Gross, who helped create search advertising at GoTo in the late ’90s, has been trying to recreate that magic on the social Web for the past couple of years with the company that’s now named UberMedia. But various products like syndication, monetization and new Twitter clients have all been too close for comfort to Twitter’s own agenda, and Gross has had to twice rename and more times reformulate his business.

Chime.in, which is a division of UberMedia, plans to sell ads on behalf of users’ posts, giving them 50 percent of the revenue, or will allow them to sell their own ads and keep all the revenue.

“I never thought there would be an opportunity as big as keywords,” Gross said in an interview last week. “But social signals are so much stronger than search terms.”

Brands such as E! Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Bravo TV and Disney have agreed to contribute Chime.in pages. All content on the service is public and users aren’t required to use their real names, though they are encouraged to connect to their Facebook and Twitter accounts. The main interface is a personalized social newsfeed of the latest and most popular posts called a “Chimeline.”

Gross planned to debut Chime.in tomorrow at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, but the iPhone app accidentally launched early, so people are already taking a look. He said the company — which has also built a Web site and Android and BlackBerry apps — is now scrambling to launch today.

Paying for participation in online communities hasn’t historically worked very well. I asked Gross why he thought Chime.in would be any different.

“The biggest example of success is blogs and Google AdSense and Federated Media,” Gross said — where bloggers build up their own audience and then layer on advertising. “Why it hasn’t expanded to communities is because anyone who has tried to build a standalone place missed the social sharing element, so they had to play the SEO game and that doesn’t work.”

Gross argued that the Chime.in community will police itself against gamers and crappy content — the kind of stuff that’s plagued sites like Digg and content farms like Demand Media — because users won’t recommend Chimes they don’t like.

“The breakthrough that’s happened is if you let people have the flexibility to share, they’ll get the message to the right people and do the dirty work for you,” Gross said.

But it’s important to note that there are other benefits to owning your own photo-sharing service. For instance, Twitter could use its new service to run ads, just like many other photo-sharing services.

Here’s a nice reminder of how that works: A photo of Sunday’s barely-attended Brewers-Marlins game, posted by Sara Livingston, then retweeted yesterday afternoon by MSNBC’s Darren Rovell. It has since been viewed more than 27,000 times.

Right now those views are generating dollars for Twitpic, which is running two ad units on the page, sold by middlemen like Google, Federated Media and VideoEgg. But there’s no reason Twitter couldn’t be running its own ads against that photo and keeping all of the revenue for itself.

Twitter ads on Twitter photos won’t be a magic revenue bullet for the company. And Twitter hasn’t said anything publicly about its ad plans for the service, anyway–my hunch is that if they do runs ads there, they’ll wait a while to do so. (Note that Facebook is only adding a light dusting of ads next to photos its users share, and Facebook is the Web’s biggest photo-sharing service).

Photo ads would be a nice option for Twitter’s sales team, though. Particularly because they don’t require the company to create an entirely new kind of advertising, like they’re trying to do with their “Promoted” suite of products.

Ad buyers are still trying to get their heads around ads like “Promoted Tweets” because they’re not sure what value they’re getting for their money, what kind of users are seeing them, and whether they can buy enough volume to make the thing worthwhile.

But ads on Web pages, next to photos people like to look at? That’s an easy sell. Doesn’t easy sound nice, Adam Bain?

Federated Media, the San Francisco-based advertising and publishing network, has acquired BigTent, a platform hosting more than 15,000 communities, mostly made up of parenting groups, especially moms.

Financial terms of the deal with BigTent, also located in San Francisco, were not disclosed.

BigTent has raised $5 million in venture funding from Menlo Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

In an interview earlier today, FM CEO John Battelle said the move was to further strengthen its tools for both the advertisers and publishers it serves, especially to create better “content conversations.”

Along with leveraging BigTent’s members by linking top brands with the parenting community, the platform could be used by publishers to reach their bases.

This is the second acquisition for FM within several months. In August, it acquired semantic search start-up TextDigger, a platform that allows content owners to include semantic indexing in search.

