While Jimmy Wales has been busy of late creating a new search engine and dreaming of challenging Google for dominance within the field, another Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has been working on a new collaborative resource designed at offering more validity and expertise to its entries.

There are lots of bloggers talking about Google’s launch of their Pay-Per-Action (beta) program which is really just adding CPA ad units to Adsense with a name to not associate it with CPA directly.

Via SEL, Google beta launched a distributed pay per action ad network, and are accepting publisher sign ups here.

The new pricing model offered by Google to its AdWords clients means those advertisers will only pay Google when a customer converts in a specified way.

Finally got a chance to install and look at Joost Beta, and it might just end up being the killer app.

A more measured process to releasing these updates should help Mozilla avoid issues with rolling out an update to its entire userbase in one shot.

The New York Times Reader, a piece of software you can download to read the NYT on your PC, came out in beta last fall and I immediately downloaded it for a few reasons — including the fact that I am a geek, a newspaper journalist and a big NYT fan. And I have to admit that it was (and is) pretty slick. Thanks to Microsoft’s presentation software, it replicates the look of a newspaper, but updates itself when connected to the Web, etc.

Microsoft has been running in beta in some foreign markets a website called MSN Reporter that copies many features from the popular Digg website. On MSN Reporter, users share and rate news, rating them up or down with giant “Kicken!” and “Dumpen!” buttons (translated as “Kick it” and “Dump it”).

Google has agreed to acquire Adscape, a company that puts ads inside of video games, for $23 million. Google had missed out on Massive, a company Microsoft picked up for $200-400 million about a year ago, and is going to have to settle for the much smaller Adscape, which it will have to build into a bigger player. Judging by Google’s great success with dMarc, I’d assume nothing at this point.

Vanessa Fox has reported on Official Google Webmaster Central Blog that Google is taking webmaster tools out of beta and allowing webmasters and others to comment on the blog.

Vanessa says on bidding farewell to beta:

Cost per click bidding for site-targeted campaigns has been opened as a beta test for Google’s AdWords clients.

Yahoo has announced the integration of Yahoo Mail with Yahoo instant messenger. This new functionality of Yahoo messenger will apparently make it possible to send and receive instant messages right from your Yahoo Mail (beta) interface.

So this PC World story covers the new version of Google Groups, which is now out of beta, which means little in the sense that beta users have been using this interface for months.

I got my invite to beta test Clickriver today. Yippie. I already set up my account, so lets see how long it takes Amazon to start showing my ads for things like my name and search engine optimization.

God, Microsoft is changing! Windows Vista is coming out soon, and they’re already looking for beta testers for Service Pack 1, which they plan to release in the second half of this year.

When O’Reilly talked about Web 2.0 and perpetual beta he was tryng to say (I think) that the classic software release cycle is becoming too slow and self-focused for modern companies and that companies should never stop to enhance their applications and services with help from the community.

The fourth incarnation of Google Earth was released this week with some interesting new features being heralded by enthusiasts. A new 3D building layer has been added in answer to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D beta.

While browsing Google Labs, I noticed new Firefox extensions.

Google’s Blogger service has been running a couple of versions in parallel: the old Blogger they picked up from Pyra Labs, and the new beta built to replace it. The new Blogger has shed its beta tag and is ready for all those people who make blogging a New Year’s resolution.

Not its domain names, of course, but ones that people may want to register while signing up for Google Apps for Your Domain services. It could be an indication of Google’s future intentions for the Apps services too.

The Yahoo Mail beta offers sophisticated desktop client-like email features, but in terms of speed has demonstrated a dismayingly slow loading pace. It’s an issue that Yahoo has been working to fix.