When it comes to searching for things on the web, everyone goes about it in a different way. For example, I still know people who search for “YouTube” on Google instead of typing ‘www.YouTube.com’ into their search bar. Crazy, right?

Data analytics firm Chitika did some interesting research into how many words users type to perform searches on the top five search engines.

The search engines include Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL. Chitika found that Ask.com users tend to type in the most words when searching, while AOL users type the least. The graph below is based on search engine traffic this month from North America.

It’s likely that the wordiness of Ask users are due to the fact that the site wants you to ask questions in natural language format, but this study is interesting none the less.

With most search engines providing auto-completion in their searchbox, it will be interesting to see if the total number of words people perform each search with drops, since the suggestions will override their natural predilection of being verbose.

One of my favorite things to do online is chat. Real-time chats haven’t been done well since the old aol chatroom days where you could enter a room based on the city you were close to, or an interest that you had.

Since aol, apps like Yobongo have tried to bring chat back with real-time serendipitous chats based on your location.

Today a simple app called “Sirkel” was released.

Set your chat Sirkel

By dragging the slider up and down on the right hand side of Sirkel, you can choose how much of the world you’d like to chat with. Your default circle is set to 3 miles.

You log in with your Facebook account, and the app asks you for your location. Once you get going, it’s kind of neat to see new people pop up on the map.

Chatting through your browser

Since Sirkel kept things simple, there is nothing to download. By clicking the photo above the red dot when someone pops up on the map, a chat is started with them. The chat interface is clean, and lays nicely on top of the map.

I could see leaving Sirkel up on my extra monitor, glancing at it once in a while to see if anyone is active. What we miss on Twitter and Facebook is real-time interactions with people that we don’t know. While this might not be something for everyone, it is a nice way to chat outside of your normal circle.

Considering that you can drag around the map, it will be interesting to see which areas embrace Sirkle, if any. The only downside to Sirkel is that there is no “friends list”, so if I chat with someone I have to remember their name, otherwise it’s likely that we’ll never talk again.

Try chatting outside of your default 3 miles, and see who you meet! Since the app requires you to login with Facebook, Sirkel won’t end up being rowdy or crude, since peoples real names are coming along with the incoming chat requests.

With most businesses deciding that it’s time to have a Twitter account, Facebook page, and a blog, the need to bring all of these things into one place is necessary. About.me let individuals create a beautiful “home” page with links to all of their social media accounts. JustAbout.co is doing the same thing for your company or product.

JustAbout.co has given The Next Web an exclusive invite code, so sign up today.

JustAbout.co was founded by Ludo Antonov and Arianna O’Dell due to the simple need of providing companies of all sizes an easy way to set up a website.

According to the company:

JustAbout.co integrates with the social networks that matter most to your line of business. After you’re done customizing – easily aggregate your social channels. Networks are grouped in categories, making it easy to find and add the networks in your industry.

This type of service is most certainly necessary as managing a website dynamically for most companies is a thing of the past. Hiring someone just to update every single happening for a business is just too costly and social media cancels out the need for that.

Quick setup

Setting up your JustAbout.co page is simple. Just enter in all of your details, add links to your social networking accounts, and the site saves your changes on the fly. If you’ve ever used aol’s About.me, you’ll be very familiar with the interface.

Why I find this interesting, is the reason that most might find it not so useful. About.me is for people specifically, a place to build your personal brand, and all of its services are tailored for that. I saw companies using the service to create pages for themselves and they always looked out-of-place.

What JustAbout.co can do if it stays focused on the business end of things, is create a solid offering to a huge userbase of companies. Having a network of hosted pages works for the company, and for the users in the same way that hosting a WordPress blog on WordPress.com does. This approach means all companies will benefit from sweeping changes and upgrades made to the site. Hopefully JustAbout.co will offer a directory of companies, because I feel like a second generation yellow pages is something that’s needed on the web. Open search just doesn’t always cut it.

Be sure to grab your companies’ username on JustAbout.co and use the special invite code: #TNWFTW

Last night, I attended a gathering of some of the smartest technology minds focusing on Education for grades K-12. I didn’t know what to expect, other than Newark Mayor Cory Booker and LinkedIn‘s Founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman being there to listen to seven companies from the ImagineK12 startup incubator in Palo Alto.

In a small office within the Palo Alto aol building, teams with big hearts (and sometimes very nervously) discussed their views on the future of Education for children all over the world.

I’m going to be doing a few interviews with some of the companies in the near future, which include Goalbook, educreations, and Eduvant. This is a space that I’m very passionate about.

Each team had one thing in common, their belief in the importance of technology to make change happen in a system that hasn’t changed in decades.

