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During yesterday's Q3 earnings call, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings revealed the company's plans to launch a streaming-only service which will allow users to watch movies via their PCs without having to sign up for the DVD-by-mail portion of the Netflix service. Unfortunately, this new streaming-only option won't be available to any Netflix subscribers in the U.S. Instead, it's a part of the company's new international efforts which will launch in the second half of 2010, starting off small in one market then expanding into other countries one-by-one.

Best known as a site that indexes and verifies leaked documents, Wikileaks exists as a space where whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers can speak out against corruption without fear of employer or government retaliation. According to a recent article in IT World, the organization will soon offer publishers a chance to get in on the action. The group will give publishers the opportunity to embed a Wikileaks submission form on their websites.

The classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are has been turned into a movie due in theaters next week. The promotional iPhone app is something that your kids may enjoy quite a lot. (iTunes link)

The app lets you listen to the movie's sound track, see photos, watch trailers and best of all - interact with an on-screen image of the monster Carol. Carol can be tickled, hit, he'll throw things at you, you can put him to sleep at night and he'll eat photos of the contacts on your phone.

After a summer of establishing blogger guidelines and fair use, the Associated Press is considering charging online customers for a 20-30 minute head start on breaking news stories. According to a report by the AP's Jeremiah Marquez, the AP's chief executive Tom Curley made the announcement at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club. Curley suggested that because the AP licenses stories to major hubs like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, these outlets would be willing to pay for scoops.

The Knight Foundation has announced the launch of its 2009 Knight News Challenge, a contest that will award people with the best ideas for building the future of news media a total of $5 Million in support. The Challenge is riding high this year on news that a past winner, hyper-local news aggregator Everyblock, was just acquired by MSNBC.

Now in its 4th year, the Knight News Challenge has funded 35 news projects so far. The rules of the contest have changed this year in response to one of the biggest complaints of the past: projects can now be submitted privately to Knight judges and not be exposed to the public at large.

Earlier this week we looked at the top 50 web properties in the U.S., according to comScore, and analyzed the changes over the past year. The top 5 were almost the same, except for the entrance of Facebook at number 5. What really caught our eye though was the progress of several less glamorous brands up the comScore charts. We profiled one of them, Demand Media, yesterday. Today we look at a site that wasn't in the top 50 one year ago but is now ranked #26. The Answers.com site gets over 28 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore.

How has Answers.com achieved this stellar growth? The same way Demand Media has: sheer quantity of content.

UPDATE: Bob Rosenschein, CEO, Answers.com, left a comment on this post with some illuminating data points. He first notes that the majority of page views comes from WikiAnswers.com, which had 22M uniques in July '09 while Answers.com had 10M "with some overlap." What's more, he notes that "the growth in our traffic is almost entirely from our WikiAnswers site."

In our recent post about the top 50 web properties in the U.S. according to comScore, we noted that Demand Media is on the rise - moving from #36 to #24 in the past 12 months. Demand Media owns a number of successful sites, including ehow.com, Pluck and eNom (the second or third-largest domain registrar in the world). The company also proclaims itself to be "the leader in social media solutions." Demand Media provides social media platforms to corporations and has a strong SEO business, creating niche website content tailored to search engines.

In short, Demand Media knows how to get page views.

A new study commissioned by the European Union has finally proven what many have suspected all along: internet users don't want to pay for content. Period. And nothing is going to change their minds. The report finds, in a surprising contradiction to what industry executives have been spouting for ages, consumers' behavior has nothing to do with the peer-to-peer technology (P2P) that has given rise to all-you-can-eat systems for free downloads of copyrighted content. In fact, many people claim that they wouldn't pay for online content even if all other free options were taken away. This finding has dramatic implications for the future of business, and not just in the entertainment industry, either. If people won't pay for content, how will companies survive?

The Associated Press is set to create a news registry to protect their online content from copyright violations. The organization amassed critics on the issue after a number of DMCA take down notices were issued to bloggers who had linked to the AP, used their headlines or paraphrased AP stories. One such blogging network, the Drudge Retort, was asked to remove seven items containing AP quotes. Nevertheless, after prominent bloggers created an uproar on the matter and claimed fair use on the content, the AP backed down. In a conversation with the New York Times, AP spokesman Jim Kennedy said, "We don't want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this" It appears the news registry is the AP's answer.

Trying to explain ThisIsLike to a friend ends up sounding like a junior high locker conversation: "He photographed a model, who is also a performing artist, who was in this band, and one of her bandmates was this other girl, who now writes for this website, which is actually similar to this other site, which was founded by this guy."

That's one way to explain the degrees of separation between two people. Another way would be to click through the photos, videos, links, and descriptions on ThisIsLike.com or watch our screencast of that process.