3+ year old TechMeme, an automated news site that shows breaking news clustered by topic, has always generated “headlines” by analyzing how news sites link to each other. If a lot of sites start linking to something unique, TechMeme guesses it’s news.

That isn’t working, says founder Gabe Rivera today in a blog post: “Only an algorithm would feature news about Anna Nicole Smith’s hospitalization after she’s already been declared dead, as our automated celeb news site WeSmirch did last year.”

He’s hired someone to start vetting stories that the algorithm says are headlines, to either push them up or get them off the site entirely.

I believe this is a slippery slope for TechMeme. Certainly a human editor can make the results better. But it also completely destroys the objective nature of TechMeme and turns it into something different. It’s now subjective, and in many ways just another news site.

On Thursday Livestation, a P2P desktop application for streaming live TV broadcasts, will show a preview for its iPhone/iPod Touch app to do the same. Yes - live TV on the iPhone. Luckily we don’t have to wait. They’ve got a YouTube video, embedded after the jump, which shows the app working on an iPhone. The irony to all this is that Livestation is a product of a long-in-the-tooth UK startup called Skinkers which is… part owned by Microsoft.

Nokia is pushing hard for consolidation, looking to make their smartphones the go-to device for communication. One of the major announcements at Nokia World 2008 this year is about their Nokia Messaging solution. It is essentially a multi-platform messaging solution that enables email considerably more gracefully than the original Symbian interface.

Cheezburger Network, the company behind I Can Has Cheezburger and a number of other humorous blogs, has unveiled the newest addition to its popular blog network: OnceUponAWin, a site dedicated to finding and posting nostalgic photos and videos from your childhood.

I have a hard time believing OnceUponAWin will be as popular as the network’s flagship blog about lolcats or FAIL Blog, a favorite around the TechCrunch office. But it’s a solid addition to the network, and will only further boost Cheezburger Network traffic, which has been growing at a steady clip. From September to October the site saw a 19% increase in the number of unique visitors and a total of 128.3 million page views.

Make sure to look at the latest job listing on CrunchBoard. While doing that take a look at our new Crunchboard Service and Sales Directories. They are a great way to connect with the start-up community. Click through for some of jobs posted in the past week.

Kleiner Perkins’s iFund is a $100 million fund to invest in startups building applications for the iPhone.

Startups that wish to apply for funding can fill out an online application here. That information, which includes contact information, founder bios, the business plan, demos, financial information, etc. is then dumped into a database for review.

That data was accidentally published on the web by Kleiner Perkins’ former hosting provider, Meteora Technologies Group, in a SQL file, which is easily readable in a text editor or other application. The file was then indexed by Google and found in a query on one of the companies (the guys from Fruux found it). Applications from about 588 companies are in the file. A quick perusal shows very detailed information from each of these companies.

Facebook Connect is beginning to materialize and we’re on the ground floor: TechCrunch readers can now use their Facebook accounts to sign in before leaving comments.

Doing so yields several benefits. Most immediately, you’ll no longer have to enter a name, email address and website manually before dropping your two cents. Just click once on the “Connect” button that sits next to the comment form and we’ll automatically detect who you are, even on return visits.

Hooking things up with Facebook also lets us display your profile portrait in miniature form next to your name in the header of comments. Your name conveniently links to your Facebook profile as well, making it easier for other commenters to get in touch with you and perhaps become your virtual friends.

Google may get three times more search traffic than Yahoo, but, SearchWiki aside, most of the innovation seems to be coming from Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search as they strive to gain a larger slice of the search market share.

Last year Yahoo introduced Search Assist, an advanced autocomplete feature that recommends related searches as you type your query into the search box. Autocomplete isn’t a new concept - Google has offered it for years through Firefox and its browser toolbar (and recently integrated it into its homepage). But Yahoo takes it a step further, going beyond just guessing what word you’re typing by suggesting possible related searches.

After a tepid start, online holiday sales seem to be picking up a bit. Online sales on Cyber Monday as measured by comScore were a healthy $846 million, up 15 percent from last year’s Cyber Monday. Online sales since Thanksgiving are up 12 percent to $2.4 billion. But overall online sales in November of $12 billion are still down 2 percent.

Can sales make up the difference over the next five weeks? As the chart above shows, holiday sales so far in 2008 (the red bars) are struggling to keep up with the levels we saw in 2007 (the dark blue bars). Maybe consumers have just been postponing purchases longer than usual, but now that the U.S. is officially in a recession that knowledge will likely have a psychological impact on people’s willingness to splurge. (I love how the recession news didn’t come out until after the Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend).

Hitwise also offers some insight into what happened on Cyber Monday in terms of Website traffic to retail sites.

Group-hug health site DailyStrength is being acquired by HSW International, which operates HowStuffWorks in China and Brazil (but is a separate company). Terms were not disclosed, but this has all the signs of a mercy acquisition.

DailyStrength has zero presence in China or Brazil. HSW International plans on keeping the site up, but it’s main interest seems to be in integrating DailyStrength’s social media technology platform on its international informational sites.

Reply.com, a San Ramon-based online marketing company, has launched a new product called Click Marketplace that it hopes will give small businesses that don’t typically have large ad budgets access to highly targeted advertising. Reply.com CMO Brian Bowman says that while other ad platforms offer geo-targeted ads, they tend to be more expensive than normal ad campaigns, and are also prone to incorrectly assessing a web user’s location. Conversely, he says that Reply is offering smaller, more targeted campaigns that rely on user input to ensure that the ads are relevant and the users are engaged.

