Hacker News, a small but influential digg/reddit-like tech news site hosted at Y Combinator, is asking its users if stories from Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag should be banned from the service.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don’t want to be accused of censorship, so I thought I’d ask for opinions first.”

After 20 hours of voting, 60% of the 400+ people who voted said yes to the ban. One commenter writes “Don’t rely on the tyranny of the democracy. Use this as an opportunity to build a framework based on principle and apply it across the board. When you build constitutions, you have to do it in private, with great minds and based on timeless principles… and weight in fact the true nature of man.”

Based on the voting, Hacker News then banned them from the site.

Hacker News is still in the honeymoon period - it hasn’t yet attracted such a large readership that the trolls have taken up permanent residence. After mentioning them a couple of times and seeing comments asking me to please stop writing about them, I asked the community if they’d prefer I didn’t mention them. The responses were mixed.

It’s clear that the site is aiming for intelligent and thoughtful discussion, so it’s no surprise that they are thinking of banning the toxic wasteland known as Valleywag. The question is, will larger sites, hoping to avoid the Valleywag trolls, begin to ban them, too?

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Even though video has become a popular internet pastime over the past few years, there’s still a very little that average people can do with it. They can watch it, comment on it, and embed it on social networks and blogs if it tickles their fancies. Oh, and they can create it…but the majority of them won’t bother.

Omnisio wants to provide more options for us less creative types. Since most people don’t have enough time, patience or skill to record their own original content, Omnisio is giving them the tools needed to create mashups of other people’s original content.

As with Hulu, Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web (currently only those on YouTube, Google Video, or Blip.tv). They can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations. The process from start to finish is easy enough; just copy and paste the URLs of the videos you want, and drag a few sliders to indicate where each should begin and end. The only real beef I have with the tool is that (oddly) you can’t move the “start” slider to exactly where you want it; it only moves in 8-second increments. The “end” slider doesn’t have this problem.

The second innovation Omnisio brings to online video is a new commenting system that places comments within videos as popup bubbles. To be fair, these aren’t entirely new to the web; iminlikewithyou users are altogether too familiar with them. But they’re fun nonetheless, and it’s nice that you can use them to annotate videos with friends without interference from the mob that overruns YouTube.

Finally, the guys behind Omnisio are developing technology for combining slides with videos and tagging interesting people and highlights. The presentation functionality will essentially sync slides with various points within a video and show those slides in a dock below the video where you can click on them to skip around.

Omnisio is a Y Combinator company founded by Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar, and Simon Ratner. Expect even more capabilities from them down the line intended to put a “spine” into online video.

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London based Songkick, a Y Combinator startup that launched in October 2007, aims to help music artists pack fans into concerts. They’ve been developing a number of new products that are slated for launch soon. But one that they quietly launched last week without much fanfare is something they refer to simply as “Battle of the Bands.”

It’s a sort of Alexa or Compete comparison engine, but instead of comparing websites it compares bands and artists. They track any band that has 50 or more followers on MySpace - about 1 million bands currently. They then scour the Amazon sales rank for their music, mentions in 1,500 popular music blogs, total MySpace friends and plays, and other stats to determine the overall excitement for a band at any given time.

Type in one or more bands and see how they compare over time.

Who’s the hottest band right now, according to Songkick? Vampire Weekend, who are currently on tour and had 30 blog mentions this week. Hear their music here. Soon, Hogarth says, they’ll add permanent links for battles and give users the ability to embed graphs into websites.

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The fledgling startups listed below will present their ideas and initial products to investors at this spring’s Y Combinator Demo Day on March 18. Of the 19 companies in this batch, 10 have already launched and only one remains in stealth mode. Most of them have been in development for only three months.

Chatterous

Chatterous connects various forms of communication so that people can message each other regardless of the form they use most. Currently the service ties SMS, email, IM, and web together so that messages sent using one technology will be received by others using any of the other technologies. This works by setting up a group on Chatterous’s website and putting down all the ways your friends can be contacted. You can then start sending messages to them immediately, meaning that they don’t even have to change their own behavior all that much. Chatterous launched in public beta last week.

