I have a membership with Netflix and recently noticed that they now include a Community section accessible by members. The new Community section appears to be an attempt by Netflix to add social networking to its site and begin competing with well known social network sites for movie fans like Flixster.

The new social networking features include “top 10 lists”, popular movies by hometown, and a friends list showing recent activity and movie ratings. Although none of the features are unique or groundbreaking, Netflix has a large membership and resources and could become the dominant force in social networking for movie fans.

Next time you watch as a group of terrorists bomb a building in Second Life, you may just be watching a practice run of a real terrorist act. According to an article by Natalie O’Brien, there are three jihadi terrorists and two elite jihadist terrorist groups registered on Second Life.

Rohan Gunaratna, author of “Inside al-Qaeda”, says “They are rehearsing their operations in Second Life because they don’t have the opportunity to rehearse in the real world.”

Working with authorities, Second Life officials are asking members to report suspicious or inappropriate behavior in the game, just as in the real world. But then again, shouldn’t anyone that spends hours a day in a virtual world of “make-believe” be considered suspicious?

In a recent Associated Press article, AP writer Gary Robertson wrote that MySpace.com has found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on their Web site, up from 7,000 profiles they reported in May.

MySpace declined to comment on the numbers reported but instead focused only on the fact that the profiles had been removed. Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief security officer, said in a prepared statement, “We’re pleased that we’ve successfully identified and removed registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead.”

The question is what lead is he referring to? Allowing children to create profiles without parental permission or age verification? Or is it allowing users of any age to interact with each other? Hmmn, is it any surprise that the number of offenders found on MySpace more than quadrupled since May?

I am like many people and use Wikipedia as a source for all things trivial. However, I have been noticing a disturbing trend that more and more listings I encounter are filled with erroneous information. I understand that the entire premise behind Wikipedia is that pages are written by human editors, be it a PhD scholar who has years of experience on the subject or a high school dropout who likes to edit pages between beer chugs.

Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, showed last year how easy it is to create his own “Wikiality” when he modified various pages during a taping of his show. He also encouraged his listeners to modify entries on elephants to state that their population had tripled in the last six months. This public demonstration of the site’s main flaw, caused Wikipedia to lock pages and terminate various accounts.

But, as Colbert might ask, what is the “Truthiness” of Wikipedia? Is a reality of facts and logic, or the reality of only those with too much free time on their hands with nothing better to do? If you are a regular user of Wikipedia, you must ask yourself, are you taking the red or the blue pill?

I am a regular listener of a variety of Internet radio stations. However the Copyright Royalty Board may soon make it much more difficult for these stations to continue broadcasting because of propose royalty rate changes. Last Tuesday, several online radio stations protested the proposed rate changes that could spell the end of the industry. The rates are expected to become effective July 15th and be retroactive to January 1, 2006.

Yahoo Music’s Ian C. Rogers wrote “… the new royalty rates are higher than the revenues anyone can hope to make from related advertising. In other words, we all lose money on Internet radio starting July 15th. Yahoo! has no intention of operating LAUNCHcast radio as a loss-leader. This senseless rate hike needs to be changed, or our business will have to.”

Several other webcasters have voiced similar concern. If the proposed rates are not changed, Internet radio may become a thing of the past.

I frequently get asked what exactly is Web 2.0? The phrase was first used by Tim O’Reilly in 2003 when attempting to explain the new generation of web applications being developed after the Internet bubble burst of 2001. To O’Reilly, the bust signified a turning point for the web, and thus the term Web 2.0 was born. The term gained popularity with the first Web 2.0 Conference in 2004 and has gained momentum ever since.

But what exactly identifies one application as Web 1.0 and another as Web 2.0? The debate is still out. Some will say that Web 2.0 is nothing more than a meaningless buzzword while others work towards establishing official Web 2.0 specifications.

Technologies such as blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds, wikis and Web APIs are typically classified as being Web 2.0. Tim O’Reilly himself considers Web 2.0 as developing applications around the unique features of the web instead of trying to make the web confirm to the applications. Examples he provides include Craigslist, Wikipedia, eBay, del.icio.us, Skype and Google Adsense.

As you can see, with no real set of standards, Web 2.0 can mean a variety of things to different people. So, the answer to the question “what exactly is Web 2.0” still remains undecided.

With recent acquisitions of companies such as YouTube, Feedburner, and DoubleClick, Google is making it no secret that they want to expand their reach into as many markets as possible while displaying more of their sponsor ads to increase profits.

But where will Google strike next? Below is a list of some advertising opportunities that Google just may be considering.

1. GoogleMoon. GoogleMoon would show Google Ads on the surface of the moon. What better way to reach every human on the planet, even if they don’t have computer? GoogleMoon would involve Google buying NASA from the US Government along with billions of dollars of construction equipment. Nike is already in negotiations with Google to have the “Swoosh” logo plastered across the moon.

2. GoogleCrap. Not to be confused with the average quality of Adsense publisher sites, GoogleCrap will involve Google purchasing each and every public restroom in the world. The new service’s motto will be “When you got to go, go Google” and will include sponsored ads displayed on toilet paper.

3. GoogleHilton. Lastly, in an attempt to capture the largest viewership of any possible acquisition, GoogleHilton will involve buying ad space on Paris Hilton’s lower back. Several pharmaceutical and beer companies are expected to be sponsors.

Google Street Views is a feature offered through the Google’s Maps service that allows users to see street level views of an ever growing number of locations. Google Street Views is just another addition in a line of mapping and imagery products from Google that includes such products as the popular Google Earth.

Google Earth provides users with satellite images of almost any spot on the planet. However, if you happened to be caught naked in your backyard pool by the satellite, the pictures are of such low resolution no one will know you from the family dog. This is not the case with Google Street Views. This was made clear with the case of “Thong Girl” who was caught on tape by Google Street Views in her truck displaying her, well, thong.

What other embarrassing images might Street Views capture in the future? Should this be consider invasion of privacy, or should we just except that a search for “your name here nude” in Google will soon yield results for each and every person on the planet?

Recently, Didier Stevens, an European IT professional, conducted a Google AdWords experiment to see how many people would click on an ad that clearly indicated that doing so would infect their computer with a virus.

The results? Over 400 idiots, umm, I mean people clicked the ad over the six month test period.

Interestingly, 98% of the clicks came from users of Internet Explorer. I guess hackers and adware crooks have a reason for targeting this browser the most.

Too bad Stevens did not publish more demographic information from his experiment. It would interesting to see if any clicks came from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post recently coined the term “Googlenope” as a phrase or expression that is not present somewhere on the Web and therefore not cached by the Google search engine.

In his article Weingarten compiled a list of several “Googlenopes” he found. Of course, now that he has written about them they will no longer be “Googlenopes”.

I decided to also seek out some rare “Googlenopes” of my own. I first tried “nietzsche for dummies”. Nope, 160 results. Next I tried “Bill Gates Nude”. To my surprise and disgust, there were 142 results. This was going to be more difficult than I expected.

However, after a while I started to get a feel for hunting the elusive “Googlenope”. The more unrealistic the phrase the better the odds of uncovering a “Googlenope”. My top kills included “superstar federline”, “elmer fudd marries wabbit”, “lindsay lohan shows self control”, and “go2tap.com named best blog ever”.