PaidContent.org reports that AOL is cutting 1,300 jobs in its call centres in response to falling demand for telephone support – it seems AOL customers are becoming better at helping themselves when they have problems.

The annual Webby Awards winners have been announced. Among those honoured are The Gorillaz (Webby Artist of the Year), Flickr (Best Navigation/Structure) and Google Earth (Best Visual Design/Function). The annual awards are the “Oscars” of the online world.

PaidContent.org has an audio interview with Jonathan Weber, founder of journalism/citizen media company NewWest. Among other things he talks about how hard it is to recruit citizen journalists and why contributed pictures work.

…this time from PaidContent.org. “I’ve spoken about this a lot of time, but if you still want to hear me blather on about it, listen to this 10 minute interview I did with StreetIQ’s Andrew Coffey, at the Milken conference last month. I talk about journalists as entrepreneurs, audiences as media users and creators, etc, familiar topics to our regular readers.” Download the interview, here, or stream it from here.

Charlene Li is the Forrester analyst most closely associated with the next wave of internet applications and their impact on corporations. Here Robert Scoble interviews her for his new book.

Windows Live has launched QnA in beta. It’s a response to Google Answers (which uses paid researchers with community comments ) and Yahoo Answers(which relies on community amateurs). QnA has individual ranking and community features. Meanwhile, MS’ “Live” experiment continues its headlong rush to get competing offerings onto the market. The latest is Live Shopping. Unlike Froogle, which it is clearly aimed at, Live Products using products that happen to appear in the main index and attempts to extract and format them. Froogle, in contrast, asks for submissions and as a result has better formatted entries. Techcrunch has the skinny.

Quintura is a new search engine that promises better results by letting the user explore related terms. Reviews, to date, are mixed, but innovation in search is, if anything, increasing.

Blogs in China are set to exceed 60 million by the end of the year, according to a study on China’s media industry by Tsinghua University..

Google, TiVo and del.icio.us win the 2006 Creative Good Copernican Award for good, user-centric design.

According to eWeek Yahoo is launching an updated version of its search advertising platform.