Google has launched its own version of customisable, vertical search, reports John Battelle. The service uses Google Co-op which the company admits has stalled a bit since launch, and differs from other offerings, like Rollyo, by allowing any number of domains to be searched, filtering for particular pages, and adjustment of the weighting of results.

Update: there is also a feature to allow “volunteers” to add sites to the vertical in question which could be great to getting a bunch of like-minded people to collaborate on building the ultimate vertical search for a sector.

I’ve been a long time fan of Newsgator – especially when used as a plug-in to Outlook, but I’ve been taking another look at Google Reader which relaunched recently. I’m impressed by a lot of the features, especially the way it is so easy to share blog posts on a public page – here’s mine. From now on I’m going to share more posts this way rather than blog about them.

We’ve had the Web 2.0 logo creator, now comes the automatic web acquisition story writer.

Given the speed with which new blogs are appearing it is imperative to make sure your’s stands out from the crowd, argues Folksonomy.org, which has published it’s own list of seven tips that it says will do the job.

WetPaint is a site which offers easy-to-create wikis with a web 2.0 feel about them. Lots of nice community tools built in.

Scrybe is an Ajax organiser which, if the YouTube video they posted on their site is to be believe, will be a really useful combination of calendar, todo list, clipping tool and collaborator. You can email to be added to the public beta. (By the way, using YouTube to host your product demo is a really clever idea!)

Reuters has opened a bureau in Second Life headed by Adam Reuters, real name Adam Pasick, a veteran technology and media journalist. He will be covering the alternative world for the news agency.

An assisted search start up ChaCha Search has come up with a novel way of paying it’s “guides”.

From Wired: “Workers at ChaCha are experts in specific topics, and they help users of the search tool find information that, presumably, only somebody in the know would be able to uncover. The ChaCha guides earn between $5 and $10 an hour as a starting wage, and any money they earn can be dumped instantly onto a debit card and spent right away. The guides keep track of their earnings on the ChaCha site and can get their earnings by clicking a “Pay Me Now” button on their personalized page.”

Wired reports on a new Italian technology which could generate as much electricty from kites as from a nuclear power plant.

HotSoup is a new online community that claims to link up Opinion Drivers both famous (Bill Clinton, Lance Armstrong) and “the roughly 30 million rassroots influencers we know through our communities: friends, neighbors, PTA members, firefighters, homemakers, small business owners, and non-profit directors to name a few”. It’s basically a discussion forum but with (somewhat confusing) bells and whistles.