Pluck Lands $7 Million, Totals $17 million

Pluck, the Austin, Texas-based RSS and publisher services company, has raised $7 million from Reuters, along with return backers Austin Ventures and Mayfield. That takes Pluck’s VC funding to $17 million in total since the company formed in 2003.

Pluck is less focused on consumer-facing sites now, having shut down the Pluck RSS reader at the end of October. I had some correspondence with the Pluck folks, however, and it seems that the RSS reader is being pulled simply because the other part of their business is taking off so quickly. The plan was to phase out the RSS reader less hastily, but changes to IE7 and FireFox created compatibility issues that convinced them to wrap it up. The core RSS technology continues to be used.

More ...

Reviewme.com - another pey per blogging site

Reviewme.com is offering bloggers up to $250 for reviews of advertisers products or Web sites. And, as part of a promotional offer, the company set aside $25,000 to pay bloggers to review Reviewme.com itself.

"The $25,000 is almost used up, and we want to keep the promotion alive, so we're probably going to extend it," said Andy Hagans, president of ReviewMe,, on Friday.

The Pay Per Post (payperpost.com), which launched in July, in playing broker between advertiser and blogger. Among the differences in the two sites is that advertisers with PayPerPost dictate the kind of review or write-up they want. ReviewMe, on the other hand, requires that bloggers be allowed to write responsible reviews based on their honest opinion.

Full story...

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo Acquisitions

An interesting Ajax-based timeline for all the acquisitions made over the years by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Drag and Move features...

See it at Shmula.com

Wink Launches Social Network Search

Wink, the social search engine, has evolved beyond recognition since I first reviewed it over a year ago. The site began by offering a web search that let you rate and tag the results - the idea was that you could find what you were looking for more easily based on the collective judgment of all the users. In some ways, it was like Digg for search.

In September this year, Wink 2.0 launched, with a complete redesign and more focus on Wink Collections - this meant you could create a group of interesting links and share them with friends. They also added social networking. On November 4th, they notified users of a much cooler feature: support for YouTube videos within collections. This means you can visit YouTube, find your favorite videos on any topic and post them to your Wink collection by hitting a bookmarklet in your browser - it’s pretty similar, in fact, to the new Share feature from Facebook, which also supports rich media.

Full story...