Google Inc. is taking the wraps off an Internet encyclopedia designed to give people a chance to show off - and profit from - their expertise on any topic.

The service, dubbed “knol” in reference to a unit of knowledge, had been limited to an invitation-only audience of contributors and readers for the past seven months.

Now anyone with a Google login will be able to submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed through the Internet search leader’s marketing system. The contributing author and Google will share any revenue generated from the ads, which are supposed to be related to the topic covered in the knol.

The advertising option could encourage people to write more entries about commercial subjects than the more academic topics covered in traditional encyclopedias.

Since Google disclosed its intention to build knol, it has been widely viewed as the company’s answer to Wikipedia, which has emerged as one of the Web’s leading reference tools by drawing upon the collective wisdom of unpaid, anonymous contributors.

But Google views knol more as a supplement to Wikipedia than a competitor, said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. Google reasons that Wikipedia’s contributors will be able to use some of the expertise shared on knol to improve Wikipedia’s existing entries.

With a seven-year head start on knol, Wikipedia already has nearly 2.5 million English-language articles and millions more in dozens of other languages.

Knol is starting out with several hundred entries. The initial topics covered include an overview of constipation by a University of San Francisco associate professor of gastroenterology and backpacking advice from one of Google’s own software engineers.

News Corp’s MySpace Internet social network will join the OpenID alliance to begin letting its users take their online identity to other sites and social networks without having to register again.

The move comes after the network decided in May to let its estimated 115 million users globally share their MySpace profile information on some other sites.

OpenID is an open source alliance that, by letting users take one identity to multiple websites, aims to eliminate the need to create multiple user names and profiles.

The popular online hangout Facebook is sporting a new look to reflect changes in how its members communicate with each other and how they share photos and updates about their lives.

Central to the redesign, to be unveiled Monday, is an expanded Wall, the section of a member’s personal profile page where friends can leave comments and photos. People will now be able to add items more easily, and the Wall will incorporate reports on a user’s activities previously found on a user’s “Mini-Feed.”

The development comes as Facebook and rival MySpace from News Corp. vie to become the central hub of online communications. Both sites are reorganizing their layouts this summer to reduce clutter and make information easier to find.

Rogers, a huge cable internet provider in Canada, has decided to hijack all unregistered domains, and replace them with Yahoo! advertisements. This means Rogers users who type in a domain that doesn’t exist, are now getting Yahoo ads instead of the normal “not found” error.

Interestingly, Rogers also decided to do this with subdomains. So for example, example.google.com now takes you to its own ad page.

Delver.com today unveiled an alpha version of the first true social search engine. Delver maps a user’s social connections then delivers comprehensive Web search results ranked according to their social relevance to that user.

Delver, based on the user’s search query, organizes and ranks publicly displayed content, found on social networking profiles, web sites, blogs, bookmarks, and photo and video sharing sites from the user’s online social network. A ‘breadcrumb’ is shown next to each result, showing how that result is related to the user, thus qualifying its relevance.

“Delver is designed to ‘delve’ into your online social graph to generate search results gathered from your friends, your network and your friends’ networks, to help you find information more relevant to you as an individual,” said Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver. “We prioritize results based on your network to make Web search more fun and meaningful, while enabling you to discover others in your extended network who share common interests.”

Delver also gives users the ability to tap into the content and network of people whose opinion they value by adding them as ‘Search Buddies’. Delver prioritizes results from ‘Search Buddies’ and their network as if they were the users’ friends. Furthermore, Delver provides a number of features for organizing and retaining the information found as a result of a search query. When results are yielded, user’s may choose the “keep it” option, which stores the selected links in the appropriate categories for compiling lists or easier reference later on.

Though Delver.com is in an early stage of product development, it demonstrates the great potential and necessity of social search. Delver currently covers Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Hi5, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious; other sources, such as Facebook and the top blogging platforms will be added to the service over the next few months.

An Australian woman renowned as the world’s oldest blogger has died at the age of 108, with her last posting talking about her ailing health but also how she still sings a happy song every day.

Olive Riley, of Woy Woy about 50 miles north of Sydney, began blogging in February last year, sharing stories from her life during the two world wars, raising three children on her own, and working as a station cook in the outback.

The physically frail but mentally alert Riley won an international audience with her blog, The Life of Riley, and series of videos posted on YouTube with her talking and singing.

