First, there was HOT or NOT where you could rate the pictures of men and women. A great site to visit if you're single and don't have a date on a lonely Friday night. But life changes and now you have a family. Do what do you do if you're married with nothing to do on a Saturday night?

Yes, you can always watch Curious George with the family, but how do you get back to your old life in a responsible manner? Well, now you have an alternative, Web Hot or Not?

David Sifry (Technorati) explains how webhotornot.com came to exist.

How did it come to exist? When I was in Madrid visiting my friend and investor Martin Varsavsky
late last year, we had a fun time brainstorming ideas to help find and
rate interesting web sites, and we came up with the idea. Who knows,
perhaps the ratings might even be useful if people start using the site
- sort of a "prediction market" for web sites. Most of all, we just wanted to create a simple site that was fast-loading and fun to use. We both love Hotornot, so we figured we'd do an homage.

The November 1st issue of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article regarding Netlog.com (formerly Facebox). The article is titled, "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers".

The article focuses on the diversity challenges that social networking sites have in Europe with Europeans speaking more than a dozen languages. Netlog appears to have stepped up to the cultural diversity challenge and is doing so at a much lower investment cost than its rivals. Netlog's secret weapons: the use of open source tools (apparently the site runs on PHP, MySQL, Ajax, etc.) as well as an army of foreign students at a nearby Belgian university.

By relying on some clever technology and a ready supply of foreign students at a nearby university, Netlog has become a veritable Tower of Babel. It counts 28 million members and has versions in 13 different languages, including French, German and Italian, as well less common tongues like Romanian and Norwegian. Polish and Russian versions are nearly finished and another dozen languages, including Catalan, Estonian and Arabic, are on the way.

That is a notable achievement, because outside of North America, many Internet start-ups are hemmed in by linguistic barriers that limit their ability to attract users and generate revenue.

I applaud Netlog's forward-thinking to build from the ground-up a multi-language content/social management system. More interesting is that while Netlog's developers understood what was at stake, the much larger U.S. social networking sites have been hampered by not thinking on more global terms.

Packt have awarded Joomla! $2000 for receiving the highest number of votes for 'Best PHP Open Source CMS', surpassing Drupal and e107 who came second and third, respectively.

The judges for this roundup noted Joomla!'s "good front-end for administrators and end-users" as well as the large community that supports the Joomla! project.

Last year Joomla! was the winner of the same (albeit modified) competition in which the CMS was awarded $5000.

Packt still has two more cash prizes to give away over the next two days for the 'Most Promising Open Source CMS' and 'Overall Winner'. However, considering the nominees for Overall Winner and Best PHP Open Source CMS are identical, the final results should come as no surprise.

Source: http://www.packtpub.com/award

"Opinion: If you look at what IDG is actually measuring, and how Linux is often deployed in the real world, you'll see there's a major disconnect."

Complete Story

"The Internet is a threat to traditional news organizations, which no longer have the advantage of being the first to report breaking news online, according to a Harvard University study released yesterday."

Complete Story

As I mentioned last month, Packt Publishing is currently taking nominations for their Open Source Content Management Systems Award.  Nominations are scheduled to close on August 31, 2007.  With the deadline less then two weeks away, there is no better time then the present to head over to their site and promote your favorite open source CMS.  Nominations are being accepted for each of the below categories (click to nominate):

• Overall Winner, Open Source CMS Award
• Most Promising Open Source Content Management System
  
• Best Open Source PHP Content Management System
• Best Other Open Source Content Management System
• Best Open Source Social Networking Conten

Packt publishing has also set aside a total of $20,000 in award money to be dispersed among the winners...so this isn't only a chance to for the open source projects to get some recognition but also a chance for the projects and their community to earn a little bit of cash.

"Microsoft's pricing for its Dynamics Live CRM is undercutting the competition by about half, and partner compensation for on-demand sales is about 20 percent less than it is for annual subscription rates.

The software giant announced the long-awaited product and pricing information for its on-demand customer relationship management offering at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference July 10 in Denver."

Complete Story

As most of you probably know by now, Jeff Robbins from Lullabot and Drupal genre recently released "The Drupal Song".  What you may not know is that Wordpress and Joomla! also have their own songs.  Well this fact hasn't gone unnoticed by Amy Stephen in her own blog in which she says it's time to vote for the top song of the week.

OK. Normally, I am adverse to pitting one open source content management system against the other, but it appears we have no choice. As of today, we have three songs and only one can be the #1 Open Source CMS Song of the Week. It is time to pick the winner. Sorry, it’s how it works. I didn’t make the rules. If you object, you need to contact Casey Casem.

WordPress community member Devin Reams released his song and video back in January. Joomla! community member Anand Omka released his Joomla! song back in November and the video was released last week. Today, Jeff Robins released his Drupal song and Dries Buytaert announced the video will be shot on location during the OSCMS conference at Yahoo later this week.

Any has invited the open source communities to vote for their "favorite song" and as far as I can tell, the vote will take place through comments at her blog.  What?  Wordpress and and Joomla don't have their own poll module built into their core?  But alas, we're not voting for the best CMS here but instead the best song.