Battelle said that the additions to FM’s offerings are moving it toward helping content makers and advertisers create more relevancy, well beyond simply serving ads.

“People might look at us as a school of fish, but suddenly realize we are a shark,” said Battelle. “We want to create meaningful interactions on the independent Web.”

The shark metaphor scares me a bit, but it will be interesting to see what FM chomps up next.

Here is the official press release from FM:

Federated Media Publishing Acquires BigTent Platform for Groups

SAN FRANCISCO –Federated Media Publishing (FM), a next-generation media company, today announced the acquisition of BigTent, the leading platform for trusted parenting groups.

More than 8 million parents engage deeply with FM authors, the best independent voices on the Web. Millions more rely on BigTent to stay connected with local school, community and shared-interest groups.

“The combination of our two audiences gives marketers a powerful new way to reach the most valuable consumers online,” said Deanna Brown, President and Chief Operating Officer of FM. “Moms are busy, so they’re picky about where they spend their online time. They read high-quality writing from the best bloggers and they engage with each other in the most useful communities.”

BigTent’s thousands of groups continue to function as they always have, with the same great customer service, and the platform continues to welcome new groups. Each group has its own private, secure social networking environment and a set of tools that save precious time and enrich communities.

“BigTent groups are the social fabric of their communities, and we’re thrilled by the new and better ways we’ll now be able to serve them,” said Laney Whitcanack, the co-founder of BigTent, who is now Chief Community Officer at FM. “With FM, we have a partner who values their voice and is committed to their ongoing support and growth. Working together, we’ll continue to build authentic and meaningful opportunities for major brands to engage with these trusted groups.”

The purchase of BigTent follows FM’s recent expansion of its ability to reach parents online through a partnership with the Clever Girls Collective and the increase in its technical capabilities with the acquisition of semantic-search technology from TextDigger.

Chas Edwards (pictured here), the publisher and chief revenue officer for Digg, the social news discovery service, is leaving the San Francisco company, according to sources.

The exec, who came to Digg in May of 2009 from Federated Media, will move to a start-up called Pixazza, a photo-tagging site for advertising, “by enabling consumers to simply mouse over images to learn more and see related products.”

Edwards’ title at Pixazza–which confirmed the move–will be as Chief Revenue Officer and Publisher Development.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has garnered almost $18 million in funding from Google Ventures, CMEA Ventures, August Capital, Foundation Capital and Shasta Ventures, as well as from angel investors Ron Conway, Gideon Yu and Maynard Webb.

The departure from Digg, sources said, is amicable, and Edwards will remain an adviser to the company, which has been undergoing some turmoil of late.

That’s been due to a much-criticized new version of the once-hot service, as well as some management upheaval.

Digg recently appointed Matt Williams as its new CEO. He quickly apologized for the bungled relaunch of the news aggregator and has promised to fix its problems.

But while it’s technically possible to use that same technology to Skype with your friends or families or whomever, airlines won’t let you do it.

The reason should be self-evident, but not to Federated Media’s John Battelle. Who apparently does this all the time.

Except on a flight this week, when a United Airlines attendant told him that using Skype in flight is a security violation.

That’s not true. But with the help of the Web–and, apparently, State Department employee Katie J. Stanton–Battelle pieces it together: Airlines ban in-flight video chat because it’s incredibly annoying for everyone who’s not chatting.

Or in Federal Aviation Administration-speak, the airlines are “simply responding to the overwhelming majority of their customers, who prefer silent communications to the public nature of Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) calls.”

Battelle insists his Skype chats provoke nothing but “amusement” from his seatmates. But my hunch is that it’s only dumb luck that has kept him from getting pummeled by a fellow passenger to date. That United attendant did him a real favor.

Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s (GOOG) search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times (NYT), and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.

