ReadWriteWeb

The Ford Foundation has just granted $300,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to support Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia's repository for free, sharable multimedia files.

The grant will fund a study of barriers to entry for users and contributors new to Wikimedia Commons. The project team will also identify best practices from similar media-sharing sites. The team will design and implement a simpler workflow for uploading, licensing, and describing media.

Facebook held a conference call today about changes being made to the website's privacy features but we were left feeling a little confused. A long list of settings are being collapsed into a much more manageable privacy interface and users who want to keep sharing messages only with friends and family they have approved will be able to continue doing so. But it is pretty clear that Facebook would like you to share a lot more information publicly than you are right now, with the whole wide open internet.

Why? I asked the company if they really were trying to nudge users into being more public on Facebook and if outside developers would then get access to more user data. Two out of three of the Facebook staff members on the call have now confirmed that yes, they are aiming for users to be more public. Leah Pearlman is a Facebook Product Manager and author of the forthcoming book Facebook for Dummies but her explanation for why the company wants more public sharing to happen was pretty hard to believe.

Facebook is holding a press webcast and phone call this morning regarding upcoming changes to its privacy policies and features. It's an ongoing story we've been following closely but as we wrote on Monday in our in-depth coverage of changes underway: Given the change underway and the company's move to lobby governments around the world in favor of its privacy philosophy, we think it would be a good idea to have a more thorough public conversation about what that philosophy is.

This morning's call could be an important chapter in that conversation. We'll be live blogging it below starting at 10am PST but we begin by laying out what we think the big questions are. Please feel free to contribute your questions in comments; we'll likely get a chance to ask the company one question on the call. It could be yours.

Over the last few years, Pingdom has established itself as a well-regarded uptime monitoring service, but until now, its services were only available to paying customers. Today, however, Pingdom launched a free version of its service. The free service offers all the features of Pingdom's paid accounts, though users are limited to monitoring just one website or server. This free account also comes with up to 20 SMS alerts per months, which is a nice perk, given that you probably want to know that your site or server is down as soon as possible.

Google released some interesting data about the volume and types of attacks its spam detection software identified over the last quarter. According to Google, overall spam levels in the second quarter of 2009 were 53% higher than during the first quarter, and 6% higher than a year ago. Even though the total volume of spam dropped by 70% after the the takedown of the infamous McColo ISP, it only took four months for spam levels to get back to normal. Last month, 3FN, an other large ISP spam source was also shut down, but spam volume only dropped by about 30%, and chances are that the spam market will simply rebound within a few months, as new spammers get into the market.

Quanp, a new service from office electronics company Ricoh, has just launched a beta of their online storage system which offers an interesting twist to the usual backup services: a visual search tool that displays your data in 3D. The 3D viewer is actually a desktop application designed for Windows PCs, but Mac users aren't entirely out of luck - there is an online version of the service, too.

GizaPage is a new "social network organizer" - not aggregator, mind you - what they do is different. Instead of pulling in your social media posts and updates from around the web into a content stream like FriendFeed, they create a web page which features the social media profiles you link, each in their own tab and each page served from the social network's own domain. It's like loading up a tabbed web browser with links to your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., but all easily accessible from one custom URL (yourname.gizapage.com).