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A clever graduate student at Cal Tech has come up with a piece of software that reveals the locations of people who make anonymous edits of articles in Wikipedia. The results range from the bizzare to the downright shady. Wired’s Threat Level blog has a list of voter favourites.

Highlights include:

• Someone inside Diebold editing its own Wikipedia entry to remove criticism of its electronic voting machines.
• Someone inside Dow, the chemical company, removing an entire section on environmental and human rights controversies, including a section on the Bhopal disaster.
• Someone inside the BBC changing George W Bush’s middle name from Walker to "wanker".

The idea that self-interested institutions or individuals commonly edit their own entries in Wikipedia isn’t a new one, but it is surprising to find that such conflicts of interest are so widespread. Still, it would be a mistake to assume that they have exposed fundamental flaws in the Wikipedia project.

The main reason not to worry is that the Wikipedia scanner is likely to serve as a deterrent to such conflicts of interest in the future. Diebold, Dow, the BBC and dozens of other companies and organisations are likely to come out of this with egg on their face, something that is likely to make their partisans less likely to meddle with Wikipedia entries.

It used to be called Vanity Publishing - releasing books that don’t sell enough copies to support the sort of print run a publisher needs to make a profit. But thanks to the "long tail" economics of the internet, and aided by Xerox’s latest print-on-demand technologies, there is now a race on to tap a part of the market that most publishers have long stayed clear of.

Canadian serial entrepreneur Bob Young tells me he expects revenues from his website, Lulu.com, to double to $25m this year, before doubling again in 2008, even though he says the average print run for the books he publishes is "less than two" (these are just promises, but they still suggest pretty fast growth for a site only launched in 2004.)

The trick is to apply the eBay model to book publishing. Instead of items to auction, readers submit digital versions of their books (eventually Lulu may introduce a version of eBay’s listing fee to weed out the clutter, Young says, though it’s still too early for that.)

Individual copies are then printed off on demand and dispatched to meet orders. Lulu outsources that part to commercial printers who face the dirty work - and capital investment - of turning these digital promises into reality. The cost of producting a 200-page softback book is around $7, says Young - authors pick their own selling price and split anything above the production costs with Lulu.

The most profitable authors for this sort of business are people who have a built-in audience for their work, and who can bring new buyers to Lulu - professionals who want to publish technical manuals for an internal corporate audience, for instance, or amateur historians producing work for a local historical society.

Plenty could go wrong. Lulu may not generate enough revenue to cover its fixed costs. Service quality may suffer. A forthcoming overhaul of the site’s user interface, intended to create different experiences for authors depending on the type of book they want to publish, may not work out. An attempt to branch out into DVDs and other forms of media may fizzle.

And then there’s Amazon. Last week the online retailer overhauled its own vanity publishing arm, renaming it CreateSpace and scrapping its earlier set-up fees. One of the things Young hopes will give him an edge over the internet juggernaut: a third of his sales are already coming from Europe, and his model should help him to stretch further around the world without facing the heavy fixed infrastructure costs of an Amazon. Taking on Amazon in a part of the online book business, however, does not sound like a job for the faint of heart.

It’s starting to look like the good-old, bad-old days in the tech finance business.

Remember when investment banks stood accused of deliberately under-pricing tech IPOs so they could hand big windfall gains to their best institutional investor friends? It was to counter that sort of thing that Google opted for an auction when it went public three years ago this week.

VMWare’s IPO today smacks of an earlier era. An opening day premium of 76 per cent pushed its stock market value up close to $20bn - and all that in spite of its mid-August launch date and the highly unstable state of the financial markets.

The size of that premium suggests that VMWare’s bankers left $725m on the table by pricing the deal lower than they could have done. That is considerably more, as it happens, than EMC paid when it bought all of VMWare three years ago.

Back during the tech bubble, the bankers said they simply had no control over first-day "pops" like this. If traders wanted to chase prices to irrational levels in pursuit of the instant profits on the latest hot stock, that was no reason to price shares at nonsensical levels.

It’s harder to make that argument today. Demand for VMWare was always going to be heavy: it’s not every day a software company whose revenues have reached an annualised $1bn, growing at nearly 100 per cent, makes its appearance on Wall Street. It would be interesting to know how much more EMC would have made had it opted for a Google-style IPO, rather than leaving it to Citi, JP Morgan and Lehman Brothers to find the "right" level at which to sell the shares.

