Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have joined forced on a protocol for sitemaps which will make crawlers more efficient. More from their new site sitemaps.org

Google has released a wizard to help make including maps on websites straightforward. The wizard writes the code for you once you have decided how to customise it.

Simon Waldman, director of digital strategy and development at the Guardian Media Group, makes an interesting case for a global collective rights system for content. He argues that the debate between the aggregators and the content owners is stuck in a stand-off and that what is needed is a system more like the rights systems employed by the music and video industries. He said at Beyond The Printed Word conference that Google’s negotiations with content owners after it acquired YouTube showed that there was growing acceptance that aggregators would have to pay for content. He also warned that the current view that advertising would be the business model of choice was misguided.

Terry Semel, ceo of Yahoo!, says the time has come to “stop talking about old media and new media.”

The Press Gazette has published a list of the 50 people it calls “the New Media Establishment” who were nominated by its readership.

According to an AOP post Reuters has acquired a stake in the blog syndication site Pluck for £3.7m.

Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media division, said: “What this deal provides is an edited and moderated view of what is happening in the world of blogs. Our general view is that news is news…we don’t take the view there is only one view you can trust and that we have it”.

PR agency Edelman is launching some business initiatives in Second Life. The first is a competition to find the best business model in Second Life with a prize of seed money for the winner. The second is a video blog called The Grid Review which will cover the entrepreneurial spirit inside Second Life. Edelman is partnering with The Electric Sheep Company on the initiatives.

David Sifry, founder of Technorati, publishes his regular update on the state of things in the blogging world. Technorati is currently tracking 57 million blogs.

Turn is a new advertising engine in which advertisers pay for results, not clicks. 

Riya, the search engine company, has just launched like.com, a visual search engine especially tuned to product search.