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Like most things on the Internet, there’s a good side and a dark side to where the media business is headed.

The good side is very good: thousands of layers of mostly needless middlemen and processes are being eliminated as journalists get a direct channel to their readers. And, because it’s a two way medium, readers get that channel right back. And in the cases where the subject of an article has been wronged, the Web gives them powerful megaphones to fight back. In short, the more everyone has a voice, the more reporters are challenged to make sure they are right, because they will be called out.

It's not often that Internet companies last 10 years, but Moonfruit in the UK has proved pretty resilient. It survived the dotcom boom the first time round, launching with VC-backing, growing to 65 staff and cutting back to two staff in the space of a couple of years. It's a wonder why they didn't exit in the most recent boom, but here they are still, plugging away. And their resilience is proving to be an asset as their 10-years old web site building business comes back into fashion, even as more recent competitors like Weebly, Yola, MyDragnDrop and Webnode, and many others, try to capture the market for people who want to build simple web sites. So what's the best way to re-invigorate an internet brand after 10 long years? Get trending on Twitter, that's how. So Moonfruit has been giving away 10 Macbooks for every year of their operation, beginning this week. The result is that it has become the top trending term on Twitter three days in a row, as all people need to do is add the hashtag #moonfruit to their tweet. An algorithm is randomly choosing a winner. There are five days left. By the second day this week it had reached 2.5% of all twitter traffic. But could the stunt backfire as fast as it worked?

It’s not easy to launch a successful WebEx competitor. Most businesses have long since established their “system” for dealing with web meetings, using old standbys like WebEx or GoToMeeting. And those businesses that are willing to venture into the unknown have had plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from, like DimDim, for quite a while. But that isn’t keeping CallWave from launching one of its own, dubbed Fuze Meeting. And while it’s not going to be an easy space to compete in, Fuze Meeting doesn’t disappoint.

As far as startups go, the history of the company is pretty unique. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. CMO Patrick Moran says that the company did this on its own accord, and that its hand wasn’t pushed by any banks or VCs. CallWave will soon change its name to Fuze Box to reflect its new position as a startup.

The beta testing stage can be the cornerstone to the successful development of a new site. And many startups have to conduct and implement beta testing of sites, surveys and analytics internally, which can be an daunting task when you are launching a site. Prefinery lets startups outsource the whole beta invite process, from start to finish. Prefinery is offering 100 TechCrunch readers with beta invites to test the site. You can sign up here. Use the invitation code "TECHCRUNCH" when signing up for the service. Prefinery's ambition is to create a valuable first experience for beta testers and to help startups in collecting and organizing information that will result in a better product. Prefinery will do anything and everything when it comes to the beta testing process. The service will create a splash page for your product, generate an HTML sign-up form with fields and survey questions, create an automatic welcome e-mail/message, take signups into a queue, approve users, and trigger invite e-mail. The service will also generate invite codes and assign quantities.

Three months ago we reported that Ads Had Come to Twitter and it was a pretty big deal - until Twitter promptly said the word "sponsored" was only appearing on the site in error. Now the "sponsored definitions" of certain Twitter "concepts" have appeared on the site again - and they sure look legit this time.

These first ads probably aren't going to bring in enough cash to fuel a micro-app acquisition spree by Twitter, but this is the first clear public indication of one way the company is bringing in revenue. It's funny - the ads have been live for about a week now and no one but a fewsmall, alertblogs has written about them. (Seth Simonds in particular caught a really interesting international angle on the story.) It was big news three months ago and we believe it's still important.

In a new report issued on the first of the month, Forrester Research has asserted the importance of enterprise platforms for governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). Pointing to big name corporate failures in the last decade, they argue that the value proposition for GRC software is clear, and they identified leaders in this growing market.

The open question from the research is whether enterprises will really see the need as being so desperate. Fear may be a great motivator, but GRC platforms have yet to prove that they're a piece of IT that businesses require to succeed.

Okay, it’s not exactly the Camp David Summit that took place in 2000 between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but sometimes the littlest gestures can go a long way.