That change could very well come out of the ImagineK12 incubator, which says this about itself:

We believe technology is transforming K-12 education. The infrastructure, hardware, software, and platforms are either available or being developed that will change the nature of how we teach our children in profound and far-reaching ways. A high-tech wave is beginning to sweep through the educational world largely driven by technology entrepreneurship. But the impact of those entrepreneurs will depend on the quality of their ideas, their ability to execute, and their ability to get funded.

Imagine K12 is a for-profit enterprise looking to invest time, experience, energy and resources in entrepreneurs who have a passion for education and the technical know-how to create their vision. Over a three-month period, we will draw on our extensive entrepreneurial experience, understanding of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, and knowledge of the education industry to help bring your idea to life, get your company funded, and to get your company on the road to success.

Last night wasn’t a pitch session for funding, although I’m sure most of the startups hoped that Reid Hoffman would take interest, as he is an extremely prolific VC now. Most of the nearly three hours were spent on presentation of the products, and Q&A by Mayor Booker on the nuts and bolts of education, and business advice and guidance from Reid Hoffman. For these companies, this type of audience is nearly unheard of, and each one took notes and paid full attention. And of course, vice versa.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker shared that he can no longer watch the way school systems have worked, there has to be change. Technology, he believes, can bring that change.

The theme of the night appeared to be data. Educational institutions have a huge flow of data, some not even digitized, and have no way to pour through it to make smart decisions for their schools or more importantly for their students. Some of the companies have come up with ways to use data to incentive students with behavioral issues, make better use of a Principal’s time by giving them a dashboard of student and financial data in real-time, as well as share lesson plans all over the world.

A few of these companies seemed to intrigue both Booker and Hoffman, causing Booker to set up meetings between the companies and schools in Newark immediately.

Why isn’t there more of a focus on technology in education? Lack of money. Schools are notorious for having financial issues, even though technology can help with that, and there isn’t a steady flow of VC funds for those who want to focus their efforts on the education space. It seems as if ImagineK12 is set to change all of that, and having Booker and Hoffman involved certainly doesn’t hurt its cause.

Let’s also not forget that if we put more technology in schools, we’ll have more technologists like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs for years to come.

You can view more photos from last night below:

Facebook could be set to feature prominently in another movie as it has emerged that the screen rights to a new novel based around the social network have been sold to Warner Bros.

The Future of Us is a novel by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler which will be published in November this year. It tells the story of two young people in 1996 who log on to their AOL accounts, only – improbably – to see the Facebook accounts of their 2011 selves appear.

It doesn’t sound like it will have quite the bite of The Social Network, but whether or not the book and film’s plot grabs you, the news that Facebook could again be featuring prominently on the big screen shows the social and cultural impact it’s made in a relatively short space of time.

Of course, just because the film rights to the book have been sold doesn’t necessarily mean that it will ever go into production. Now, when’s the Myspace story being brought to the big screen?

This post is a designed meditation on publications that are strictly digital, and their future under the new reality of agglomeration through acquisition.

Yes, the great landscape of blogs and digital media is a-changin,’ and there is no more conspicuous face in the matter than AOL. AOL, a hulking relic in the very definition of the phrase, coming back from the dial-up grave, is on the warpath with a checkbook. It is, quite literally, redrawing the map of online content.

This is not the moment in which digital publications have ‘come of age,’ or any such nonsense, but it might mark the instant in which a media empire can be built with purely online elements. AOL is trying to do just that.

While that might seem almost laudable, there are cracks in the armor. Two trends outline changes in content under an AOL led future that might not be as wholesome as the company wishes to appear: the AOL way, and recent, seemingly new, standards for contributions to the Huffington Post following its purchase by AOL.

The Huffington Post: Clearinghouse of the Internet

The Huffington Post’s tagline, ‘The Internet Newspaper,’ was more fitting than most of its readers probably knew. It wasn’t just a newspaper for the Internet, it was one done in the style of the Internet. With thousands of contributors from every walk of life blogging away, it had a feel of barely controlled chaos, something that helped to foster its vibrant community of reader commenting.

As the Huffington Post grew, it took on a status all of its own; it still holds to this day the number one influence rating of all blogs as denoted by Technorati. To contribute to the Huffington Post became a mark of having ‘made it’ in one topic or another. And as the publication added new sections, including city specific pages, a Religion forum, and soon, Canadian and UK editions, more and more writers became interested in adding to its pages.

After all, the Huffington Post had what everyone who writes wants, and it’s not money, it offered access to an audience. And so on it went, with new topics, writers, growth, and increasing revenues, until all of that was turned upside down in one fell swoop.

