Personalized home page service Netvibes has quietly rolled out a new social feature called Buzz. The Buzz section tracks what links are getting starred the most throughout Netvibes network of home pages.

Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most.

Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve seen since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position.

While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption.

Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either.

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1938 Media, the controversial (and hilarious) video blogging site founded by Loren Feldman, has been the center of attention over the last few days. Now big partners are starting to take notice, and Feldman is inking some interesting distribution deals.

The site grew in popularity after Feldman began mixing puppet parody shows into his usual punditry, specifically targeting hyper-sensitive tech industry insiders who were sure to fire back. But those parodies have drawn significant criticism from those targeted as well as a few sympathetic bloggers. In response Feldman agreed to stop some of the harder hitting stuff aimed at social media consultant Shel Israel.

The puppet videos are definitely a hit, however, drawing sponsors and, earlier this month, a distribution deal with CNET.

The CNET deal has yet to go live, and chances are it never will. The recent controversy may have given CNET cold feet. Feldman says the deal is “on hiatus” for now.

But starting today Verizon Wireless’ 3 million mobile VCast users will have access to Feldman’s video content on their phone, as well as 1 million Fios broadband cable subscribers via video on demand. The deal, which will pay Feldman an undisclosed license fee, puts the 1938Media brand next to YouTube, Break.com and other high profile partners.

Effectively Verizon has created a 1938Media channel and has given Feldman the ability to bring in third party video content as well. To start, Mahalo Daily, Revision3, Ze Frank and Jay Grandin content will be included.

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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s announced earlier today a deal California had made with Tesla Motors to bring that electric car company’s manufacturing to the Bay Area.

Watch above as he is joined by Treasurer Bill Lockyer and Tesla Motors President Ze’Ev Drori to deliver a few words about the significance of keeping Tesla in California.

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As Yahoo prepares for its upcoming shareholder meeting, it is fighting to convince enough investors that it did the right thing by spurning Microsoft’s various offers, especially the last one which had Microsoft just buying Yahoo’s search business, in favor of doing a search advertising deal with Google. Today, Yahoo filed the slide deck that it will present to shareholders at its annual meeting on August 1 (embedded below). There is a lot of he-said, she-said going on here, and the tone of the presentation is extremely defensive.

The slides go through familiar territory, marshaling Yahoo’s arguments for why Microsoft’s offer would have been bad for shareholders. But Yahoo does make some new points. Namely:

—Microsoft’s proposed $1 billion for Yahoo’s search business would be taxable, so shareholders would see less.
—Microsoft was only offering a 70% rev-share (TAC) for search ads on Yahoo, which is low for such a big deal.
—Cost savings would be no more than $750 million, not the $800 million to $1.5 billion that Microsoft estimates.
—Conveniently, the $750 million in cost savings that Yahoo estimates is equal to the 30% of revenues it would be sharing with Microsoft under the terms of the deal, thus offsetting any impact on operating income.
—Microsoft was only willing to guarantee its price-per-click rates for three of the 10 years of the proposed deal.

Yahoo’s strongest argument is that separating display and search advertising makes little sense strategically in a world where those two forms of advertising are colliding. (The Microsoft deal would have required that Yahoo give up its search advertising business and prevented it from re-entering that market in the future).

Towards the end of the presentation, Yahoo takes on activist investor Carl Icahn (who wants to replace the board with his own slate of directors) by pointing out that his track record with companies he has become actively involved in trying to change (Blockbuster, Motorola, Time Warner) has not been so great in recent years. It also points up the weakness in Icahn’s five-point plan to fix Yahoo.

Meanwhile, investors are not sure that Yahoo has a plan either. In a note today, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney wonders if maybe an AOL-Yahoo merger isn’t the best remaining option. Excerpt:

—Yahoo!-AOL merger possible - Four motivations: 1) $900 million of annual synergies, 2) Yahoo! gains display scale and keep search options open, 3) Time Warner gains Internet scale via a passive equity stake in larger entity, 4) Yahoo!’s clear interest in remaining independent.

The $900 million in “synergies” he sees are mostly from cost savings. But he also thinks there is value in keeping display and search advertising together. In fact, in another note today he made Google his top Internet pick, in part because of “continued marketing budget shifts to Search.”

Now, if Microsoft were to come back to the table with a serious offer for all of Yahoo, many of these objections would go away.

(Disclosure: As a former employee of Time Warner, I own shares in the company).