The leak of a few hundred lines of Facebook’s source code over the weekend caused a bit of a tempest as bloggers questioned whether the breach had compromised security at the popular social networking site. But beyond some red faces at Facebook HQ, the accidental disclosure - apparently the result of a mis-configured Apache server - is unlikely to do lasting harm.

This morning I spoke to Dave Marcus of McAfee Avert Labs, a web security outfit. Here’s what he had to say about the debacle:

If you’re going to have some of your pages exposed though a server error, this is probably the one you’d want. There doesn’t seem to be any user data. This would be step one of an attack, information gathering. There’s good intel to be gained here about Facebook and the infrastructure it’s running on. But this doesn’t give me anything I want  if I’m looking to root the server or make a duplicate application.

As concerns about a dire security breach die down, tech-savvy bloggers have begun poking fun at some of the more colourful comments left by Facebook’s developers in between their bits of source code. Well-commented computer code is rare and to be commended, but in Facebook’s case, its ample annotation includes gems such as "an error can also be here because the
profile photo upload code is crazy " and "We special case (sic) the network not recognized error
here, because affil_retval_msg is retarded."

One commenter on Techcrunch said the annotated source code "looks like it was written by decidedly average college freshmen." Touche.

Motorola had been hoping to make a big splash tomorrow morning with the announcement that five US mobile carriers will launch customised versions of its flagship next generation Razr handset, the MotoRazr2.

But somehow the carriers, led by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, lost the plot and broke the news embargo on Friday spoiling Motorola’s show  - a pity because the struggling US handset maker has a lot riding on the success of the Razr2.

Motorola, which has been losing market share hand-over-fist to rivals including Finland’s Nokia since changing its strategy to focus on margins and profitable growth at the start of the year, is betting that the Razr2 - one of its first 3G-enabled handsets - will help halt the slide.

Tthe flip-phone-style Razr2 is slimmer and, Motorola claims, stronger than its predecessor, and includes several interesting innovations including a touch-sensitive external screen, ‘CrystalTalk’ technology designed to improve voice quality and stereo Bluetooth connectivity for that ‘wire-free music experience.’

Aside from Verizon and Sprint, Alltel, AT&T, T-Mobile USA and US Cellular will launch versions of the Razr2 over the next few weeks mostly priced around $250 with a new service agreement. Each of the carriers has a slightly different take on the new phone with some emphasising its music or video capabilities while others focus on its text messaging and voice features.

No word on how Ed Zander, Motorola’s beleagured CEO, reacted when he was told about the embargo breach, but I can’t imagine it was pretty.

  It wasn’t that long ago that Darl McBride was the most hated man in the tech industry.

As CEO of SCO Group, the legal campaign he launched against IBM in 2003 sent a shiver through the entire open source world. If SCO could prove it owned the key intellectual property in the Unix operating system - and that some of that code had found its way into Linux - then he could have levied royalties on every Linux user.

No wonder Microsoft, smelling a chance to strike back at IBM and Linux, was quick to pay SCO $16.75m for a "licence" to Unix - cash that helped to fund the company’s long legal campaign that was to follow.

Any remaining power that Mr McBride had to terrify the open source world largely evapourated on Friday. A court in SCO’s home state of Utah ruled that the company never owned the copyright in the Unix software. That had remained instead with Novell, which had sold SCO the code some years before. Since Novell (distributor of SuSe Linux) had already expressly waived any claims against IBM in regards to any rights it has in Unix, that pretty much seems to wrap it up - subject, of course, to any appeals from SCO.

There was also a pleasing footnote for all those who saw Microsoft’s payment to SCO as a devious ploy to undermine IBM. The court ruled that SCO would now have to pay the Microosoft licence fee over to Novell - along with another $10m it got from selling a licence to Sun, which had reasons of its own for wanting to undermine Linux. The Groklaw blog, a long-time opponent of McBride, could be forgiven its yodel of celebration this afternoon.

First, the cold. Limelight Networks was meant to be the New Akamai, which made its June IPO one of the most anticipated of the year. Content delivery networks like this, which bring high levels of reliability to routing data across the internet, should be big beneficiaries of the growth of online video. They are also good barometers of the health of the broader online media industry.

