Sphere.com is a new blog search engine which launched on Monday. Although not perfect it seems pretty useful.

News Corporation has bought two more Web 2.0 companies that specialize in user-generated content - Newroo offers users a content aggregator tool and kSolo.com is an online karaoke site.

Mike Davidson, chief executive of Newsvine believes that if MySpace was designed along the lines of Google it would have far less page impressions:

1. Click over to "GoogSpace", or whatever we want to call it. (+1 page view)
2. Click through to read and reply to all mail (0)
3. Visit a few friends' pages (+3)
4. Edit my profile page (+1)

1. Click over to MySpace. (+1 page view)
2. Log in, because MySpace doesn't remember logins very well. (+2)
3. Click through to read and reply to all mail… about three per mail. (+21)
4. Visit a few friends' pages. (+3)
5. Reload a few pages because of server errors. (+3)
5. Edit my profile page. (+10)

eHub has a list of the week's Web 2.0 highlights including:

- BlinkSale
- FeedRinse
- EditGrid
- Teamslide

The Guardian has an interesting view on BBC's announcement that they are going to revamp their website to encourage more "user-generated" content which will take them into directo competition with the likes of Google, Yahoo and MySpace.

Microsoft are jumping onto the social networking bandwagon as they created a new social networking technology company called Wallop which it says will solve some of the problems current social networking technologies sites face and will introduce a new way for consumers to express themselves online. The product will be launched later this year.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Baris Karadogan has posted an exhaustive list of Web 2.0 companies. Wonder how many of these will be around in 12 months?

It looks like Facebook will not be sold anytime soon as they have just received $25 Million in venture capital from some Silicon Valley investors.

Following the massive popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook it was only a matter of time before everyone else started leaping onto the social networking bandwagon. Today's offerings are Sisterwoman.com which caters to women over 21 and JokeBox.com which invites users to share jokes and other funny material. Here are few more social networking communities that I predict will be launched in the next 12 months:

- over 50s
- gardening
- football fans
- pets
- venereal diseases
- etc
- etc

Visiblepath.com a new social networking site aimed at the corporate world has received $17million in funding. The site aims to do for the business world what MySpace has done for teenagers.

Here is a funny article from gigaom.com comparing web 1.0 with web 2.0. If you are a cynic you will not be suprised to see that there are more similarities than there are differences.

Technologyreview.com isn't too impressed by the raft of new web2.0 companies popping up. They lack of business models and reliance on Google Adwords for revenue will mean many of these sites will not be around in a year of two's time.

BuzzShout which launched this week, is a collaborative review site for Web 2.0 companies. Anyone can suggest a new company. The process includes stating the company name and URL, uploading a logo, writing a description and adding tags to describe the company and its industry. Moderators review submissions prior to publication

Squido is a new site that enables bloggers to get paid for doing what they love ie. blogging about obscure topics. All you have to do is sign up and then create a "lens" about your topic such as "sunglasses". Squidoo claims that it's technology makes the pages easier for authors to maintain and more useful to readers than conventional blogs. Furthermore it also makes it easier to monetize the traffic as the user is helped to create affiliate links to ecommerce sites such as Amazon and CafePress. The revenue that is generated by the links is then shared between Squidoo and the blogger.

StyleHive calls itself a collaborative shopping community, what might one of those be? Well , they allow you to create online bookmarks to your favourite fashion, shopping and designer sites. The bookmarks themselves can include photos and prices making it more interesting and attractive to look at than other bookmarking sites like De.icio.us. The site already has lots of great resources being shared in themed communities such as baby, bags, denim, jewelry, kitchen, shoes, sunglasses, watches and wedding

The New York Times has an interesting article on the rise of interchangeable software components that are made available by companies to external programmers to turn into new web services. Google currently allows programmers to use elements of its web search, maps, chat and advertising, whilst Yahoo is offering programmable services, including financial information and photo storage. This

InformationWeek has come up with a list of the Top 10 web start ups that you should be aware of. The list includes:

- Blinkx
- Writely
- SimpleFeed
- Six Apart
- HousingMaps.com
- Socialtext
- DreamFactory
- 30boxes
- Laszlo
- Jigsaw

Yahoo has now added user powered ratings to its Yahoo Finance channel which helps identify the messages in the Yahoo Finance Message Boards worth reading. Which considering the amount of message posted could prove an extremely useful feature.

News Corp appear to be interested in buying more Web 2.0 companies. Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, told a Bank of America investor conference "I'm intrigued by some of these start-ups in the Web 2.0 space. They don't cost an arm and a leg, but they have no business model". However they are not interested in FaceBook which they consider too expensive at a valuation of $2 billion.

Typepad has partnered with a number of companies to offer widgets which allows users to add fuctionality to their blog pages. There are over 20 widgets which amongst other things allow you to show items you have for sale on eBay, sell merchandise you have created on sites such as Zazzle.com or offer email newsletters.

Diigo has puta new spin the old idea (created by Third Voice back in 1999) of being able to put post it notes on websites for other people to see . Now in addition to being able to put a memo on a site, every page you mark up appears in your Diigo bookmark list, along with your comments.

Remember the early days of the internet when everyone started offering "Site Of The Day" awards which were a surreptitious way of getting people to link back to the award givers site. Well SEOmoz are the first people off the blocks with Web 2.0 awards which is getting them lots of buzz. And they haven't done a bad job with 300 website entered into 38 different award categories. If nothing else they deserve their own award for the smart search engine optimization strategy.

Web 2.0 has now gone overground with mainstream media. The front cover article on Newsweek is "Putting The 'We' in Web" looks at how user-content Web sites, like MySpace and Flickr, are taking over the web. Not everyone is so keen on the internet's new favourite buzzword, Infoworld.com has seen a lot of the companies claiming they are Web 2.0 who are nothing of the sort and are only using the buzzword to attract venture capital funding. Whilst Slate.com thinks that Web 2.0 is actually just the internet.

Where else could we start a blog concerned with watching Web 2.0 trends than with some definitions of what Web 2.0 actually is. The best ones I have found come courtesy of Web 2.0 application Wikipedia and Tim O'Reilly the person who actually came up with the buzzword.