Online news site Newsvine, which launched in March 2006, was acquired by MSNBC.com, a fifty-fifty joint venture between Microsoft and NBC. The deal was all cash, and the acquisition price has not being disclosed.

Scott Moore, VP of news and information for Yahoo, promises more user-generated “social news,” much like the information delivered by sites including Digg.com and Del.icio.us.

Even with the incidence of identity theft soaring year-over-year according to the Identity Theft Center in San Diego, governments enacting laws that explicitly hold corporations accountable for data losses deemed avoidable, and class-action suits seeing results for those victimized, users are giving up more than the usual to mashup services in exchange for convenience.Recently I blogged about OAuth releasing their final draft specs which allow users to access their private data across sites without sharing their username, password or identity in any capacity. The team appears to have really looked at the other authentication protocols currently employed and built upon them.

Denise Caruso of the New York Times highlights other ideas being developed to both protect our identity and leverage mashups.

The project that Denise finds the most intriguing is called the CloudTripper Project, which is devoted to portability of personal social data.

(CloudTripper empowers) individuals to “take their data with them” as they move across different websites and applications without having it locked into any particular silo. [cloudtripper]

The Identity Governance Framework, also mentioned, “aims to help organizations comply with national and international regulations, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act”.

(The IGF) specifications provide a common framework for defining usage policies, attribute requirements, and developer APIs pertaining to the use of identity related information. These enable businesses to ensure full documentation, control, and auditing regarding the use, storage, and propagation of identity-related data across systems and applications. [oracle]

The bottom line is that every day, whether through naivete, ignorance, or blatant disregard users are offering up their name, address, phone, Social Security and credit-card numbers online. And considering the PR nightmare that TJX has experienced, a standard needs to be adopted to protect both the individual and, in doing so, the liabilities of businesses.

Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. How is it that a conference name meant to convey the resurgence of the internet, following the bubble, through the emergence of second generation services and sites that facilitated community and collaboration, became as overinflated as the perceived value of many of the “Web 1.0″ sites? At the end of the day, I’ll happily side with a guy who was there.

So now the race is on to define Web 3.0.

• Jason Calacanis definition coincidentally defines Web3.0 as Web2.0 through a vetting process (mahalo.com)
• Nova Spivack defines it as a timeline where we will leverage technologies as-of-yet released (ie: RDF and OWL) and realized with Radar Networks (also as-of-yet released)

So to throw my two cents in, Web 3.0 will be:

As if the absurdly unnecessary Twitter wasn’t enough, FriendFeed, a new service currently in invite-only beta, steals a page from Facebook News Feed by allowing members to see what their friends are sharing on a variety of sites. They claim to support 23 different services running the gamut from movie ratings on Netflix to photos published to Picasa to videos viewed on YouTube to songs listened on last.fm.

The FriendFeed team had worked on some of Google’s more popular products, including Google Maps and Gmail.

Catching up on TechCrunch today, they have an interesting anonymous tip that Yahoo would be shifting away from premium services in the music group.

Vince Broady, head of Yahoo’s entertainment and video group, has since blogged that this isn’t in fact a lead up to the termination of paid content, but simply a staffing change for a more integrated entertainment team.

That means we’ll be creating more synergies between our music, games, movies, TV, and omg! properties, making them more personal and engaging for entertainment hounds. [more from Vince Brady]

What they actually hope to be creating (besides synergy) are new media platforms, applications and services, as well as the means to leverage social media and user-generated content. Sounds like the transition from content creator to content delivery to me.