Get your own classified board on your website – try out Edgeio’s Marketplaces in beta.  Keith explains,

The idea of allowing any web site to create a free classifieds board, and to take listings into it – either in return for a fee or for free – is core to the first marketplaces product – Classifieds Boards. Theoretically this should make it possible for web sites to do what newspapers and magazines have done for hundreds of years – make revenue from classified listings alongside their revenue for advertising.

Check it out at http://marketplaces.edgeio.com. I have placed a job board on earningscast – too me 5 minutes – at http://jobs.earningscast.com.

Neil Patel offers “5 Sure-Fire Social Media Headline Formulas That Work” in his latest post. Read the full post here, or take the cliff notes here:

• Increase Your [Blank] within [short time period]
• How-to Improve Your [Blank] through [number] Easy Steps
• [Blank] Goes to an All Time Low by [some sort of incident]
• How-to [Blank] – The Ultimate Guide (I used this one)
• The [Name of an expert] Approach to [What the expert is good at]

Turns out Wikipedia is one of the top ten most visited sites on the web according to Danny Sullivan:

1. Yahoo Sites, 129 million
2. Time Warner Network, 117 million
3. Microsoft Sites, 115 million
4. Google Sites, 113 million
5. eBay, 81 million
6. Fox Interactive Media, 75 million
7. Amazon Sites, 51 million
8. Ask Network, 49 million
9. Wikipedia Sites, 43 million
10. New York Times Digital, 40 million

Duncan Riley reported yesterday that the Wikimedia Foundation is insolvent.  The Chairwoman of the foundation that runs Wikipedia indicated that the organization would run out of money in three to four months.  Of course her goal is to get you to donate money to her foundation, but I think it might be time to rethink how the Wikipedia is funded and controlled.

The current stewards are obviously failing.  The fact that Ms. Devouard has run this asset to the brink of insolvency is almost unbelievable.  The property is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and yet her team cannot think of a better way to fund the website than begging Lift07 conference attendees for more money.

I propose that the foundation publish its financial situation publicly and then build an all-star board to help turn this ship around.  I am certain that together we can come up with a neutral, non-commercial model that will ensure the survival of Wikipedia forever.  Duncan suggests, “I smell a begging bluff on this one…”  I suspect so, but I think it might be time to stabilize my favorite property on the web.

It is true, the Big in Japan tools will use OpenID in the near future.  Your old user IDs will work, but Big in Japan will also provide OpenID logins and serve as an OpenID provider.  More to follow soon.

If you run a social media service is it your job to prevent users from uploading content that is copyright?  We always assumed that it was.  Now what steps do we need to take to find copyright material?  We always assumed that we were required to use all reasonable methods to do so.  Periodically a copyright owner will contact us and request that a video or audio file be removed and of course we comply.  What if we decided that we were going to stop using ‘reasonable methods’ to remove copyright content, unless a copyright holder entered into an agreement with our company?  I suspect we would get sued.

Turns out that is exactly what Google is doing.  They wait for take down notices and then remove copyright material.  Google has filters that would prevent copyright material from appearing on YouTube and Google Video, but according the Mark Cuban and the WSJ: “Viacom spokesman Carl Folta also took issue with the idea that YouTube would only make filtering available to companies who make deals a la Warner Music.”

Sounds like having your cake and eating it to to me.   Do no evil?  Guess it is okay to ‘Not do no evil…’