In this morning's New York Times, there's an interesting article about the new trend of "ghost Twittering." If you don't know what that means, it's when someone, usually a celebrity, politician, or a "personal brand" of some sort, pays another person or other people to update their Twitter account on their behalf. This "ghost writer" of tweets thus becomes a "ghost Twitterer." While it may make sense for someone like U.S. President Barack Obama to farm out Twitter updates to staff (he has bigger tasks to focus on than tweets), when individual celebs and micro-celebs engage in this practice it seems a bit disingenuous. Is it really so hard to post 140 characters every now and then?

For the fourth in our series of VC interviews, we spoke with Richard de Silva at Highland Capital Partners. Richard specializes in digital media; for example, he is on the Board of Digg. So, he seemed like the right person to ask about the theories floating around the blogosphere that we are in an advertising bubble and that online advertising is doomed.

Gartner released a report today that highlights the different ways that companies are adopting Twitter for business use. Although Twitter was originally intended for communication among individuals, a number of organizations have begun to actively participate on the platform. However, not all companies are using Twitter in the same way. Some are tweeting, some are just listening, and some really savvy companies are doing both.

Public collaboration, network effects, crowdsourcing - call it what you will, the read/write web is based largely on projects where the value of the whole is greater than the sum of countless parts. Those parts are contributed by individual people all over the world, often for free. It's world-changing stuff, but can businesses make effective use of this paradigm?

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is joining the advisory board of the research engine DeepDyve, a search engine designed to scour the "deep web." This "deep web" is an area of the internet that isn't currently indexed by modern-day search engines like Google and yet consists of an estimated 99.8% of the Internet. Any company that is able to successfully tap into this data will be the one to introduce the next breakthrough technology in search as we know it. Will that be DeepDyve?

In this latest installment in our series on recommendation engines, we look at ChoiceStream - a recommendations vendor which counts Overstock, Borders and AT&T among its high profile clients. ChoiceStream has recently turned its attention to using recommendations in online advertising, and in this post we look at how the company is doing this. The ChoiceStream advertising product aims to generate personalized banner ads for each consumer, using data on shopping and buying patterns that it collects from the advertiser's website. The company claims that this technology improves click-thru rates, conversion rates and average order size.

Twitter marked its 3rd birthday this weekend and the site that Nielsen called the fastest growing social network last month shows no signs of slowing down. While active participation by users is a great show of strength, the use of Twitter as a platform for developers and aggregate data analysis is the most exciting thing about the company.

The story of Twitter as a platform is just beginning; the most exciting developments are still to come. Below we share our three favorite examples of what Twitter is becoming; these 3rd party uses of the service point the way for the larger Twitter ecosystem to become even more important in the future. We're not talking about Twitter clients, we're talking about Twitter data mining.

ExecTweets is a new Twitter-powered site that provides an information-rich and curated view of just well-known executives grouped by fields of expertise. The site makes it easy to quickly vote up specific tweets as they appear as well as send a reply via Twitter if you want to engage in conversation. According to the official Twitter blog, Federated Media accepted the request to build the site in response to pressure for a more topic-based Twitter site. The site is sponsored by Microsoft.

When Gmail failed a few months ago, I tried using Google to find out what was going on. When that did not get me an answer, I tried Twitter and did find some answers. That alerted me to the power of real-time search in one specific usage case. It was a relatively minor problem for me. But what if I ran customer service for a SaaS firm that just had a major outage? How would I find and monitor the conversations going on out there? That is what today's announcement by Salesforce.com about Twitter integration is all about.

Last November LinkedIn launched a new feature that would allow members of groups to share and discuss news articles. Last week, the professional social network offered group owners and managers another way to provide relevant news to their group by way of sharing feeds.

Managers can now create customs news feeds by adding an RSS feed, an Atom feed, or just a Web site URL.