On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.

– One of three tweets that were the basis for an arrest warrant for Hamza Kashgari, who addressed the Prophet Muhammad on his birthday, and is now charged as apostate and an infidel, both of which are crimes punishable by death

Who wants to pay for paidContent? We’ll find out soon, it seems, because the sales process for the pioneering blog and its parent company ContentNext appears to be wrapping up.

But if you were making a bet, you’d get good odds that the most likely buyer will be GigaOM, another pioneering tech/media business.

People familiar with paidContent believe GigaOM is in the last stages of a deal to purchase the site and its related businesses from Guardian Media Group, which bought the company in 2008 and then put it on the block last fall.

I asked the Guardian about the sale on Friday, and a PR rep told me that “the sale process is ongoing. Beyond that we would not comment.” Last night, I corresponded with GigaOM founder Om Malik, via text message, but he didn’t respond to my question about a potential acquisition.

That’s certainly not the same as a confirmation. But there’s some pleasing logic to a GigaOM/paidContent rollup. Both businesses started as influential one-man blogging operations, then added staff and moved into related operations such as conferences. (Full disclosure: AllThingsD competes with both companies.)

PaidContent founder Rafat Ali left his company a couple years after selling to the Guardian. Malik has sold off chunks of his business to venture capitalists such as True Ventures (where he is now a venture partner) and Reed Elsevier Ventures, who have invested a total of $15 million.

Depending on the price, you could find other strategic buyers that could be interested in paidContent. But I’m told that two of the most logical buyers — WebMediaBrands, which has been stocking up on tech industry publications including Inside Networks, and SAY Media, which recently bought tech blog ReadWriteWeb in December – aren’t in the running.

Other possibles not in the bidding, according to sources: Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media, which owns The Verge tech site; and Dow Jones (which owns this site).

The only other big bidder to consider would be AOL, which owns Engadget and bought TechCrunch in 2010. Sources there said a bid was unlikely, too.

Called Plexus Engine, the start-up will target information workers such as those in marketing and PR.

Kirkpatrick had developed over his years at ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch tools for getting scoops not by talking to sources but by tracking people online. For instance, he found geo-located tweets from a Twitter engineer in Utah that corroborated the location of a Twitter data center there, and generated instant message alerts for himself when people he was tracking made comments on any blog around the Web.

Kirkpatrick said Plexus Engine has been in testing for a year and a half. He will continue to write columns for ReadWriteWeb.

Singly was founded by Jeremie Miller, who created the open-source instant messaging protocol XMPP. It won the O’Reilly Strata data conference‘s start-up competition this week, and has already raised some funding from individual investors. (I’d hoped to attend Strata in person, but got caught up in an endless stream of little news items this week.)

Giving users clearer ownership and better access to their data is a geeky topic but an increasingly relevant one, for privacy and other reasons.

Singly will reportedly offer a hosted version of the Locker Project, or just the code itself, for users to collect their participation on social media sites and even their click streams, financial records and heart-rate monitors. This concept is known as “exhaust data,” i.e., what users emit as they motor around the Web.

Then, Locker Project users can run yet-to-be-built apps to analyze their exhaust data in order to find patterns, make recommendations, set alerts and do whatever else they can imagine.

So many things we do these days can be recorded, and already are. Rather than just allowing behaviorally targeted advertisers, governments and credit card companies to stalk us, the thought behind projects like this is that we users can gain value out of stalking ourselves and analyzing our own data. I wrote a bit more about the justifications for this stuff during my old gig at GigaOM.

And to be sure, other companies and organizations are exploring the idea of personal archives too–for instance, the recent Y Combinator start-up Greplin is building a unified personal search tool that members can use on their email, calendar, storage and social Web accounts.

It would be something like Woot, or maybe Gilt Groupe, or maybe Amazon’s (AMZN) Gold Box Club, or maybe Dell’s (DELL) famous Twitter experiment. That is: Retailers are already using Twitter to do this sort of thing, but Twitter has ideas about turning it into something bigger. Or at least something that makes it some money.

That’s according to a recent report from ReadWriteWeb, which Twitter won’t confirm but won’t dispute. “We’ll definitely let you know when we’re ready to talk about it,” Twitter PR boss Sean Garrett writes via email. “Should be in the next couple of weeks.”

So let’s assume that’s legit. And let’s add it to the list of Twitter revenue gambits we’ve seen so far:

• Blessing custom-designed pages for brands like Microsoft (MSFT).
• Renting out commercial access to its traffic “firehose” to big players like Microsoft and Google (GOOG).
• Selling targeted “Promoted Tweets”, a.k.a. “in-stream” ads, a la Google’s AdWords.
• Selling sponsored “Promoted Trends”–a conventional ad that sits alongside users’ streams.

Did I miss anything? If so, let me know. But by my count, we’re now at five different ways for the famously revenue-free company to generate revenue.