Addmired

Addmired provides the AddHer and AddHim social network widgets, both of which display two user profile pictures at a time and ask users to answer certain questions about them, such as “Who’s more popular?” The founders argue that their widgets are more appealing to social network owners than other widgets, because they help drive traffic within the social networks, not siphon traffic out of them. They look to establish service level agreements with some of the smaller social networks. We covered the service in February here.

Snaptalent

Snaptalent is an advertising network for job listings that uses IP detection to determine whether website viewers work or study at particular companies or institutions. It then displays listings from employers who want to attract workers from organizations known for their talent, such as Facebook or Harvard. See our review of the service from this week here.

RescueTime

RescueTime helps individuals and businesses track how they spend their time at the computer, and consequently, find ways to become more productive. The web-based dashboard charts application and website usage over long periods of time and shows you whether you’ve been reaching your goals. So far, 278 businesses have signed up for RescueTime for a total of 26,132 seats. See our review from last May here.

MightyQuiz

MightyQuiz is a user generated quiz destination and widget provider that we covered recently. Users are encouraged to answer trivia questions from a wide range of categories. They can also submit their own questions and embed them on their sites. The site is very sticky: the average session lasts 8 minutes (or 19 questions). As a comparison, the founders claim that Slate has an average session length of 4:22 and Wired has 3:34.

Tipjoy

Tipjoy is an easy micropayment system for the web. It has been designed to cut out the steps necessary for website visitors to leave small amounts of money for content publishers, such as bloggers. The Tipjoy button placed on a website asks for only an email address and by default registers a donation of 10 cents. The service is nearing 70,000 impressions per day and the founders are exploring different models for micropayments, such as employing them to finance high definition video on the web. We wrote about Tipjoy here.

8aWeek

8aweek promises to save you hours of time wasted each week on time-drain websites like Facebook and Drudge Report. The 8aweek browser toolbar will track your website usage, remind you of how much permitted time you have left on each restricted site, and even block you from particular sites once you’ve spent too much time on them. See our review from February here.

WebMynd

WebMynd provides a visual interface for reviewing your browsing history. The founders draw comparisons to Gmail - just as Gmail obviated the need to sort messages into folders by providing effective search and tagging, WebMynd renders it unnecessary to manually bookmark sites and organized them into folders because it’s easy to search and visually flip through the pages you’ve visited. WebMynd operates as a Firefox toolbar and has already indexed 8M page impressions. We wrote about them in January.

BaseShield

BaseShield will protect Windows PCs from malicious viruses and attacks by leveraging virtualization software. Its methods improve on existing anti-virus solutions by preventing all types of attacks, not just the recognized and documented ones. The service has yet to launch.

Insoshi

Insoshi is an upcoming white label social networking platform. It will differentiate itself from many of the other social networking platforms by taking a completely open source approach (think: WordPress of social networks). The software has yet to be released.

Mixwit

Mixwit describes itself as a combination of Slide and iTunes. While it has more ambitious long-term plans, it currently provides an easy way to make sharable mix tapes with songs found through the MP3 search engine Seeqpod.

Omnisio

Omnisio will help you annotate and share videos from any website. It will also add structure to the existing video content on the web. The service has yet to launch.

Deluux

Deluux aims to become a distributed Facebook, or an inverted Ning, by relocating the center of people’s online identities to their websites, which exist outside of any one social network. The service will facilitate the distribution of personalized content around the web and help drive traffic to these personal websites. It has yet to launch.

Wundrbar

Wundrbar wants to improve upon the search bar experience by providing users with powerful inline commands. The idea is reminiscent of YubNub but Wundrbar strives to appeal to a larger audience and to incorporate functionality that helps people manage their personal online accounts in addition to searching the web.

YumDots

YumDots wants to be the go-to mobile application for finding places to eat when out on the town. Its emphasis on using interactive maps to display information about local restaurants makes it more efficient than other mobile review services like Yelp’s. The service has yet to launch.

280 North

280 North will debut with a web-based PowerPoint clone called “280 Slides” that strives to mimic the desktop experience and features the ability to export presentations to PowerPoint format. The founders’ longer term goals consist of providing a JavaScript-based development framework for building desktop-like applications for the web. None of these services, however, have been launched yet.