If Limelight executives are to be believed, the rise of online video is turning out to be far from smooth. The company today gave a very downbeat revenue forecast for this quarter, in the process triggering a 35 per cent drop in its share price. Jeff Lunsford, chairman and chief executive officer, blamed it on seasonality: apparently demand for Web video drops off as the regular TV seasons end for the summer. He also pointed out that many online media businesses are still searching for a business model. The costs of delivering online video are soaring before the revenues start to come in, leading media companies to demand lower prices from companies like Limelight.

The issues faced by one relatively small network company may not be typical of the whole industry, and the audience lull and the difficultly of making money from an online audience may be temporary. But this is a reminder that the online video business is still in its infancy.

Now the hot. VMWare’s debut on Wall Street, due next week, looks like being the tech event of the year in the IPO market. The company, which makes virtualisation software, has just raised the indicated price range for its shares from $23-25 to $27-29. At the upper level, that would vaue it at nearly $11bn, putting it comfortably among the world’s top ten software companies by market value.

As we wrote a while back, CEO and co-founder Diane Greene is about to step forward as one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful women.

Last night Google slipped out an interesting new experimental feature for Google News in the US. Most news sites have opened up their stories so that readers can comment: on Google News, however, it is only people who are actually written about in the stories who will be able to comment.

From Google’s blog post on the subject:

Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we’ll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it’s the individual’s perspective, rather than part of a journalist’s report.

As John Murrell points out, this will not go down well with the news organisations. Their pact with Google was to let brief takes of their news get picked up by the search engine in return for the traffic this would generate. By starting to build its own user-generated editorial content around someone else’s professional output, Google is bidding to keep eyeballs on its own websites for longer.

This is the direction Google has been heading since its acquisition of YouTube last year, of course. Eric Schmidt has been working hard this year to try to convince the established media industry that Google is a worthy long-term partner, but experiments like this send the clear message that his company is building a rival audience of its own - and it isn’t shy about piggy-backing on somebody else’s content to do it.

Steve Jobs spent about an hour on Tuesday demonstrating some new software that will come bundled with Apple’s shiny new brushed aluminium iMacs. The most impressive, by far, was Apple’s re-vamped video editing software, iMovie.

The editing software allows users to upload home movies form a variety for formats for easy editing. It features a breakthrough method for scrolling through video called "skimming". Simply move your mouse across the thumbnail of a clip and it will play for you, right there, at faster-than-realtime speeds. It’s an innovation that is classic Apple - understated, seamless and practical.

Another impressive change - users of iPhoto, Apple’s photo libary software, and iMovie will now be able to upload their pictures and videos to their .Mac internet accounts. Even more importantly, given .Mac’s relatively low user figures, anyone else with an internet browser will be able to share a .Mac user’s photos and video. It’s Apple’s answer to YouTube and Flickr.

All in all, the new iLife ‘08 software is an interesting step forward for Mr Jobs and Apple - one that shows that, in spite of iPhone’s overwhelming publicity, the Macintosh remains an important part of the Apple ecosystem.

This is feeling more like the late-1990s all the time. Latest case in point: the proposed initial public offering of Accoona, an online electronics retailer that is in the process of building new businesses in search, comparison shopping and what it calls "online-based lead generation," while also venturing out into China.

The key phrase here is "in the process". As this regulatory filing shows, all but 2 per cent of the company’s revenues in the most recent quarter came from selling consumer electronics online - something it does far from profitably, given that its overall gross margin was a paltry 4.5 per cent. Add in other costs, and this was a company that lost $50m on revenues of under $150m last year.

There isn’t even much growth in its core business (on second thoughts that’s probably a good thing, given the margins.) Yes, revenues were up by nearly two thirds in the latest quarter, but virtually all of that came through acquisitions.

So what are investors being asked to pay for? An option on a comparison shopping service, an option on a search engine, an option on China, and an option on a business called ExchangePlace (where consumers sign up to get "offers from as many as four providers of products and services in which they are interested.") One of these options might pay off handsomely, but at this stage that’s a definite "might."

As John Battelle says: "That’s the kind of IPO that got us into trouble last time."