AOL buys the farm

AOL turned out its pockets, found some $315 million to spare, and cut a deal. Rumors have HuffPo founder Arianna’s share at around $100 million of that total.

Of course AOL’s homepage remains massive, holding onto the 17th spot on the most trafficked US site list, 16 slots higher than the Huffington Post today. But if you examine those charts, one is going down while the other is rising. AOL bought the upward graph.

When any publication is purchased, especially one in which the founder is still on board, people fret about the effects of the takeover; will the character remain the same? Will the new owners beat the life out of it? Will its best and brightest leave and find new homes if the new corporate environment is stifling?

The list goes on, and in the case of AOL there is precedent to ground such worries: the AOL Way. The AOL Way, in case you missed the controversy, is AOL’s plan for the future of its publications, including its purchases, not just the ones that it has grown.

The AOL Way is a method of streamlining and SEOing content to make it, borrowing from Daft Punk, “harder, faster, better, stronger.” But what it does not do is bolster author autonomy, or anything along that line; it is a method designed to extract money from content, not to build great publications.

When the AOL Way leaked in full the media, our own Courtney Boyd Myers asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “Is AOL destroying journalism for page views?” While that headline is a touch loud, and what headline is not, she is pushing a real point: is AOL going to use their Way to turn down the levels of personality and quirk at the publications that it owns and will buy in the future?

This question is why I called this article “Content control in the Age of AOL,” and took the time to write it. AOL has not just purchased the Huffington Post, but other, quite dear publications, that have long had reputations for the individuality of their authors. And we worry about them.

But in the case of the Huffington Post, are we seeing any changes thus far that might be cause for alarm for fans of the publication’s past form as an independent publication?

Big changes afoot?

The answer to that question is maybe. According to some Huffington Post contributors, a good number bloggers that helped build the site were uninvited to the party without being informed.

One such ex-Huffington Post blogger, Joe Favorito, claims that ever since the AOL purchase of the site things have gone “quiet.” This is what he had to say on the matter:

Then as most know, Huff Po was sold for a huge sum of money, and all went quiet. [Submitted] Posts were never answered for weeks. Email addresses bounced back, phones rang and rang with no voice mail. A “citizen journalist” site disappeared for its contributors.

I was not alone in this experience. At least 15 or 20 others have gone through the same thing. Finally two weeks ago I received an email back from “Becky”…n. last name, a generic email, no phone number…saying that a post I had sent in weeks before “didn’t fit the focus of the site.” I asked what the editorial guidelines were, who I could speak to just to get clarification. Nothing. Not a word.

In a similar vein, a request for comment submitted by The Next Web to the Huffington Post on their editorial guidelines has thus far not been answered.

The end of truly indie big-media online?

The constant struggle between causation and correlation aside, based on other anecdotal evidence and stories like Favorito’s it seems that on some level the contribution guidelines for the Huffington Post have changed under AOL.

And that makes sense. After all, AOL is a company that has deeper pockets than the Huffington Post ever did, making it a much higher profile target for lawsuits. And what what company trying to build an empire would care too much about a few thousand bloggers who are, now that the Huffington Post has all the momentum in the world, riding its coattails a touch?

Such submitted content from unpaid, non-contractual writers is perhaps just too much of a risk for AOL to take on. Even more, now that HuffPo is so large, individual blog posts are hardly big drivers of traffic to the site.

But recall that we called the Huffington Post more than just a newspaper online, but one that embodied the core elements of the Internet: egalitarianism, participation, and so forth. Even if AOL has made the changes that it seems to have made in good faith, they are still transformative in a way that is counter to the old core of the Huffington Post.

TNW checked into the blogger backend of HuffPo and can confirm that, according to what the website says, the blogging guidelines have not been updated since last year:

On the Technorati 100 list, AOL owns three of the top five publications. You have to ask the question, is this the end of truly massive independent online media? If the company continues to purchase as it has been, the top 100 blog list going to become its fiefdom. That level of concentration, coupled with the capitalistic plans of the AOL Way, paints a future in which the biggest media publications are snapped up, and then commoditized.

Happily, there are signs that go contrary to that future. We half-mentioned TechCrunch earlier, another recent AOL acquisition, and a publication that is a TNW competitor. TechCrunch has not suffered, so far as can be told from the surface, any harm except for the occasional forced meeting since they were bought out. Now, TechCrunch is full of spunky writers and is headed by a slightly acerbic captain, which must help in defence of its culture, but I have been surprised at how little meddling has been attempted by AOL.