Aggregator sites like Huffington Post and online portals like Yahoo (YHOO) and Google have seen their readership, advertising revenue and influence increase. Meanwhile, traditional-media types have criticized these forces for unfairly leeching their reporting and hurting their business models. We’ll be alert for verbal sparring.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

He calls himself as “a simple customer-service guy” (not unlike Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who goes by “customer-service representative”) and said at yesterday’s Federated Media conference that his team fields several hundred tweets a day. He receives about 200 private messages a day through the microblogging service, a mix of customer-service issues, spam and feedback on other Comcast Twitterers.

Mr. Eliason has only been with Comcast (CMCSA) for a year and a half, originally managing a small customer-service group at the cable provider’s Philadelphia headquarters. His team tiptoed into social media by contacting bloggers (by phone) who complained about service problems, but watched Twitter for about two months before doing outreach there.

Read the rest of this post

Welcome once more to Weekend Update! I’ll be filling in today for your regular host, Beth Callaghan, who’s on vacation.

And what sane person wouldn’t be, after the slew of Silicon Valley silliness inspired by April Fools Day this past week? Digital pranks were the name of the game as Google (GOOG) and others heaped so many tepid hoaxes upon us that we wanted to call April Fold so as to quickly end this round of gags.

But no bag of tricks was needed for one Web site to April Fool itself into crying wolf about an imminent Google (GOOG) acquisition of Twitter, when a real story around the corner was aboutGoogle turning Turbo Tax tweets into ads.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest jokesters of them all, The Onion, won one of the biggest awards in journalism, a Peabody, meaning that the best sense of humor goes to that panel of judges. And to Stephen Colbert, who was willing to entertain (for a while) Twitter spokesmodel Biz Stone’s biz-model-less thoughts in an interview on “The Colbert Report.” Also on BoomTown this week: Facebook’s former CFO Gideon Yu is out, as was a leaked memo from Mark Zuckerberg about Yu’s departure and the company’s situation.

A sense of humor is certainly an invaluable feather to have in your cap these days. Digital Daily wrote about the most recent doom-and-gloom predictions and events to happen in this econalypse, like analysts’ predictions of YouTube losing $470 million in 2009, the barren IPO-less wasteland VCs are bemoaning and a major global slump in semiconductor sales. Other headlines weren’t quite so dreary: Google’s foray into VC land, the folks at BlackBerry HQ celebrating surprisingly good fourth-quarter results and the world’s worst-kept secret, the anticipated merger between IBM (IBM) and Sun (JAVA).

There was a similar mix of dark clouds and silver linings over at MediaMemo. The National Collegiate Athletics Association forced Twitter and partners AT&T (T) and Federated Media to take down one of its first ad campaigns, “March Tweetness,” crying copyright foul. Also running afoul with big companies in legal waters, free music Web site Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy. And video site Veoh laid off a significant amount of staff and kicked out its old CEO, replacing him with founder Dmitry Shapiro and refocusing the company on its “Video Compass” browser plug-in.

Online video is generally a turbulent space these, but the waiting is the hardest part for Hulu when it comes to the rumored Disney deal in which Disney (DIS) seems to be playing the field. Other gems of the week were URL-shrinking Web service bit.ly’s raising of $2 million and media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Kindle envy.

In a new Mossblog, Walt Mossberg gives us his first impressions of the BlackBerry App World store in which Research in Motion (RIMM) takes a bold step into what was formerly the sole domain of Apple (AAPL). In Personal Technology, Walt reviews a network hard drive from Western Digital (WDC) that makes the technology gloriously simple for everyone. And in Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret takes a look at several laptop trays, designed to protect the–ahem–family jewels and family members in general from laptops’ scorching undersides.

Finally, our exciting Woz-watch, after many weeks, has come to a sad end: Steve Wozniak was voted off “Dancing with the Stars” this week after one misstep too many. Down, but not out, the Apple co-founder swore that the “geeks shall inherit the earth”… just not the dance floor, any time soon. Please.

More next week.

And now it’s gone. At least temporarily.

Federated has taken down the site at the request of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and has put up a placeholder search page in its place. The problem? The college sports group, which keeps a tight grip on any and all trademarks related to its teams, games and tournaments, says the site infringed on its copyrights.

