ReadWriteWeb

Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

Jill Fehrenbacher, founder of leading green design blog Inhabitat, announced this morning that her nearly seven-year-old site has been acquired by media network Internet Brands.

Fehrenbacher says she started the site when a student, as a way to engage in public conversation about specific topics of interest to her. That sounds like the kind of founding story that many of the first wave of commercially viable blogs of the era can tell. The site speaks to a lucrative young readership with disposable income and now gets 15 million unique visitors each month, up from 11 million at the beginning of this year. Fehrenbacher told the story of Inhabitat's birth in depth in a long post this Spring. No acquisition price was named but given the site's growth, audience and angel fundraising, it was presumably a life-changing event for Fehrenbacher. She'll stay on as the site's manager and Editor in Chief.

In a blog post published yesterday, Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington officially announced the launch of a new section on the site called Small Business America.

The newly-profitable, left-leaning mega-site got its start covering and aggregating news about politics five years ago and has been branching out into other topics ever since.

You probably hear about Foursquare all the time, we certainly write about it a lot here on ReadWriteWeb, but did you know that there are many other things going on in the world of location and mapping? It's a red-hot sector, producing innovative new technologies and use-cases every day.

Where can you learn about all this geo-creativity? Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've come up with a system for efficiently discovering a large number of the top blogs on any subject - and we track the top stories in Geolocation closely. We've decided to open up a little bit of our research and share with you our list of the Top Blogs in Geolocation This Week. Read on to find out which top 10 blogs are writing the hottest stuff now and see all 300 of the blogs we're tracking.

Google has quietly launched a new feature: search for blogs on any topic. The company announced the new type of search in a weekly round-up of search updates last week, and respected SEO blogger Bill Slawski argues that the launch may be related to a new Google patent.

This has the potential to be a wildly useful service. How many of you have had professional or personal reasons to seek a list of the top blogs on a new topic? I know I, and many people I talk to, find themselves in such need frequently. How do you access the new search? How well does it work? Read on.

MOG, an up-and-coming streaming music service, has just launched its own editorial hub called the MOG Music Network. This online news source goes hand-in-hand with its music listening service, the latter which is available both online and as mobile applications for the iPhone and Android.

The MOG Music Network (MMN) includes music-related news from the company's network of 1,200 music blogs plus in-house news, reviews another other features. According to MOG, its network of blogs now generates more than 20 million monthly unique visitors and its goal is to become the largest music network online.

American consumers will shell out an estimated $2.6 billion for back-to-school supplies this fall. That's up 1.7% over last year, incidentally, an indication that even in tough economic times, there's no escaping the lure of the 64-box of Crayons. And as parents and students are shopping for their back-to-school supplies, educators are preparing a whole other set of tools for the classroom.

We asked educators what is the one new tech tool they are most looking forward to taking into the classroom with them this fall - hardware or software, a new tool, or just one that's new to their class.

Regator, the human-curated blog directory and news aggregator, just relaunched with a vastly improved and easier to use design, an improved search engine, and tight integration with Facebook Connect and Delicious. Regator's mission is to aggregate the best content from blogs across over 500 categories. To do so, Regator's editors created a vast directory of the best blogs on the Internet, with topics ranging from tech news and politics to tourism and beekeeping. The service's algorithms then create front pages for every topic that includes the most popular and interesting articles from these blogs, as well as an index of related posts and lists of trending topics.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors yesterday in D.C. As part of an apparent strategy of mollifying the media, he insulted the integrity and professionalism of bloggers and the quality of blogs. You know. Like this one.

"There is an art to what you do," he said to the real journalists. "And if you're ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That's all you need to see. So we understand how fundamental tradition and the things you care about are."

Tuesday night, ReadWriteWeb announced that we would be taking a new approach to how we use social media to communicate with our readers. Instead of blasting out automated content on Google Buzz as we do with our Twitter and Facebook accounts, we will be using Buzz to interact on a new level by discussing anything and everything in Buzz's forum-esque threads. I described it last night in a Buzz comment as "a better version of forums meets a less frantic chat room," and many positive comments seem to be welcoming this new form of engagement. This also got me thinking about how startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs can take advantage of Buzz.