So there is hope. But dollars shout and most digital publications that are important are quiet; online media has never been a salad fest. So long as AOL, and others, it must be said, want to grow by leaps and bounds they can, and they will. That coupled with a corporate strategy as stark (almost robotic) as the AOL Way and the future of online media looks slightly boring, if nothing else.

What this means for readers, and for writers

Ever since the AOL Way came about, flagship AOL publication Engadget has had a very hard time holding onto its key staff. In fact, they have been leaving in droves. It’s sad to see a blog that everyone so loves and enjoys hollowed from the inside out.

But there is rebirth. Many of the Engadget-exiles have banded together and formed a new, if temporary, home. It is already scorching other blogs and is racking up headlines by the bushel. It’s about the writers, silly.

But it’s also about the readers, who are going to pull up their trusty sites in the future only to realized one day that many of them have been homogenized.

Perhaps the current, and near-term future of digital content can be summed as follows: big interests are snapping up many of the best online publications, but their management plans for those companies are going to force out many of the writers that built them, or they will be forced out as we have seen with the Huffington Post. This will take away much of the spark from those publications, even if it won’t hurt their flagship reporting overmuch.

The very dynamo that built the publications that are, to bend English a touch, under purchase, still exists however, and that is the zero marginal cost of distributing data through the Internet; the people who built what is being purchased can do it again.

That is why when you peer far into the future, past the Age of AOL, things are as bright as ever, even if certain lights are today being extinguished.

Jonathan Tasini was one of the very first writers to jump on board The Huffington Post blogging ship in 2005, reportedly at the request of Arianna Huffington herself. For the past 6 years, Tasini, a union leader and social activist wrote about labor rights, economics and government policy, joining the ranks of The Huffington Post’s thousands of unpaid bloggers.

This past Tuesday, two months after AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million dollars in February, Tasini filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the media giant. Tasini is working with The Newspaper Guild and the Writer’s Union on the suit, which seeks at least $105 million in damages for more than 9,000 writers. The Huffington Post will have 20 days to answer the complaint.

We caught up with Tasini in New York City’s Chelsea Market, so please excuse the loud noise in our video interview with the Texas born, New York bred, Yankees fan for life. Tasini is the kind of guy who’s friends with his dentist, loves a good romance and takes things in stride, yet he’s also committed the next several years of his life to making Arianna Huffington’s life “a living hell.”

“Hundreds of writers were angry, disappointed and outraged by how Ms. Huffington treated them after the sale. She was personally wealthy before the sale, then she pocketed a huge sum of money, money she would never have gotten without the work of those unpaid bloggers. There would be no sale to AOL, there would be no company value without the thousands of bloggers. She pocketed that money and basically told the bloggers in a Marie Antoinette attitude, ‘Let them eat cake,’” said Jonathan Tasini.

In a statement responding to the filing, AOL spokesman Mario Ruiz called the action “completely baseless” stating, “Our bloggers utilize our platform to connect and ensure that their ideas and views are seen by as many people as possible, It’s the same reason hundreds of people go on TV shows to broadcast their views to as wide an audience as possible.”

Tasini isn’t the only force angry with The Huffington Post. In mid-March, The Newspaper Guild of America, which represents 26,000 media employees across the country, released a statement, encouraging all unpaid writers at The Huffington Post to stop working in support of a strike launched by Visual Arts Source.

Despite the lack of a clear legal argument, The Huffington Post could be in trouble, considering Tasini’s historic past with labor rights cases. In 1993, Tasini filed a suit against The New York Times, claiming they took unauthorized work from thousands of freelance authors. It held that The New York Times was violating author’s rights when it licensed back issues of the newspaper for inclusion in electronic databases such as LexisNexis. The court ruled in Tasini’s favor in 2001 and The New York Times set up an 18 million dollar fund to pay writers in 2005.

But the big difference between Tasini’s current case and his case vs the New York Times, is “unauthorized work,” vs “authorized work.” Simply put, these bloggers agreed to work for free. “We aren’t alleging this is a case of copyright violation,” says Tasini. “At the moment, there’s no copyright violation, although the case and its contours are still evolving.”

“My whole life, I’ve had a passion for social justice. The labor movement has been my home for the last 20 plus years. There’s something in me that intuitively wants to stand up against injustice in the workplace,” says Tasini. “I think what she did was immoral, illegal and at the least stupid. If she had been smart, she would’ve said I will write everyone a small check. If it was $25, $50, etc. I think people would’ve been far less outraged.”

While there are several other media outlets out there who don’t pay their bloggers, Tasini says he will deal with this just one at a time. He hopes his actions will give people the courage to file their own legal challenges or organize in more productive ways (e.g. unions) because, as he says, “across the blogging platform and media industry, writers and creators should be treated decently.”