Not all of those are going to be winners–we haven’t heard much about those custom pages for a year or so. And Promoted Tweets looks like the only one with potential to scale into something really big on its own–big enough to justify the lofty valuation Twitter landed when it raised that big pile of money last year.

But if you’re a Twitter booster, you have to feel good about that list of experiments. Twitter doesn’t need all of them to be huge successes–it has enough scale that even a bunch of moderate successes will translate into big numbers.

And in a worst-case scenario, where they all fail, the Twitter dudes can cross those efforts off and move on to something else. That’s what start-ups are supposed to do.

On the other hand? The constant, repetitive so-common-it-barely-raises-an-eyebrow failing? That won’t make Twitter boosters happy.

But good news! The World Cup is over in less than a week.

It would be something like Woot, or maybe Gilt Groupe, or maybe Amazon’s (AMZN) Gold Box Club, or maybe Dell’s (DELL) famous Twitter experiment. That is: Retailers are already using Twitter to do this sort of thing, but Twitter has ideas about turning it into something bigger. Or at least something that makes it some money.

That’s according to a recent report from ReadWriteWeb, which Twitter won’t confirm but won’t dispute. “We’ll definitely let you know when we’re ready to talk about it,” Twitter PR boss Sean Garrett writes via email. “Should be in the next couple of weeks.”

So let’s assume that’s legit. And let’s add it to the list of Twitter revenue gambits we’ve seen so far:

• Blessing custom-designed pages for brands like Microsoft (MSFT).
• Renting out commercial access to its traffic “firehose” to big players like Microsoft and Google (GOOG).
• Selling targeted “Promoted Tweets”, a.k.a. “in-stream” ads, a la Google’s AdWords.
• Selling sponsored “Promoted Trends”–a conventional ad that sits alongside users’ streams.

Did I miss anything? If so, let me know. But by my count, we’re now at five different ways for the famously revenue-free company to generate revenue.

Not all of those are going to be winners–we haven’t heard much about those custom pages for a year or so. And Promoted Tweets looks like the only one with potential to scale into something really big on its own–big enough to justify the lofty valuation Twitter landed when it raised that big pile of money last year.

But if you’re a Twitter booster, you have to feel good about that list of experiments. Twitter doesn’t need all of them to be huge successes–it has enough scale that even a bunch of moderate successes will translate into big numbers.

And in a worst-case scenario, where they all fail, the Twitter dudes can cross those efforts off and move on to something else. That’s what start-ups are supposed to do.

On the other hand? The constant, repetitive so-common-it-barely-raises-an-eyebrow failing? That won’t make Twitter boosters happy.

But good news! The World Cup is over in less than a week.

On Twitter, people used the hashtag #pdxboom to relay news about the noise. And in a sign of the potential for using social media in emergencies, one resident soon set up a Google (GOOG) map that residents could use to indicate how loud the sound was in their area. Marshall Kirkpatrick at tech blog ReadWriteWeb has the story here and writes that “in just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park.”

The Portland police cited “local blogging information” as one of the factors that led investigators to return to the area, where they found evidence of a large pipe bomb.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

That’s the first time Mark Zuckerberg and company have earned that designation–at the expense of Google (GOOG)–but it is in no way surprising. Facebook saw traffic spike last Christmas, too, and that’s when it had a mere 140 million users. The user count is now up to 350 million.

So even if tens of millions of them leave the site in a huff over its privacy changes (and there’s no evidence that’s happening), it’s going to be blowing by traffic records on a regular basis.

Really safe bet: You’re going to see a similar story after New Year’s. (Via ReadWriteWeb.)

As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”

None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.

Read the rest of this post

According to a new report from Forrester Research (FORR) the site references in the post, enterprises will spend much more in the coming years on social networking, RSS, blogs, widgets and such, making it a $4.6 billion market by 2013.

Here is an interesting data table from the ReadWriteWeb post (click on the image to make it larger):

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Twitter’s creators should be jumping up and down now that an actual business plan might be surfacing.

In fact, a lot of popular consumer products might not port over to the business market, even if the concept does.

And, naturally, the old grumps in the IT departments loom large over what gets into corporations and what does not, the ReadWriteWeb piece notes, although other enterprise departments like marketing are already enamored with Web 2.0 tools.

Still security and scaling issues remain paramount, and start-ups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT).

I saw real evidence of the shift at an event in Silicon Valley last week, related to Rohit Bhargava’s new book “Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get It Back.”

And, although I expected much more of a corporate love fest, since the affable Bhargava is an SVP of digital strategy and marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations, it turned out to be a very interesting discussion of ways companies could embrace Web 2.0.

I was particularly struck with the very sharp questions from the Silicon Valley-heavy corporate audience too, who were savvy but still curious about the potential pitfalls and benefits of such tools.

Such discussions will be even more interesting, as they percolate across the country to places where most people are just hearing the word widget.

You know, pretty much everywhere except here.