You’d think that might have crossed the minds of Twitter, Federated or at least the folks at AT&T (T), who already work with the NCAA. But no matter. Federated spokesguy Matthew DiPietro says the site will be back up with a new look, a lack of copyright violations and a different URL in time for the tournaments Final Four games this weekend.

Does this derail the great Twitter advertising strategy? Nope. But it does illustrate just how new and unformed this stuff is, both for Twitter and its ad partners. Which DiPietro is happy to admit. “These are first-of-their-kind executions,” he told me. “They’re very experimental… things will get worked out.”

Everything about the newest ad gambit is parallel to the earlier one: It’s run via Web ad agency/network Federated Media, and consists of a page that Twitter endorses and will promote on its site.

And just like the ExecTweet page, most Twitter users won’t see Twitter’s promotions since most Twitter usage happens away from Twitter.com. And just like ExecTweets, March Tweetness is a collection of themed Tweets that you could find on your own, using Twitter’s handy search function, which it paid $15 million for last year.

But this one looks marginally more useful to me: Unlike ExecTweets, there is a rhyme and reason to collecting Tweets tied to specific events–in this case, different games during college basketball’s March Madness tournament. One of Twitter’s most compelling features, after all, is its ability to deliver snippets of thoughts, in real time, so I could see people actually using this one.

And don’t worry, Twitter users: You won’t be getting come-ons for Vista in your Twitterstream. Not yet, at least.

The program that Twitter has rolled out today–something called ExecTweets–is a fairly cautious step into marketing, and that is certainly by design. But it does give a you a good sense of what Twitter thinks it can do with its buzzy, fast-growing and almost revenue-free product.

Today’s news: Microsoft (MSFT), via its Federated Media ad network/platform/agency, is sponsoring a page that collects Tweets from various executives. Twitter will get an undisclosed payment for giving the site its stamp of approval and for promoting the site on Twitter itself. Federated says it plans on launching similar programs on Twitter with other clients.

Soon, most likely today, Twitter users will start seeing promotions for ExecTweet on the main Twitter login page, and in the little box that Twitter just started featuring on profile pages. The one that looks like this:

As advertising goes, this is pretty innocuous. Hard to imagine even Twitter’s most anti-advertising adherents having a big problem with this one. But it’s also hard to imagine that many people will see the ads at all since the majority of Twitter use happens off the site, on mobile apps like Twitterific for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and desktop clients like Tweetdeck.

And it’s hard to imagine that many folks will want to use ExecTweet, period: The whole joy of Twitter is seeking out and finding specific people you find interesting–not just a mass of people whose common thread is that they’re “executives.”

I already follow AOL founder @stevecase, for instance, who’s prominently featured on ExecTweet right now. But I don’t imagine I’ll want to pay attention to others who show up on ExecTweet simply because they’re on ExecTweet.

And note that nothing about ExecTweet required Twitter’s OK: The company’s open API model allows users to repurpose its data for their own Twitter apps, and countless entrepreneurs and engineers are doing just that.

But there is something to be said for branding campaigns launched with Twitter’s approval and participation. Figuring out exactly how much that will be worth, and what it will eventually look like, will likely take Twitter and its ad partners a while to figure out. But now they’re starting. Finally.

Last week, I went to the 15th Stanford Accel Symposium, hosted by Stanford University’s MediaX and the VC firm Accel Partners.

With the honking big title of “The Delta Conference: The Impact of 2008 Dramatic Events on the World of Digital Media and Technology,” it was not quite that dramatic.

But there were a few nuggets to be found at the event, including a panel on online media with a stellar gang, all talking about microblogging, content and where it is all going in this horrible econalypse.

It was kind of like “The View,” except all guys in khakis and oxford shirts. You know, a typical Silicon Valley gathering.

BoomTown did video interviews with all the panelists about their takeaways from the chat: CBS (CBS) Interactive top terrier Quincy Smith, former Yahoo (YHOO) and now LinkedIn bigwig Jeff Weiner, former Yahoo and now Microsoft (MSFT) bigwig Scott Moore, former exec at Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL and now entrepreneur Jim Bankoff, and Federated Media head John Battelle.

