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The team behind microblogging service Pownce announced on the company blog today that it is joining blog software company SixApart and closing Pownce in two weeks. Pownce left private beta with a big launch just 11 months ago but the service never grew beyond a core group of fans.

The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.

Yahoo just announced the top 10 search terms on its mobile search engine. The top mobile searches are either for social networks (MySpace, Facebook), or searches for local information (Craigslist, movies, weather). A lot of of mobile searchers were also looking for auctions on eBay. The top 10 is rounded out by searches for more time sensitive topics like the Olympics, AIG, and The Dark Knight. The only celebrity to appear in Yahoo's top 10 mobile searches is Kim Kardashian.

Interestingly, not a single one of the top mobile search terms appears on Yahoo's top 10 list of searches on its regular search engine.

Last week Barack Obama's Presidential transition website Change.gov added OpenID login for commenters and now the entire site has been put under a Creative Commons license. These concepts are no longer just the dreams of "crack-pot fringe case" advocates - they're the official policy of the US President Elect.

The particular Creative Commons license chosen by Change.gov, the "By" license (one of many options), means that instead of the default US Copyright of "all rights reserved," visitors are now allowed to reuse any of the content from the site as long as they give attribution back to the original source. Standard Copyright is for protecting scarce content but Creative Commons is a legal framework set up to make sharing and reuse as easy as possible.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Blockbuster, the beleaguered video rental chain, is planning to use Microsoft's Live Mesh platform to deliver streaming video to desktops and mobile devices. The article is weak on specifics, but Blockbuster seems to be planning to use Live Mesh specifically to allow users to start watching a movie on one TV and then to continue the movie on another TV or mobile device later on. Bockbuster's CIO Keith Morrow also mentioned a parental notification system that would alert parents if a child tried to watch a movie during homework time.

Songbeat is an interesting new desktop music application that lets you stream and download songs from SeeqPod, Project Playlist, Spool.fm, and iASK. Songbeat also gives you the option to 'record' music from your last.fm stations. To do this, the application records the live stream, which, according to Songbeat is perfectly legal in Germany, where the company is headquartered.

The free version of Songbeat allows you to download up to 25 songs for free, but in order to download an unlimited number of songs, users will have to pay $29.99.

It seems we're approaching a new age here on the Internet. Instead being anonymous, faceless IP addresses, social computing and changing technologies have allowed the lines between the "real" world and the "virtual" world to blur. Web 2.0 helped create a world where your identity is revealed in bits and pieces as you share snippets of your life online - a photo here, a Stumble there, a tweet, a Digg, etc. However, the rise of social media is only one of the changes that is busy shaping the new web.

Do we really need another shopping holiday? Some marketing firms and major retailers think we do. To follow up on the success of Black Friday, the start of holiday shopping season for American consumers, and Cyber Monday, the day when we surf online for the deals we missed at the mall, a mobile marketing firm called Mobigosee is planning to launch "Mobile Tuesday" on December 2nd of this year.

I'm very pleased to announce that Bernard Lunn has joined ReadWriteWeb full-time as our Chief Operating Officer. Starting today, Bernard will assume responsibility for most of the non-editorial functions of our business - sales, business development and other operational matters. This allows me to re-focus on leading our editorial, including doing more writing! I will still be running the business, but Bernard will take a lot of pressure off me by running our sales and business development operations. He will also be leading our 'channel' strategy.

While the majority of our day-to-day searches are easily handled by our favorite search engine, there are always those intensive searches that have you jumping from site to site - or opening a series of tabs - to find a good cross-section of information on a given topic. Even once you've established a preferred workflow for this kind of comprehensive searching, it can be time consuming to run through the process.

Wouldn't it be easier if you could simply enter one query and have it run through a bunch of search sites?