and Founder of the modern Library in Alexandria (Bibliotheca Alexandrina)'

Read more at TDG.

View on Blather's Map of the Weird

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Previous Blather coverage

Giant Ancient Pyramid Found In Bosnia? (April 2006)

Bosnian "Pyramid" not man-made, U.K. expert says (June 2006)

Can it get any worse for the newspaper industry? The steep decline in print advertising just keeps getting steeper and, for the first time, even online ad sales have gone down. Total print ads in the U.S. were down 16 percent in the second quarter to $8.8 billion. That makes nine consecutive quarters in which “print revenues have declined at an almost continuously accelerating rate,” notes Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur. He put together the chart at left, which starkly illustrates the newspaper industry’s death dive.

The newspaper industry took in $1.7 billion less in print ads during the second quarter than the year before For the first half of the year, the industry is down $3.1 billion. At this rate, there won’t be an industry left by the end of next year. Of course, revenues have to stabilize at a lower level before that happens. Don’t they? Rght now, we’re at 1995 revenue levels.

Don’t look to online ad sales to save the industry. Online ads came to only $777 million in the second quarter, which was down 2.4 percent from the year before. That’s marks the first decline ever in digital revenues. The practice if bundling print and online ad sales isn’t helping in this case, either. Advertisers trained to buy bundled ads are more likely to drop the entire bundle when making budget cuts.

The advertising recession is in full swing, and no segment is safe any longer.

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I actually cried laughing at this.

Georges Rouault was a modernist misfit. He was a figurative artist during a period that saw abstract art gain the ascendancy. He was a religious artist at a time when almost all advanced art was avowedly secular. And he dealt in allegory during an era that came to see allegory as, in Jorge Luis Borges's bald judgment, "an aesthetic mistake."

To a lot of comedy fans, Rich Vos is a guy they discovered in 2003 on the first season of NBC's "Last Comic Standing." A few others might remember him from before that, when he was the first white comic to play HBO's "Def Comedy Jam" 13 years ago, or more recently from his work with shock jocks Opie & ...

Dorchester native David Shiner went back to basics to create Cirque du Soleil's latest show, "KOOZA," which opens today under the Grand Chapiteau at the Bayside Expo Center. But of course, when you're dealing with the stylized and often otherworldly look of Cirque du Soleil, "basic" is a relative term.

Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Nelson calls it his "darkish Valentine to theater." "How Shakespeare Won the West," set in 1849 in the middle of the California Gold Rush, follows a group of New York actors who hear of a small town out west where people are so starved for theater that they throw bags of gold at actors' feet.

"Hay Fever" With the Charles River visible just beyond the stage, the Publick Theatre creates the perfect contrast between the calm countryside and the delightfully dotty Bliss family who inhabit Noel Coward's "Hay Fever." A relaxing weekend turns into a dizzying dramatic event in this crisp comedy, running through Sept. 14 at Christian Herter Park. 617-454-1444, www.publicktheatre.com --Terry Byrne

Nobel Prize-winning playwright Dario Fo has a history of dead-on accuracy when aiming for big targets like corrupt government officials and businessmen in his native Italy. So it's not surprising that his plays are often revived in highly politicized times such as these. The Nora Theatre Company is taking on Fo's farce about inflation, "We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!" ...

Feydeau's play isn't the only Moliere-inspired creation onstage in Boston tonight. "The Discreet Charm of Monsieur Jourdain," adapted from Moliere's "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" by Dmitry Troyanovsky, is at the Loeb Experimental Theatre, presented by the American Repertory Theatre/Moscow Art Theatre School and ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. Troyanovsky, a 2000 graduate of the ART Institute's directing program, updates the ...

The 11:11 Theatre company kicks off its 2008-2009 season tonight with "She's All Yours," a comic romp about infidelity. Written by French playwright Georges Feydeau and first performed more than 100 years ago, the play aims to satirize social mores in the tradition of Feydeau's idol, Moliere. $15, $12 students/seniors. 8 p.m. The Factory Theatre, 791 Tremont St., Boston. 617-817-6600. ...

So the tech and geek crowd is a little underwhelmed by the new $300 million Microsoft advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld that kicked off tonight. It’s mostly content free, with just one mention of Microsoft near the end. It’s a far cry from the brilliant Microsoft v. mac ads that Apple has run over the years.

So what’s the deal? In an email we’ve obtained from Microsoft SVP Bill Veghte to all employees, he talks about the goals of the campaign. The overall goal is to inspire consumers and “tell the story of how Windows enables a billion people around the globe to do more with their lives today.” This first phase, he says, “is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity.”

The ads are just an icebreaker, he ads, to reintroduce Microsoft to consumers. Later this month they’ll do a deeper dive, which I assume means talking about features.

One thing’s for sure - the ads have sparked conversation. Full text of email is below:

From: Bill Veghte
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 5:37 PM
To: Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: Telling the story of Windows

Since it first launched nearly 25 years ago, Windows has been one of the most successful products in the history of the high tech industry. As we set our sights on the next 25 years, it is essential that we deliver incredible offerings on a great platform. We must also tell the story of how Windows enables a billion people around the globe to do more with their lives today. We must inspire consumers with the promise of what Windows uniquely makes possible across the PC, phone and web.

Telling our story means making significant investments to improve the way consumers experience Windows. To that end, we are focused on making improvements at practically every consumer touch point, from the moment they hear about the Windows brand in our advertising to how they learn more about Windows products online; from how they view Windows and try it at retail to how they use the entire range of Windows offerings – Windows Vista, Windows Mobile and Windows Live – across their whole life.

Today, we are kicking off a highly visible advertising campaign. The first phase of this campaign is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity. The first in this series of television ads airs initially in the U.S., and it aims to re-ignite consumer excitement about the broader value of Windows. The first television spot aired on NBC during the opening game of the NFL season and will be seen throughout the evening on various primetime programs. Worldwide, you can view this first TV spot at http://msw.

This first set of ads features Bill Gates and comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Think of these ads as an icebreaker to reintroduce Microsoft to viewers in a consumer context. Later this month, as the campaign moves into its next phase, we’ll go much deeper in telling the Windows story and celebrating what it can do for consumers at work, at play and on-the-go. At that time, I’ll be back to share more information about our plans to further strengthen the bond between consumers and Windows – one of the most amazing products, businesses and brands of all time, and, with the right tenacity, passion and agility from all of us, a story that has many great chapters to come.

CrunchBase Information Microsoft Bill Veghte Information provided by CrunchBase

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Dropbox is one of those infuriating startups that just won’t show us much of what they’re up to beyond the basic user experience (see video). We first saw them at Y Combinator demo day in August 2007, and talked to them again in March when they went into private beta.

It looks like Sequoia was on them fast though. Last September, we’ve learned, the company raised a small $1.2 million round of financing from the fund, making it Sequoia’s second known investment in a YCombinator company (the other is Loopt).

Expect more news on Dropbox in the next week or two.

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