Kirkland North
Kirkland North wants to take an infectious campus-wide game popular at Yale and Harvard last year and spread it to other campuses around the country. The Risk-like game pits sections of campuses against each other in a virtual battle for university-wide domination. While the founders have plans to roll out an integrated solution that can serve many institutions at once, they are currently rolling out individual versions of their online service, such as one for Stanford that launched only two weeks ago and already involves 20% of the campus.

Joberator
Joberator will help employers find developer talent by encouraging computer science students to refer their developer friends, of whom they have more intimate knowledge than any professional recruiter. Incentives for personal referrals are created by employers who list the bonuses they will pay to pay those who recommend candidates eventually hired. The service has yet to launch.

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OpenID, a way to sign on to multiple web sites with a single set of credentials, has incredible promise. Large companies have signed up. Thousands of website take OpenID sign-ins. All is good, right?

Well, not exactly. First, those big companies only issue IDs, they don’t accept them yet. And the user experience with OpenID is just plain bad. Users have to remember their OpenID URL, and are redirected to a sign in page. And it’s worse for people who already have an account at a website but want to start using their OpenID instead. Linking those two accounts isn’t easy.

That’s where new startup Clickpass comes in, which launches today. We first heard of them last year at a Y Combinator demo day, but the founders, Peter Nixey and Immad Akhund weren’t saying much at the time.

They are an OpenID issuer first. But they are also trying to make using OpenID much simpler for the user. First, they are partnering with sites like Plaxo, GetSatisfaction, Pownce and many of the Y Combinator startups. Those sites will show the ClickPass button, and users can sign in via OpenID with a single click (and they don’t need to remember their OpenID URL). If it’s your first time with OpenID, Clickpass will ask you if you have an existing account at the service you are trying to log into, and pass that information back to the site to join the accounts.

As you add sites to your ClickPass OpenID, you’ll see them listed on the Clickpass site. You are given a distinct OpenID URL for each site that you can use to manage multiple identities, all tied together on ClickPass. And if you choose to fill out profile information on ClickPass, they’ll autofill that information on new sites you join. Clickpass also ensures privacy controls by letting you choose what kind of information you want to share with the site. Conceivably the service could serve as a node for your personal data, connecting it between different website accounts.

In short, ClickPass takes the technical transparency and openness of OpenID and adds a layer of simplicity and familiarity.

Vidoop is approaching OpenID in a similar way, and PassPack is a non-OpenID solution. For launch they’ll be active on hacker news, Plaxo, Disqus, and through a Wordpress plugin.

The user experience is clean. After you sign in to Clickpass, you can sign in to any OpenID-enabled site with a single click of their button.

If you don’t want to use Clickpass as your ID provider, you can link it to any other OpenID provider, but it would really defeat the purpose. If the site has OpenID but not Clickpass you can still sign in using their Firefox plugin or OpenID url from Clickpass.

Naturally some concerns arise with any centralized login system. Doesn’t this mean a thief only has to steal one password, your Clickpass password? Co-founder Peter Nixey says we already have this problem, though. Most services will forward forgotten passwords to your email account making Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail (especially now) the Achilles heel.

As for the more probable phishing attacks, Clickpass plans to implement unique visual or textual cues (photos or quotes) to let you know if you’ve been had. But overall, Clickpass doesn’t aim to start protecting your bank account, rather that plethora of useful services the provide a great deal of personal utility, but little value to hackers (logging in to my news.yc account can’t do much damage).

It’s clear that OpenID really needs a system like this to gain widespread adoption. That’s probably one of the reasons OpenID’s chair, Scott Kveton, joined Clickpass’ board. It’s also clear that the web needs something like Clickpass too.

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Hacker News is a Digg/Reddit-like site that I am visiting more and more often. It’s my first stop in the morning, and I check it out a few times during the day as well.

Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.

Like Digg and Reddit, users submit stories to the site, and others can comment and vote on them. But Hacker News is also a forum of sorts, where users can simply post questions for others to answer - see this one asking for advice on creating a demo video for a new startup. Popular stories and questions move to the home page over time.

Hacker News used to be called Startup News and was launched in February 2007 by Y Combinator. They say “the most important goal of news.ycombinator was to create a place where founders and would-be founders can meet and talk.”

Hopefully as the site continues to attract new users, the magic won’t be lost.

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Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion - and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia - sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as most social networks, for the less professional profiles).