A couple of days ago, upon hearing that Microsoft had officially joined Twitter, the official Linux account sent out a tweet welcoming them. “ Welcome to Twitter, @Microsoft!,” they said. The tweet sat unanswered for over a day, and it seemed like Microsoft may never answer. But about a few hours ago, they did. “ @Linux thanks, nice to be here,” they replied.

Peachtree Media Advisors has just released their latest report on digital media mergers and acquisitions. We posted their 2008 report back in January, and this is a mid-year 2009 update to that. According to Peachtree, there were 342 digital media transactions in the first half of 2009, which was 12.3% below the number of transactions in the same period for 2008. More notably, the total value of transactions was much less than a year ago. In the first six months of 2009, there were $4.2 billion in digital media transactions - a whopping 61% decrease from the same period in 2008. And that $4.2B figure includes $2.5B from the Live Nation - Ticketmaster merger this year.

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I don’t recall how the YouTube user Pruane2Forever, aka “Sexman”, came on my radar, but I definitely remember a few of his videos from a couple years ago. (Here’s a old favorite — Not Safe For Work.) Basically, it’s this kid who does movie and new media reviews that are (or at least used to be) unintentionally hilarious. These days, he apparently has quite the following on YouTube, as he has over 150 videos that range in popularity from tens of thousands of views to over a million.

One of his most popular ones was a video from 4 months ago in which he calls out rapper 50 Cent. Sexman wonders how 50 still has “street cred” after doing endorsements for Vitamin Water, makeup and dildos (I’m not kidding). “What else is he gonna do? 50 Cent diapers for your little gangsta?,” Sexman wonders at one point. He concludes that 50 Cent is “just a media whore!”

You know that scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole past all those miscellaneous chairs and birds? That same feeling of confused dread is often how users feel when they're attempting to navigate a site that has never been tested. We know that developers pour their souls into their projects. But that's also why it's sometimes difficult (and even personal) to point out the flaws. A developer has to ask, "Do I want it built my way without compromise or do I want users?" If you want to run a business, rather than spending months speculating on what you think users might want, it's sometimes best to simply ask them.

Launchly is a web application review site where developers can upload screen shots and links and ask for user advice and feedback. Released this past week, Launchly appears to be a beefier version of Feedback Army with the additional abilities to track changes and request multiple rounds of recommendations.

Despite our best intentions, it looks like the DEMO v. TechCrunch50 war will continue, even with DEMO under new management.

If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters.

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

When we reported on Kiva.org’sdecision to open up its micro-lending platform to U.S. entrepreneurs, Kiva CEO Premal Shah told us he was concerned about backlash in the community. Shah acknowledged that the decision to open lending to U.S. recipients may draw criticism because it goes against the idea on which Kiva was founded—lending to help development in third world countries where credit options are limited.

It seems that videos making fun of Twitter come out almost weekly – here is my personal favorite. The latest one to arrive is BootyTweet – sad but true I’m affraid :).

“I @reply the finest birdies I know but we never met in real life so I look like a creeper…”

Start Mobile has managed to get 18 separate iPhone applications approved by Apple. So you’ll imagine their surprise when one of them was recently rejected. But you may be even more surprised to find out why.

Apparently, Apple doesn’t like the way one piece of art in the app depicts President Obama. Is it out of line or tasteless? Well, you can determine for yourself, because you’ve undoubtedly seen the art in question before: It’s Shepard Fairey’s famous “HOPE” image of Obama that was everywhere during his Presidential campaign.

One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post, or the one at right. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks.

Before I go defile myself with burgers and beer I wanted to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS for you all. The process was amazingly simple. Using a Windows netbook - it doesn't work under Windows 7 - I simply installed iTunes and ran purplera1n. It took a second to reboot then it rolled through recovery mode, rebooted, and an app called Freeze appeared. Freeze then installed Cydia and all was right with the world.

We're sure by now you've heard about the upcoming extensions that will soon arrive in Google's Chrome browser. Already we've seen a handful of these become available, including AdSweep, a PageRank checker, Cleeki, and, as of yesterday, a new bookmarking extension from Delicious. However, if you've been running the standard Chrome install (or even the public beta), new features like this are just out of reach.

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Being on hold while I wait for a customer service representative is something that I dread. The user experience with almost all companies is terrible. Here’s how I usually sequence my search for help:

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