A great video from Scoble featuring Aaron Patzer, ceo of Mint who won the $50k prize at the TechCrunch 40. Also pretty scary to a European in terms of accessibility of personal information.

Newscloud combines user-uploaded stories with votes to create a constantly changing news home page based on user interaction.

A new blog called NewsRoomNext by Michael Tumolillo has an interesting post giving advice for journalists in the online age.

Two of the most interesting tennets are:

• Every piece of content should function as an independent business that can be embedded in whatever Web site wishes to host it;
• Advertising needs to integrate with every piece of content and go wherever it goes;

Kevin Kelly writes a long piece about “choice ads” – or what John Battelle calls “sell side advertising”.

The idea is that site owners ( in Kevin’s mind, everybody!) will pick the ads which work best for them and get paid for those which perform. It does need a Google or Yahoo! to build out the payment architecture, but surely it’s just a matter of time, he argues.

Google’s shares reached an all-time high, valuing the company at nearly $175bn, just a few billion short of leader Wal-Mart, notes Tech Trader Daily. This, despite the small disparity in revenue – $11.5bn compared with Wal-Mart’s $377.8bn.

What is driving the climb, the site speculates, is a couple of investment comments – one showing financial services firms cutting back advertising but leaving search advertising intact, the other suggesting Google has a 9 to 24 month lead over competitors in several important technology areas.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch talks about a “top secret” meeting at Google where plans were announced to tackle the Facebook challenge head on. Read more here.

FeedHub is a new service, showing for the first time at the Demo conference, which aims to be a custom version of TechMeme. The idea is that you load your feeds and then train it which posts are most relevant and it then acts like Techmeme to identify the most important one.

Scoble has some concerns:

1. how big is the market? (how many people have 800 feeds?)
2. how will they make money? If by ads, won’t that put off the customers?
3. what about the attention information they will get?

Robert Scoble praises startup SceneCaster which he says will allow people to embed “scenes” into web pages and Facebook and so on. This he says has several advantages which may make Second Life more accessible to commercial organisations – in particular:

• large numbers of people can enter a scene
• linking to scenes becomes really easy

The service, which isn’t officially launched until tomorrow, is one company missed off this year’s Demofall 07 – a pity says Scoble.

Google’s long-awaited presentation application has been launched. It’s not very fully-featured but it’s a start and no doubt Microsoft will be watching with great interest.

Update: I think I missed one of the really important things here: it’s the online collaboration companies like Webex who should be the first to worry about Google Presentation as it makes simple presentation sharing over the internet with nothing to install really, really simple….

Technorati Tags: Google, Microsoft, tools