Here’s the video:

The large round by Oak, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blog site a valuation of just “south of $100 million,” a source said.

The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.

“There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be,” said Harman (pictured here), in an interview with BoomTown. “And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.”

Indeed, the Huffington Post–which is now billing itself as ‘”The Internet Newspaper”–has been hitting on all cylinders during the current election season.

And it hopes to continue building that momentum into the Obama administration, which will give the liberal-leaning site a lot of advantages in coverage.

The Huffington Post has also become a powerful news aggregator, much as the more conservative Drudge Report has, sending traffic all over the Web from its site by linking with a variety of online sites. It also has a strong offering of high-profile bloggers.

But the site’s leaders are also hoping its traffic strength will allow it to be as strong in arenas outside of its flagship political arena, including in business, local, “green” and investigative news.

It will also use the money to make acquisitions, the company said in a press release about the funding, which it put out this morning.

It’s certainly a long way from May of 2005, when its high-profile co-founder, Arianna Huffington, was roundly mocked for launching the site. Today, she has seen her power grow as the site’s traffic and influence have.

The site’s namesake operates out of her California-based office in Los Angeles, while the company has its HQ in New York.

The Huffington Post’s traffic in September 2008, for example, quadrupled from a year before to 4.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore (SCOR). That performance made it the No. 1 “stand-alone political blog and news site,” besting Drudge.

“The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online,” said Harman, who will join the Huffington Post’s board. “The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways…and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.”

But, like a lot of advertising-reliant businesses, the Huffington Post is also facing a tough market and must show it can compete under more dire economic circumstances and build a sustained and profitable business.

This slug of money should give it a lot of room to do so, said Harman, who has invested in several digital media companies, such as Demand Media and Federated Media. He was also one of the lead investors in aQuantive, the digital advertising business that was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion in 2007.

“Who knows how deep this economic situation is going to be,” said Harman, who noted that he and others kept investing in aQuantive through the last Web downturn. “But strong companies that keep investing through a bad cycle can emerge as winners.”

Previous investments in the Huffington Post have totaled about $12 million. That funding has come from Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners, as well as seed money from co-founder Kenneth Lerer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

Funding reports about the Huffington Post appeared about a week ago in the Times of London, with the post claiming a $15 million investment and expansion into investigative and local news.

But the most detailed posts were done by paidContent, which was the first to name Oak as the new investor and said the round was $20 million.

Yesterday, BoomTown had a much-belated lunch with longtime tech editor and writer Harry McCracken to catch up on how life has been going since he started his own tech blog site, Technologizer, this past summer.

The former editor-in-chief of PC World got a lot of attention in 2007, after he stood his ground over editorial meddling by former CEO Colin Crawford, who tried to kill a “Ten Things We Hate About Apple” story.

McCracken quit, but was soon back on the job at the IDG unit, with Crawford kicked upstairs to corporate.

But, within a year, McCracken had left again, this time to strike out on his own at his Technologizer site, which is owned and operated by him (and using Federated Media to sell ads). It covers a wide range of tech topics, from PCs to smartphones to the future of cloud computing.

I like the tone of Technologizer, which also uses freelancers to supplement McCracken’s daily posts, a lot.

But what I like better still and which I hope to see even more of in the tech blogosphere at large is the obvious respect McCracken has for accurate reporting, strong journalism standards and also trenchant analysis that actually gives a reader insight into a story.

In addition, McCracken is a very nice guy, as you will see from this video, where we discuss a range of things (and yes, PC Word-style, I get him to make a list of key tech issues too).

Here’s the video:

Crovitz knows a thing or two about the transition mainstream media has been making to new media and, more importantly, was never scared of the change. For us, that was critical, since he consistently said yes to our efforts to create a new kind of tech site within Dow Jones.

Tonight, he appears at a Churchill Club event called “Like It or Not, You’re in the Media Business: It’s Time to Make the Publishing Upheaval Work for You.”