The system primarily relies on inserting a ‘middle-page’ between each ad and the ultimate destination. After clicking on an ad, users are prompted to enter basic information depending on what industry the ad is associated with. Browsers clicking on an automobile ad might be asked their zip code and the the make and model of the car. Depending on the user input, Reply will send the user to one of the advertisers from its pool of participants in the Click Marketplace.

Dimdim, provider of a browser-based web conferencing platform that doesn’t require the installation of any desktop software, is dropping the beta tag with the release of a new edition of its application and is simultaneously releasing its complete source code to the open source community.

If you would like a Pro version (starts at $99 per year for an unlimited number of meetings) free of charge, click this special TechCrunch link to sign up. Dimdim will upgrade a percentage for every 100 registrations, up to 1000 free Pro accounts in total.

With the release of the new 4.5 version, Dimdim introduces what they call the SynchroLive Communication Platform, designed to automatically scale its performance to ensure all live communications are perfectly in synch.

Yahoo continues to outsource lots of businesses it previously built and maintained directly. Especially in music - In February they shut their subscription music service, and in September they announced a deal to allow full song playbacks through the Rhapsody service.

Next up is Yahoo’s radio product, http://music.yahoo.com/launchcast. The site today, which draws 3 million monthly unique visitors says Yahoo, allows users to listen to music based on preferred genres and artists. But Launchcast is limited only to Windows users on Internet Explorer, shutting out a large percentage of the Internet.

Next year they’ll shutter the service and relaunch with CBS Radio, much as AOL did earlier this year. CBS provides streaming for 144 owned radio stations, as well as providing some Internet-only content.

Conspiracy theory lovers are going to have a field day with this one: when you try to access Facebook using the Google Chrome browser today, you’ll get a warning that the social network may in fact be a phishing site.

You can still use the site if you click the button to continue, but you can also go ‘back to safety’. It worked fine for me until earlier this morning.

Update: this blog says the problem occurs in Firefox as well, but I don’t see it. (I do see it when I try to visit http://fbcdn.net/)

Twitter is buzzing with people getting this notice as well.

Update 2: the domain name fbcdn.net is effectively a domain registered by Facebook.

Update 3: now Safari seems to be claiming Facebook is a suspicious site as well when requests are made on the social network.

Update 4: the issue is topic of discussion in the Facebook Developer Forums (here and here). An administrator acknowledges that fbcdn.net was listed as a phishing site but that the problem has now been resolved, yet I’m still getting the warning message.

Update 5: problem appeared to have occured due to a bad advertisement link. The issue has now been resolved.

This guest post is written by Matt Rutherford, Web Strategist and technology producer for Charlie Rose. Matt focuses on the macro themes affecting the internet and the wider world. You can read Matt’s previous guest post, Larry Lessig Defends Copyright, Loves Charlie Rose Remixes, here.

Who protects the internet? In part, it’s this man – General Kevin Chilton, US STRATCOM commander and the head of all military cyber warfare. We’re broadcasting an interview tonight with General Chilton, in which he discusses the threat of cyber warfare, along with his other remits of space warfare and the US nuclear deterrent. Chilton is fascinating, and amongst other things has been a NASA space shuttle pilot, logging over 700 hours in space. You can watch the full interview here (and it is embedded below).

The discussion with General Chilton brings to light a crucial question, however. Is the internet actually protected? The military remit is to defend the .mil networks, prevent online espionage, and develop offensive strike capabilities. But who’s protecting the rest? Given its integration with every aspect of our lives and economy, it’s surprising just how little we know about who defends our electronic nervous system.

…But were afraid to ask. This is the title of this very interesting 34-slide presentation on Google prepared by FaberNovel, a french consulting firm. It is hard to realize the real nature of this just 10 years old giant given the number of services it has continuously released, updated (and sometimes shut down) or acquired.

This presentation gives a great overview of the company’s overall strategy and the reasons it has become what it is today.

MySpace has partnered with RipCode to give mobile users access to MySpace videos. The content will be available at MySpace’s mobile site, m.myspace.com, which currently generates around 3 billion monthly page views from 10 million users.

Video will work on the iPhone, T-Mobile G1, BlackBerry Bold and BlackBerry Storm devices, among others. All user uploaded videos (meaning videos that a user has uploaded, as opposed to all videos uploaded by all users) and most premium content will be available.

The new feature will use RipCode’s on demand video transcoding service. Videos are transcoded only when requested, into whatever combination of codecs, bit rates and resolutions an individual handset requires.

Today’s Wall Street Journal story talking about yet another takeover attempt of Yahoo is incorrect, say our own sources. And unlike The Times’ story over the weekend, which was equally fictitious (and, here’s an interesting fact - both publications are owned by News Corp.), this story had direct consequences in the market.

Today’s story has former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller out pitching private equity funds to raise “$28 billion to $30 billion” to acquire all of Yahoo.

Miller, along with his partner Ross Levinsohn at Velocity Interactive Group, were also center stage in The Times’ story over the weekend.

Our sources say that while Miller and Levinsohn have been talking to Yahoo and Microsoft executives and shareholders for months about Yahoo’s future (and at different times both Miller and Levinsohn have been proposed as Yahoo board members), they have not had any serious discussions with private equity funds about raising capital to take over the company.

Apple’s App Store has finally given developers the ability to release up to 50 promotional codes for their applications, allowing them distribute their apps to press and friends free of charge directly through the App Store.

While the feature may seem like a minor addition to most people, it will be a boon for developers looking to help spread the word about their new applications. Before now, developers looking to share their application with the press or friends would need to include them as part of Apple’s Ad Hoc program, which lets developers test their applications before they are deployed on the App Store. This was inconvenient, as the Ad Hoc program requires the UUID (a unique number tied to each device) of every phone that was participating, which most people don’t know how to find in the first place.