San Jose Mercury News columnist Mike Langberg isn't convinced the consortium led by IBM and Cisco that plans to bring Wi-Fi to Silicon Valley will be able to deliver as promised. "There's a long list of reasons why the project may never get off the ground, or pay for itself if it does get built," he says. The idea, to provide free public Wi-Fi throughout the Silicon Valley--the cradle of Web civilization--is a good one. But the plans of Silicon Valley Metro Connect are ambitious, to say the least. Metro Connect wants to provide Wi-Fi across a region of 1,500 …

Echoing AOL's recent security gaffe, Second Life--the fast-growing online site where hundreds of thousands play out fantasy lives online--suffered a security breach over the weekend that exposed the names, addresses, passwords and some credit-card data of its nearly 650,000 users. Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, sent a letter over the weekend to its 650,000 users detailing the extent of the problem and advising its users to follow up with their bank. According to the letter, "an intruder was able to access the Second Life databases utilizing a "Zero-Day Exploit" through third-party software utilized on Second Life servers. Due …

More evidence that YouTube could become the provider of a new generation of global superstars: South Korean student Lim Jeong-hyun produced a video several months ago of a mysterious man (himself) bathed in sunlight playing guitar. It became one of the most-watched videos of all time at the online video-sharing site. The New York Times identified Lim as the man behind the video dubbed "guitar," which appeared eight months ago on YouTube. It featured a young man sitting between his desk and a bed hammering away at an electric version of Johann Pachelbel's wedding anthem, "Canon." You don't see his …

It's the same old story: YouTube is amazing, the press is obsessed with it, but the whole world is still waiting for the payoff. The 19-month-old site delivers 100 million daily videos, but so far, all the company has to show for its traffic-generating prowess is a bunch of expenses. There's not much revenue at YouTube--and zero profits. While YouTube is starting to develop new ad offerings, like its "brand channels," its popularity outpaces its revenue growth, which is leading the site into the red. The current estimate for its operating expenses is between $900K and $1.5 million per month. …

Marketers are starting to spend money on RSS applications, software programs that deliver news feeds containing headlines, and excerpts from Web publications that consumers subscribe to. RSS is now being used as its own ad medium--and an official marketing tool. Here are some examples: coupons. Consumers who subscribe to promos from commercial retailers can receive coupons. There are even some aggregators, like Phatdeal.com and Deal of the Day, that offer customizable coupon feeds from a variety of retailers. Coupons and other types of feeds are also being delivered to Web sites and blogs with affiliate tags. All the tech giants …

In the U.S., state governments are now ramping up their efforts to place facilitators of illegal gambling behind bars. Late Wednesday night, Peter Dicks, the chairman of Sportingbet, which offers online sports betting, was arrested in New York by Port Authority officials upon his arrival at JFK. His arrest comes seven weeks after BetOnSports Chief Executive David Carruthers was arrested during a layover in Dallas, on charges of taking illegal bets from American consumers. Both companies trade on the London stock exchange. Dicks' arrest comes at the behest of the Louisiana State Police, which issued a warrant for his arrest …

At an investor Q&A in New York, Sheryl Sandberg, Google's vp of Global Online Sales & Operations, discussed the company's latest push to target the $10 billion annually spent by local businesses on advertising. Sandberg pointed out how Google's local search product is vastly improved over what it was four years ago. Between Google Maps and Google Local results integrated into the Web search page, you can often get good local results for local queries. Advertisers are starting to use these services, too, buying placements on Google Maps that contain things like coupons. Sandberg notes that local ad dollars still …

News Corp. needs to do a lot more of this: The media giant is putting the first seven minutes of the season premiere of the hit Fox show "The Simpsons" on the Web two days before its network premiere. News Corp.-owned sites like MySpace, Fox.com and IGNTV.com will host streaming versions. If it were smart, Fox Interactive Media would also pass the streams off to YouTube, Google Video and other online video sharing sites. And if it were really smart, News Corp. would cut it to five minutes and do the same before every show of the season, then add …

It's Backlash Thursday in media news: First, the user mutiny at Facebook.com (see today's OnlineMediaDaily), and now, a TechCrunch report says Digg.com--a news site that promotes the most popular stories submitted by its users, who vote (or "digg") on the stories they like--is facing a similar problem. The trouble: groups of users who come from the same company can easily collaborate to get stories written about them, or by them, on the site's home page. Some groups do this consistently, and now there's been a backlash in the Digg community. One blogger did an analysis of Digg's home page stories …

Columnist David Holtzman tells the major search engines that it's time to delete all that user data they collect from us. He says incidents like the AOL search data leak and the fact that the government can subpoena companies like Google to divulge sensitive user information amount to a massive privacy issue. At no point in the history of data collection has any company been able to retain as much sensitive private information as the search engines. Why do they keep the data? The answer is mostly advertising, but search company bigwigs like to sidestep the question by saying it's …