Riley was said to be the world’s oldest blogger as she was 12 years older than the previous titleholder, Spain’s Maria Amelia. She was born in 1899 and would have turned 109 in October.

Time Warner Inc’s AOL will launch a personal finance site on Tuesday, adding to a roster of new properties that do not bear its name.

The new site, called WalletPop.com, is a spin-off of AOL’s Money & Finance channel and will focus on consumer and personal finance. AOL Money & Finance will continue to business and investing news and tools.

The launch of another site not bearing the AOL brand is part of a plan to create new online businesses courting younger audiences unfamiliar with a company whose heyday ended with the popularity of high speed Internet access.

Computer industry heavyweights are hustling to fix a flaw in the foundation of the Internet that would let hackers control traffic on the World Wide Web.

Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software “patch” released on Tuesday to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.

“It’s a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the Internet works,” Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said in a media conference call.

“You’d have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything.”

The flaw would be a boon for “phishing” cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information.

Attackers could use the vulnerability to route Internet users wherever they wanted no matter what website address is typed into a web browser.

Security researcher Dan Kaminsky of IOActive stumbled upon the Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability about six months ago and reached out to industry giants including Microsoft, Sun and Cisco to collaborate on a solution.

DNS is used by every computer that links to the Internet and works similar to a telephone system routing calls to proper numbers, in this case the online numerical addresses of websites.

“People should be concerned but they should not be panicking,” Kaminsky said. “We have bought you as much time as possible to test and apply the patch. Something of this scale has not happened before.”

Kaminsky built a web page, www.doxpara.com, where people can find out whether their computers have the DNS vulnerability.

Receiving a few hundred spam messages a day is bad enough, but spare a thought for an unfortunate Orange user who’s the target of a server-straining 44,000 junk mail missives every 24 hours.

Three of the five most spammed individuals on the books of spam filtering service ClearMyMail.com use Orange as an ISP. The other two received a deluge of unwanted ads through private domains registered with 123-reg/GX Networks.

The most heavily besieged member of the quintet, Colin Wells, a workshop foreman for Stagecoach buses, is sent the equivalent of 16 million spam messages a year.

Dan Field, managing director of ClearMyMail, explained that Wells became the particular target of spammers because he made the mistake of clicking on the unsubscribe links of spam emails when he first started using the account. “That just confirmed that the email address was active allowing spammers to sell on his details to other junk mailers, further increasing the amount of spam he was receiving,

Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won’t eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative.

Say it on the Internet, and you’ll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world. It’s a fallout of the Internet’s market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.’s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.

Adobe’s announcement that Google and Yahoo! will be indexing Flash content at a much deeper level was met with all sorts of reactions last week, ranging from praise from the Flash and Flex communities to utter shock and horror from some HTML fundamentalists expressing fear that the end was nigh.

Well, it appears that Google has already started using this new indexing system and some Flash developers are not happy by how much it is revealing about their applications.

Peter Elst, a prominent Flash developer (diclaimer: and member of the Flash Pack on Pistach.io, of which I am a partner), just Twittered the following:

oh no, SWF indexing seems to do just as I feared — already noticed Google was picking up my test Flash SEO swf but its now exposing URL’s

And posted his concerns on his blog, wherein he quotes Ryan Stewart from Adobe on what exactly is getting indexed:

… it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application.

Peter goes on to state why this could be dangerous:

The concern I have here is that URL requests to the backend will get indexed, those URLs getting exposed in search queries or spider bots hitting those URLs could cause issues. Its not like in HTML content where the search engines can ignore form submit URLs, there is no such context in a HTTPService or URLRequest.

Iran’s parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for those deemed to promote corruption, prostitution and apostasy on the internet, reports said on Wednesday.

MPs on Wednesday voted to discuss as a priority the draft bill which seeks to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society,” the ISNA news agency said.

The text lists a wide range of crimes such rape and armed robbery for which the death penalty is already applicable. The crime of apostasy (the act of leaving a religion, in this case Islam) is also already punishable by death.

However, the draft bill also includes “establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy”, which is a new addition to crimes punishable by death.

Those convicted of these crimes “should be punished as ‘mohareb’ (enemy of God) and ‘corrupt on the earth’,” the text says.

Under Iranian law the standard punishments for these two crimes are “hanging, amputation of the right hand and then the left foot as well as exile”.

The bill — which is yet to be debated by lawmakers — also stipulates that the punishment handed out in these cases “cannot be commuted, suspended or changed”.