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AstleyClarke.com, a high-end fashion jewelry site based in London, has announced a $5.5 million (£2.75m) in funding from Index Ventures in London. Despite gloomy, credit-crunch market conditions, big spenders continue to do so, and they are doing more of it online in the luxury bracket. The move reflects Index’s recent interest in the eCommerce industry with Betfair, Lovefilm and Glasses Direct. Index partner, Danny Rimer, will join Bec Clarke from AstleyClarke and Mark Esiri from Venrex on the board of directors.

Online luxury players are in a good position, as they can be more nimble and bold than established brands, which are normally afraid of making their cherished brands look cheap by selling them online. In fact, they have badly mis-read their own audience. Forrester’s Consumer Technographics data says that eight out of ten “high net worth consumers” are hammering the Net with their platinum credit cards faster than I can type this sentence.

Bec Astley Clarke, a former executive at Tesco.com, founded the website in 2006 and will use the new investment to boost marketing and build the company’s infrastructure, including hiring an operations director and an IT director.

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Amazon’s customer reviews are an indispensable feature on the online mega-store, allowing shoppers to get a quick read on products without having to turn to magazine reviews or external sites like epinions. But many products, particularly electronics, have hundreds of reviews. Who has time to read through them all?

Pluribo, a new startup out of New York, has just released a Firefox extension that looks to filter through the noise of Amazon customer reviews. The plugin automatically culls through every review on a given product and generates a concise two sentence summary that highlights the most common positive and negative comments. For the time being automatic product reviews are restricted to electronics, but the site plans to implement support for other products, like books and kitchen appliances, in the near future.

Beyond providing a condensed summary, Pluribo also tries to justify its conclusions. To see the plugin’s explanation, users need only mouse-over one of the underlined terms, which will generate a list of excerpts from the relevant reviews. For example, hovering over “This product scratches easily” will show a list of quotes that contain phrases related to scratches, scuffs, and other similar terms.

So does it work? Sort of, but I wouldn’t go by Pluribo’s word alone. The system seemed to work well enough for ruling out obviously bad choices, but when it comes down to making a final selection, it’s best to turn to the reviews themselves. Pluribo doesn’t always seem to catch the most obvious problems, and the quotes it uses to justify its conclusions don’t always make sense. There’s also no way to tell which products Pluribo has indexed without opening each individual product page.

It’s also unlikely that many people will be willing to install a Firefox extension to get reviews from Amazon alone(the company says more stores are on the roadmap). Even with its problems, Pluribo is a handy tool and one that could gain some traction once it expands its supported product base.

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Second-tier social network Hi5 has acquired app developer PixVerse for an undisclosed amount, just four months after launching its app platform based on the OpenSocial specification.

PixVerse offers several applications such as Pix Chat and Pix Wall, which are Flash-based and run on not only Hi5 but other social networks like Facebook as well.

The company was founded in February 2007 and is financially backed by Venrock. It was also one of the earlier adopters of Google App Engine.

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We’re just minutes away from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s joint announcement with Tesla Motors, but we already hear that he will discuss how Tesla plans to build its electric sedan factory in the Bay Area, not New Mexico as previously expected. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear as though Tesla will actually unveil the sedan itself.

While New Mexico offered a $7 million incentive package to locate the factory there, California upped the ante by offering sales tax exemption for the purchase of manufacturing equipment, and by providing grants for the training of new employees.

We’ll have a recording of the webcast here once the event finishes. In the meantime, head over to the Office of the Governator to see it live.

Most people know Tesla for its fancy electric sports car (seen above), which can be glimpsed driving down highway 101 near its discreet headquarters in San Carlos. But with $146 million in the bank, Tesla plans to expand into a more mainstream market with a $60,000 sedan, slated for production in two years.

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Digg has released some materials around their new Recommendation Engine, which we wrote about last night, and say that it will be released this week. Two overview videos are below, including an interview with Digg Lead Scientist Anton Kast. We’ve also included the text of a white paper on the Recommendation Engine.

The Digg Recommendation Engine
People love Digg because it’s a place to discover and share great content from around
the Web. The Digg homepage always has the most popular stories, but many Digg
users find their content in the Upcoming section, which gets over 15,000 new stories a
day. To help users filter this enormous amount of content, we have created a new
feature: The Digg Recommendation Engine.