A lawsuit has been filed from an unpaid blogger against AOL and the Huffington Post today, just over two months after founder Arianna Huffington sold the site that she co-founded to AOL for $315 million.

The blogger, Johnathan Tasini, was one of the unpaid bloggers who produced a large chunk of the Huffington Post’s content, which published news stories from paid writers alongside unpaid contributors. The suit estimates the value of the unpaid bloggers contributions at $105 million.

In a statement to Reuters Tasini stated that “The Huffington Post is nothing without the bloggers who created the content.”

Tasini filed the suit personally and is seeking class-action status on behalf of all of the bloggers who provided unpaid content for the site.

Tasini is a union organizer and activist who wrote articles that were published on the Huffington Post from November of 2010 through February 11th of 2011, just a few days after the sale to AOL was made public.

In a statement responding to the filing, AOL spokesman Mario Ruiz called the action “completely baseless” stating, “Our bloggers utilize our platform to connect and ensure that their ideas and views are seen by as many people as possible, It’s the same reason hundreds of people go on TV shows to broadcast their views to as wide an audience as possible.”

The case claims that roughly 9,000 unpaid bloggers are entitled to their cut of the profit from the sale of the site.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated as the story unfolds.

As reported in the FT tech blog, The Huffington Post will be crossing the pond this summer to launch its first international version in Britain.

Arianna Huffington announced the news today at the Guardian Changing Media Summit with Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive. (See our post on the AOL Huffington Post acquisition.) The Huffington Post UK edition will start out as a local homepage featuring British content. Huffington also mentioned that she still plans to launch sites targeting French and Brazilian audiences in the future.

While The HuffPost will likely be hiring, AOL also hired 100 journalists in the UK last year that could also provide content for the new local edition. In the meantime, I’ll be in London this weekend, so come find me and I’ll give you a two good reasons (#1, #2) why you wouldn’t want to work there.

The Newspaper Guild of America, which represents 26,000 media employees across the country, released a statement this week, encouraging all unpaid writers at The Huffington Post to stop working.

Yesterday, I wrote a post titled, “Should unpaid writers for The Huffington Post go on strike?” arguing that it made sense that bloggers for The Huffington Post were unpaid because the experience gives writers exposure and access that they otherwise might not have. Working in media, art, fashion, music or filmmaking and having an fulfilling, creative job means that you likely worked for free at some point in your life. It’s a tough reality, yes. Mais c’est la vie. Also, it’s hard to ignore the fact that bloggers agree to not getting paid before they start writing.

I reached out to The Huffington Post for comment yesterday, and Mario Ruiz, the SVP of Media Relations for The Huffington Post’s Media Group responded. First, he makes the important distinction between the two levels of staff – the 160 full-time paid editors and reporters and the massive group of unpaid bloggers. Second, he reinforces my point- the bloggers aren’t crying out for cash, they’re “looking to join the party, not go home early.”

We stand squarely behind the Newspaper Guild’s mission of ensuring that media professionals receive fair compensation. It’s why we employ a newsroom of 160 full-time editors and reporters, 17 of whom we’ve hired since last Monday. However, we make a distinction between our newsroom staffers and our group bloggers – most of whom are not professional writers but come from all walks of life, from officeholders, students, and professionals to professors, entertainers, activists and heads of nonprofits.

The vast majority of our bloggers are thrilled to contribute. And we’re thrilled to have them. They flock to us — as well as to other unpaid group blogs across the web — to broadcast their views, not unlike writing an op-ed in a local paper. There’s no commitment; they can post as frequently or infrequently as they would like to. The Huffington Post makes no claim of ownership over their posts, and they can cross-post on other sites, including their own.

People blog on HuffPost for free for the same reason they go on cable TV shows every night for free: because they are passionate about their ideas, want them to be heard by the largest possible audience, and understand the value that that kind of visibility can bring. Our bloggers are repeatedly invited on TV to discuss their posts and have received everything from paid speech opportunities and book deals to a TV show (Greg Gutfeld claims he was offered his Fox show because of his writing on HuffPost).

Bottom line: nearly all of our bloggers are happy with the arrangement, and happy to access the platform and the huge audience it brings, without having to build, pay for or maintain that platform. Indeed, we are inundated with requests from people who want to blog. The proof is in the pudding: people are looking to join the party, not go home early.

-Mario Ruiz

It’s hard to imagine the strike being a success, particularly because it originated from an outside organization. If the strike had originated from within the group of bloggers, that would be a different story. But like Ruiz says, “the proof is in the pudding.” It seems, the passion of the bloggers lies in their fingertips, not in their dusty wallets for now.