"You see music fans jumping from site to site to piece all the information they want together . . . Our goal is to put that all together into one place and have an experience that is largely programmed by the users of the community, " GM of music Scott Boyd told Reuters. "Not just user-generated content, but really creating the whole experience."

The site has moved from a place were users could upload camera-phone pictures of concerts they attended to a music focused site. It has recruited artists to create their own profiles and tour blogs, and has acted as the official online community for the Coachella music festival.

Boyd says the blogs the company recently purchased will be separate from the site but will integrate some content into the main Buzznet site to offer context about individual artists searches and profiles.

"So if you’re looking into a particular band, there’s a review from Stereogum and a news story from Idolator and there’s a photo gallery created by a kid who was at the concert last night," Boyd says. "We can add value by bringing that content into our bigger community and spreading it around."

The Buzznet deal with Universal Music includes audio streaming and music video. The company won’t confirm it, but it reportedly received $25 million in recent venture funding.

In addition Buzznet has been working with artists to host contests on the site. For example, Arvil Lavigne, had a model search for her clothing line on the site, and 30 Seconds to Mars asked fans to upload pro-environmental videos along with making donations to environmental charities.

Boyd says the company now offers only 50 percent of what it hopes to achieve in the future when it comes to content and services.

"I don’t think it’s that interesting to just do an audio streaming service," Boyd says. "That’s incredibly important, but our users want the editorial around that. They want to create their own programming around that. So that’s just one part of the piece, not the end-all, be-all."

An official statement explains, "VideoEgg‘s Eggnetwork Advertising Platform (EAP) . . .  now allows deployment of video advertising in any Flash environment.  With EAP for Video, high-quality publishers can easily integrate VideoEgg’s invitation-based video advertising into their existing video platform – enabling sites to earn revenue by delivering unique in-video ads to their community."

So Metacafe, Imeem, and Buzznet can accommodate a rush of new advertisers without reassigning (or hiring) an equal number of programmers.  And VideoEgg gains access to an estimated 50 million unique users.  Not bad, eh?

Of course, any financial details related to the deal remain undisclosed, so if one party or another is getting the short straw, we aren’t likely to hear about it.  This seems like the sort of thing companies would willingly pay to achieve, however, so the details might be of little relevance, anyway.

Finally, we’ll note that the last time we wrote about VideoEgg, it had just earned $15 million in funding; this isn’t a bad trend for any company.

Buzznet also has about six million users, so that makes for a pretty decent dollar-to-person ratio.  According to a press release, Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners were the top check-writers behind this windfall.

A Hitwise report from March places Buzznet seventeenth among social networking sites, though (in terms of US market share), so a little background may be necessary.  The company writes, “With an initial focus on music, Buzznet has quickly distinguished itself from traditional social networks that are focusing primarily on messaging and basic profile pages.”

The company also claims to offer “tools and versatility that enable Web users to program, participate, interact, and create vibrant multimedia communities around topics and content they are passionate about.”

To be honest, Buzznet doesn’t look like my kind of site – its content and overall style are more “punk” and “pop” than I’d like.  But “passionate” seems to be the right word to describe its users – Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott indicates that visits to Buzznet increased by 148.4% between January and February.

With some rather “passionate” investors onboard now, as well (even if Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners can’t match Microsoft’s enthusiasm), Buzznet’s fortunes could really begin to soar in the near future.

There’s plenty of action in social networking beyond MySpace, despite the overwhelming 80 percent market share it holds. Out of the top 20 social networking sites tracked by Hitwise, a couple of lesser-known websites have been rapidly gaining ground.

Hitwise’s superlative research director LeeAnn Prescott blogged about the change from January to February in social networking traffic tracked by the firm. Both iMeem and Buzznet, with heavy focuses on music, more than doubled their traffic in the month.

Overall, Prescott wrote that market share for social networking in general rose 11.5 percent month to month. In year over year movement from February 2006 to February 2007, social networking traffic gained by 87 percent.

Only Facebook with 10.3 percent and Bebo with 1.18 percent scored market shares greater than one percent while following MySpace and its commanding lead. Xanga (0.87%) filled out the top five places.

"The category is still growing at a rapid pace, and the growth of these newer sites shows that it hasn’t yet plateaued," said Prescott. New figures soon to arrive from Hitwise will show MySpace driving more than one in four visits upstream to the next nineteen sites in their top twenty.

At MySpace, traffic was up 10.2 percent from January to February; year over year brought an increase of over 107 percent as people continue to seek out the site in greater numbers.

QOOP doesn’t have a lot of content on its web site yet, and is pretty cryptic about its operations beyond being a “product delivery solutions” company. However, search engine industry expert John Batelle’s 2004 observations can be purchased in book form from the site.

Beyond that, according to an entry in Mr. Batelle’s Searchblog, QOOP has a deal in place to publish photo books. Content for those books would come from Flickr and Buzznet, both online sites where photographers can share their work with others.

Searchblog goes on to ask what could happen if Google Print decides QOOP would be a swell partner. QOOP prints an out-of-print book, one a publisher has no interest in reprinting, and only QOOP, Google Print, and the author (or the author’s estate) profit from the sale. The publisher gets nothing.

And then there are rights issues to consider, as he further notes:

The publishing industry has been steadfastly against Google Print, threatening legal action against Google. An attempt by Google to placate publishers by agreeing not to scan any books they request to have excluded was also blasted by the Association of American Publishers.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Offering users the ability to search millions of blogs, the revamped Technorati introduces a number of features promising, “Technorati brings you what’s happening on the web right now.” Dave Sifry explains the goal of the redesign on the newly launched Technorati weblog:

“We’ve improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We’ve tried to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make it easy to understand how we’re different from other search engines.”

A quick look at the new homepage shows a complete overhauled approach to their appearance. The last manifestation followed the Google model of the simple approach, while the redesigned model follows the enriched experience path, similar to goWholesale.com. Some of these new features include the most popular News, Books, Movies, and Top 100 Blogs tabs. When clicked, users are updated on each of those categories.

Other new features include Technorati’s continuing embrace of tags. Photo links from flickr, furl, delicious, and buzznet will be displayed, provided a query matches the appropriate tag. Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds for posts they have tagged.

Technorati also updated their search feature in order to deliver more robust capabilities for visitors. An advanced search option will be featured with every Technorati search box. They’ve also added a staff page, blogs for the main site and ones for Technorati developers, as well.

These changes are part of Technorati’s effort to appeal to a more diverse audience. When you consider the usability features they’ve added for the update, its obvious they are committed to improving the user experience.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.