When you Digg a story, you tell the Recommendation Engine two things: that you
recommend the story to other users and, less obviously, that the users who Dugg the
story before you are good at finding content. The Recommendation Engine keeps track
of users who Dugg particular stories before you did, and it recommends you the stories
they Dugg. The more content you Digg, the smarter the Recommendation Engine
becomes.

Finding Diggers Like You
The Digg Recommendation Engine uses your Digg history over the last thirty days to
make Recommendations. (You can see the number of items you have Dugg over the
last month on the right-hand side of the Recommended view.) Every time you Digg a
story, the Engine matches you with other Diggers who Dugg the same story, and keeps
track of all your Diggs in common with them.

When it’s time to calculate your Recommendations, the Engine draws from this pool of
matched Diggers. For each matched Digger, it computes a correlation coefficient
between you and them. It then picks a cutoff for this correlation coefficient, and the
Diggers who make the cut are called “Diggers Like You.”

It’s easy to understand how the correlations are calculated. For each user with whom
you Dugg something in common, the Engine determines how many stories the two of
you Dugg in common, and divides that number by the total number of stories you or they
Dugg. The ratio is a correlation coefficient, a number between zero and one (zero if you
and the other user never agreed; one if you always did). Such a ratio is sometimes
called a “Jaccard coefficient.”

This scheme automatically accounts for the overall level of Digging activity. If another
user Diggs a lot, they have to agree with you on many stories to become a Digger Like
You. If another user Diggs rarely, then a small amount of agreement can suffice.
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From Diggers Like You to Recommendations
Once the Engine has determined your Diggers Like You, your Recommendations consist
of stories that your Diggers Like You have already Dugg, minus the stories you already
Dugg or Buried. There are some extra steps, like the diversity rules and the
promotability constraint described below, but this is the basic idea.

Recommendations are always displayed together with your Diggers Like You and their
compatibility percentages. These percentages are just correlation coefficients. You may
notice that you are more compatible with a user that has fewer Recommendations than a
user with less compatibility but with more Recommendations. This is because although
you have Dugg more items in common with the more compatible user, that user has not
Dugg as much.

The Recommendations you get from any particular user will come from topics (such as
Technology or World News) where you have a shared Digging history. We figure that
two users may have similar interests in a subject like ‘playable web games’, but one
person might be into politics while the other follows celebrity gossip. So we actually
compute correlations, Diggers Like You, and compute Recommendations in several
collections of topics independently.

Promotable Stories
Since the Recommendation Engine works only with Upcoming stories, all the stories you
get from the Recommendation Engine are “promotable”, meaning that they are recent
enough to be eligible for the Digg homepage but haven’t appeared there yet. This
means that whenever you Digg one of your Recommendations, you are helping select
stories for the front page of Digg!

Diversity
Just like stories on the homepage, we want your Recommendations to be diverse: a
balanced number of stories, not all on the same topic, and not all Dugg by the same
people.

To make sure that your Recommendations are diverse, the Engine imposes limits that
keep things from getting too focused. It makes sure that no one Digger Like You
determines too many of your stories. It attempts to make your Recommendations reflect
the spectrum of topics that you’ve Dugg in the past, and it adjusts the compatibility cutoff
for Diggers Like You so you don’t get too many or too few stories.

The Engine also limits the influence of any single one of your Diggs. For instance, if you
are Digg number 1,000 on a popular story, you will have 999 similar users from that one
Digg alone, and those users are not necessarily more compatible with you than the two
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or three who may have Dugg a less popular story you also liked. The Engine limits the
total pool of users you can get from a single Digg to balance things out.

We hope you enjoy using the Recommendation Engine and look forward to helping you
uncover even more great stories on Digg!
Digg on!
Anton Kast – Lead Scientist Digg

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Amazon, watch out. Earlier today, Google launched an affiliate ad network. Or, rather, it rebranded Performics, the affiliate ad network that came along with its purchase of DoubleClick, as the “Google Affiliate Network.” As with other affiliate networks such as Amazon’s, participating Website publishers get paid a fee for each referral that results in a sale. Existing advertisers include Bank of America, Barnes & Noble, Citi, Target, and Verizon.

The service isn’t yet integrated into Google AdSense (publishers and advertisers still have to set up separate accounts), but that would be a logical next step. An integration with AdSense could add a contextual element to the affiliate ads placed through the network. The more relevant Google can make those affiliate links, the more that consumers will actually click through and buy (in theory).

Google also continues to experiment with a pay-per-action advertising program, which is still in beta. At some point, it might make sense to consolidate that effort into the Google Affiliate Network as well.

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