Other speakers include: Neil Chase, VP of author services for Federated Media; Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst of Outsell Inc.; and Jeanette Gibson, editor-in-chief of News@Cisco (CSCO). The event is moderated by Sam Whitmore, editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey.

A description of the event: “Internet technology has made you a publisher. How can you turn that into a huge win for your career and your business? Well, first you might want to study what traditional publishers have learned, and what they’re doing to transform their business. After all, they ought to know. Then look at all the commercially successful bloggers: how did they do that? Then consider Cisco Systems, one of the world’s most successful tech vendors, and why it is now a successful publisher in its own right.”

It takes place tonight, starting at 6 p.m. for dinner, followed by the program at 7 p.m. at the San Mateo (Calif.) Marriott.

Best of all, friends of AllThingsD.com can save $15 off the general rate of $82 by using the discount code here when registering in advance. After inputting your name badge information, you will be shown a payment screen where you can input the discount code: gAllThingsD. If you encounter any difficulties in registering online, email your name, title and company to the Churchill Club at registration@churchillclub.org.

BoomTown video on this interesting topic to come, of course!

Is there a trend in my post yesterday about the deal former Hollywood execs Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman struck with Pepsi to make original online content that the entertainment and marketing arm of the beverage giant will have a chance to fund and sponsor?

“We want to create great online content … and also something that is more than a glorified Internet ad at the same time,” said Braun to me yesterday. “So we’ll work with Pepsi hand-in-hand to bake new kinds of ad solutions right in organically at the earliest possible moment.”

What struck me was that this was also the same line being touted by Facebook ad sales majordomo Mike Murphy, whom I interviewed Tuesday about what it will take to make the popular social-network site as popular with advertisers. (See video below again.)

Bandying about the phrase, “return on involvement,” he noted that it was his job to show marketers that becoming part of the conversation could be as important as much-measured click-through rates.

“Banners are great for branding, but this is a more relevant message that leverages social media,” said Murphy. “If we can help you make your idea or product relevant to a consumer and get the best involvement rate … it’s a different game.”

And then last month Valleywag posted here on an amazingly idiotic roundelay about a group of bloggers associated with John Battelle’s Federated Media being part of a Microsoft ad campaign, by weighing in on what the software giant’s “people ready” catchphrase meant to them.

I was going to write about it, and even talked to Om Malik (he was sorry and withdrew from the campaign) and Battelle (not so sorry, noting to me that how we all look at marketing has changed in the new paradigm).

But the prospect of headache-inducing debates about it that would go precisely nowhere stopped me cold. I come from an Italian family and I know from pointless arguments.

My own conclusion was that, even with all the disclosure, which could have been a lot better, it was probably a dicey and even flat-out wrong thing for most bloggers to do.

Except apparently for Michael “Pound Sand” Arrington, who doesn’t appear to care what most anyone thinks anyway. (Are you looking at me?)

But Battelle has kept bringing up another interesting phrase called “conversational marketing”–which again refers to engaging audiences more deeply with advertisers. Federated, in fact, is having a “Conversational Marketing Summit” in mid-September, with a laundry list of Web marketing honchos.

It apparently “brings together leaders in conversational media and marketing for a two-day dialog around the issues, lessons and opportunities of this emerging medium.”

I, for one, am looking forward to understanding what it all means, despite the fact my initial reaction is suspicious, as a reporter who naturally worries about the sidling up of ad-sales people to the editorial process.

That feeling of distaste was articulated by Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee, who wrote that the Pepsi deal “sounds kind of sleazy, honestly.”

Well, we shall see, of course, and this is just entertainment we’re talking about. And, perhaps more important, it seems to be an inevitable drift, given trends toward increased interactivity by consumers, especially younger ones.

“A lot of online content is already developed and ads and marketing are slapped on afterward,” Russell Weiner, vice president of marketing for colas at Pepsi-Cola North America told me yesterday. “We want to be part of the DNA of a show from the very beginning.”

And that, I think, is what they call the origin of the species. What species that might be, we shall all see soon enough.