Jon Erpenbach, Wisconsin State Senetor, is proposing that a one percent state tax be added to video games
(including computer games). His goal is to generate enough money to fund the juvenile detention system to allow 17-year-olds to be treated as minors by the courts.

“Number one, I think it’s the right thing to do because not all seventeen-year-olds belong in the adult system when it comes to non-violent offenses … secondly, in the long run, the numbers show that if you treat certain situations in a juvenile delinquent-type of a setting, as opposed to an adult setting, chances are there’s going to be less of a problem when the kid gets older,” said Erpenbach.

Although Senator Erpenbach doesn’t appear to be linking video games to the crimes of these juveniles, at least one Wisconsin Representative, Steve Nass, has taken issue with the perceived link. I’m in agreement with him that 17-year-olds involved in non-violent crime should be treated as minors, but a tax on a single product group isn’t the way to go about it. I’m confident that a smaller percentage tax increase on overall sales will be just as, or more, effective as taxing a single product group one percent.

WhatsOpen.com just launched their site in to beta, and along with the beta launch has announced the availability of their app for the Android OS. WhatsOpen.com tells you…. what is open when you search. Where can you find a coffee in Mountain View, CA at 3AM? WhatsOpen.com can tell you that.

The Android application supports GPS which is nice. There is also an iPhone formatted version, but that clearly doesn’t support GPS since the iPhone doesn’t.

Sadly, WhatsOpen.com only has listing for California at this time.

Like Karl Ribas said in his post, has Wal-Mart simply lost their minds? Sam’s Club has started offering Google Adwords advertising packages starting at $100 per month. They are also offering SEO.

There isn’t a whole lot of information available on their site and frankly the site looks pretty bad to me. I wouldn’t hire them to design my site — oh yea, they do that too.

Scivisum, a UK-based research firm is predicting that Web 2.0 will die in 2008 as companies pull advertising budgets from the user-generated content sites that make up Web 2.0. They cite questionable content as the motivator behind pulling advertising.

I believe the real issue is going to be ad-blocking. As more Internet users become savvy to ad blocking software, advertisers and content publishers need to become more creative in how advertising is presented to users. Advertising will become more embedded in the content that is delivered, thwarting viewer attempts at blocking. Publishers need to give viewers consequences for not viewing ads — no ads, no content.

Web 2.0 won’t die, it will just evolve. In fact, I don’t really like the term Web 2.0 anymore. This isn’t the same bubble that we saw “back in the day”. Sure, some companies are seeing ridiculous valuations with no clear business plan, but not nearly as many as there were. Contextual, non-blockable, advertising is the future of Internet advertising. However, a balance will need to be maintained to keep ads from being too invasive. I see limited invasiveness of advertising becoming a point of competition between content producers in the near future.

Pownce has developed a mobile-friendly site — optimized for browsers on small screens and light-weight to load quickly. The new mobile site is currently beta so they acknowledge that there may still be a few bugs in there. More features to come to Pownce Mobile in the coming months.

The US Federal Trade Commission regulators approved the merger with a 4-1 vote. The Commission determined that the $3.1 billion deal is “unlikely to substantially lessen competition. However, the deal still faces some challenges in Europe and potentially other places in the world. [via Wall Street Journal]

Valleywag comments that it might very well have been Microsoft’s large advertising deals that convinced the regulators that the online ad business is as competitive as Google has argued all along. However, there is no real evidence to support the claim.

Update: Mashable coverage

Earlier this week Google Talk announced that translating bots are now available. There are 24 bots available: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. You can message directly to one of these bots or invite them to a group chat. For example, if you were chatting with your French associate you would invite the en2fr and the fr2en bots to the conversation. As we all know, these services are never perfect but I’m sure the bot speaks better French than I do.

Web-based word processors, spreadsheet applications, and other productivity tools are pretty popular in the web business arena these days. But, a recent NPD survey of 600 PC users showed that most have never used a web-based productivity suite.

• 94% of US computer users have never used a web-based productivity suite
• 73% have never heard of a web-based productivity suite
• 21% have at least heard of one of these apps, but have never tried it
• A whopping 1.5% use a web-based productivity suite along with desktop apps
• 0.3% use web-based productivity suites exclusively

The companies pushing these application suites have a lot of work to do in building awareness in the market. The good news: there is a lot of growth for them to go after.

I came across this list on Squidoo of Social Bookmarking and Networking sites. It seems like this is rapidly becoming a crowded marketplace. At the time of this post there are 156 sites listed. On the top of the list: StumbleUpon, Squidoo, Lensroll, del.icio.us, and digg.

At first glance, NewzNozzl looks like yet-another-digg-clone. NewzNozzl is different because you cannot submit stories directly to the site. Instead, they take the high rated stories from del.icio.us, digg, reddit, propeller, newsvine, and StumpleUpon and put them through another social filter of voting.

From the NewzNozzl About page, “Unlike most of the other social news sites, we don’t take story submissions – instead, we let the other social news sites discover (through their community) what’s interesting and important. And then we take the very best of those stories and let our users figure out which of those stories is really interesting and useful. This lets us show only the very best stories out there, quickly and from a really wide array of sources.”

Once a story hits NewzNozzl there are links attached to each entry that allow users to submit the story to the other social bookmarking sites. So, if a site is sourced from digg, a user can then submit it to StumbleUpon with a click.

When a story becomes popular enough a wiki page is created allowing users to expand upon the story. There is also a “tip” system. “Users can use cash to vote up a story. It’s a sliding scale – the more a user “Tips” a story, the less actual votes they will get out of it. Which is perfect, as users CAN slant a story they want, but the more they want to do so, the more pain it will cost, in the form of decreased cash.” “Cash” in this case refers to Nozzl tokens which are earned by being active on the site.

NewsNozzl’s mission… to become a hub of the best social bookmarking sites. Should be an interesting challenge.