New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Anyone can be included. And anyone can edit any page, like on Wikipedia. For now, that’s it. The founders say they’ll add more structure over time, and give dedicated places to add bio information (schools, work, etc). Here’s my page.

Biographicon will have a significant hurdle to overcome - until it gets traction people won’t for the most part bother entering in their information. But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch. We’ll check back in in a couple of months and see how they’re doing.

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New Y Combinator startup 8aweek aims to help you stop wasting all that time on random Internet sites. They offer a Firefox plugin that monitors the web sites you visit and how long you spend on each site. If you are on a user-defined “restricted site,” the plugin will tell you when you’ve spent too much time there. Or alternatively, it will block sites if you tell it to be a little more aggressive about time management.

Some users may not be all that Interested in having the plugin try to change their surfing habits. But the service also provides an interesting chart showing all the sites you visited the previous 24 hours and how much total time was spent there. Some users may be surprised to see, for example, just how much of their life is spent on Facebook. The product includes a privacy option that allows users to turn off monitoring, or have the data stored only on their PC, not the Internet.

The company is offering the plugin for free; they want to make money by selling the service to businesses who want to limit the amount of time their employees waste on the Internet. Today businesses can buy a web filter to block access to known time wasting sites. But filters don’t catch everything, and some companies may want to take a softer stance by simply monitoring time on these sites rather than blocking them outright.

8aweek is very similar to RescueTime, another Y Combinator startup that launched last November. RescueTime montiors usage of both websites as well as desktop applications, so the products are not identical. But the products seem too close for comfort - I’m surprised Y Combinator is backing both of them.

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Anyone who’s ever visited HotOrNot and clicked on pictures for hours will be a perfect user for AddHer. Users (women only at this point, look for AddHim soon, say the founders) upload a photo of themselves and create a widget that can be embedded on MySpace or another website. The widget shows the user plus another randomly selected woman and asks readers to select who they like better based on a variety of questions. If this doesn’t make sense, just see the embedded widget above and keep clicking on my face (the founders decided to allow me to join even though I’m not a woman - I didn’t pick that picture though).

Readers can visit the MySpace page of the person they clicked on, and users who’ve created a widget can see their ratings and the total number of times people have seen their image. See their tour and the AddHer blog for for more details.

This is the first product of Addmired, Inc., which is a Y Combinator startup. More on the Addmired CrunchBase page.

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The idea of a “tip jar” on blogs and other content sites to help bring in a few extra dollars has been around for years. Donations and payouts are generally made through PayPal, and there are a number of plugins for various blogging platforms to make the process easier.

New Y Combinator startup TipJoy is designed to make it even easier to get people to click that tip button. Readers are not required to create an account or have a PayPal account to leave a tip, so there is little friction to them getting started. If they want to leave a tip they just click the button and type in their email address. I’ve added a tip button below to show how it works - any money we receive we’ll be distributing back to other bloggers who add the button, and/or donating to charity.

If you leave a tip as a new user, you start to build up an account debit. You can eventually pay that off via PayPal (TipJoy keeps 2%), although no one comes after you if you choose to skip out on the bill. You can also start to ask for tips on your own site, and anything people leave for you offsets what you’ve given to others.

The TipJoy site shows popular sites that have received a lot of tips, and you can also send any URL or email a tip directly as well. As a tipper, you can choose the amount you’d like to tip by default (starting at ten cents). Then, every time you click the tip button on a participating site, that amount is added to your bill.

If you want to cash out of your tips you can choose to either receive an Amazon gift card or donate the amount to charity. For now, you can’t receive cash since the company wants to avoid becoming a regulated money transfer service. In the FAQs they suggest they’ll be adding this functionality eventually.

I like the service because it creates a network around the idea of tipping for content. Users are both tippers and tippees, keeping a balance that they pay off eventually. I also like the fact that people don’t have to pay off that bill. It creates an interesting psychology where people find it very, very easy to leave the tip, and then may feel guilted into paying off the bill. At the very least, TipJoy is an interesting human psychology experiment.

The service has a number of options for integrating buttons and graphics on to the site. I imagine they’ll be adding plug-ins and other tools as well over time.

TipJoy was founded by Abigail Kirigin and Ivan Kirigin. The company blog is here.

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