Wednesday’s win for Barack Obama gave news publishers a lot to gain from, as we learned that newspapers containing his win against McCain were going for $100 on eBay. The following list is a gather of the top bids this morning:

• $122.50 for the New York Times
• $100.00 for the Chicago Tribune
• $51.00 for the Chicago Sun-Times
• $51.00 for the Los Angeles Times
• $41.00 for the New York Post
• $28.76 for the Chicago Daily Herald
• $26.00 for the Chicago Northwest Herald
• $16.50 for the Rockford Register Star (IL)
• $14.49 for the New York Daily News
• $12.50 for USA Today
• $9.49 for the Indianapolis Star

We also learned that while most of these bidders are probably new to eBay, and as a result some of the bids seem off the charts. The matter of fact is that the newspapers can be bought for cheaper. The image above from New York Times Obama ‘1st edition’ can be bought for as low as $49.99 on eBay’s ‘Buy it Now’.

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There are 1 billion impoverished people in the world. There are only 8 causes in this list. It will take you 2 minutes to read it, and 1 minute to share one of the links with your friends. Why wouldn’t you act now and make a dent in the poverty problem?

[This post is part of Blog Action Day: Mashable proudly supports bloggers, readers and social media users taking action to eradicate poverty worldwide.]

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, the Gates Foundation’s many aims include the elimination of poverty.

Why Promote It? Because you’d like to support healthcare in developing countries and equal opportunities for people in the United States.

Brooks World Poverty Institute - A section of the University of Manchester, the Brooks World Poverty Institute is a research institute dedicated to studying poverty, inequality and growth. The site has a lot of information about the actual program, but they also publish their findings here as well as maintain a blog for discussions.

Why Promote It? Because you know we can’t fix the poverty issue until we understand it.

Chronic Poverty Research Centre - The Chronic Poverty Research Centre is a coalition of universities, research institutes and non-governmental organizations that are trying to educate people on the subject of chronic poverty while also trying to halve the estimated one billion impoverished people in the world by 2015.

Why Promote It? Because you want to stimulate debate about the poverty issue at both national and international levels.

Global Call to Action Against Poverty - GCAP is a coalition of trade unions, community groups, faith groups, youth organizations and non-governmental organizations that aim to hold politicians to their promises regarding poverty.

Why Promote It? Because you want to ensure world leaders meet their promises to end global poverty and inequality.

Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign - The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is built around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which establishes the rights of every human being to necessities like food, housing, communication and a job.

Why Promote It? Because you believe everyone has the right to housing, health care, a living wage and an education.

RobinHood.org - The Robin Hood Foundation was founded in 1988 to help the poverty stricken residents of New York City. It is now considered a model for what organizations can do in other cities and has served as the inspiration for groups such as the Tipping Point Community in San Francisco.

Why Promote It? Because you want to fight poverty in New York, and inspire other US cities to do the same.

STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) - STEPS is a research group studying the interactions between social, technological and environmental factors that lead to poverty, and how we need to get them all working together to solve the problem.

Why Promote It? Because you believe that environmental sustainability is the route to better livelihoods and health for those in poverty.

The ONE Campaign - ONE was formed by eleven non-profit organizations to raise awareness of poverty in the world. They are currently carrying out the “ONE Vote ‘08″ campaign to engage presidential candidates with the issues of the world’s poor. This campaign is co-chaired by former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Bill Frist (R-TN).

Why Promote It? Because you’d like to join more than 2 million people dedicated to bringing education to young people in Africa, supplying life-saving medication against AIDs and preventing deaths from malaria, measles and malnutrition.

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And that’s not it, eBay plans to expand its business with major deals that involve a $380 million acquisition of Denmark based DBA and BillMeLater for $945 million; $820 million of which will be paid in cash. The current measures include an immediate cut on temporary staff owing to the fall in share prices that have taken record plunge dropping by a mammoth 40% to $17.40 a share. Previously the stocks hit the record high $40.73 a share.

BillMeLater is an alternative payment firm just like PayPal; enabling customers to make purchases across 1,000 sites without the need to have a credit card. DBA on the other hand is the leading classified site in Denmark owned presently by Blue Alvis; a free newspaper with a weekly circulation of 500,000. John Donahoe, eBay Inc.’s president and CEO stated:

We are making aggressive moves to strengthen our leadership positions in e-commerce and payments to competitively position our company for long-term growth.

Aggressive indeed, but one feels sorry that the investment eBay plans at making for growth steps upon employee reduction.

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The second acquisition is Denmark’s leading online classifieds site dba.dk, as well as and vehicles site bilbasen.dk for approximately $390 million in cash.

Bill Me Later, as explained by eBay’s president and CEO John Donahoe, is complementary to PayPal. “Together, PayPal and Bill Me Later will make online payments safer, easier and more convenient than ever,” he says. DBA, on the other hand, is another corner of the world conquered as far as classifieds go. “We are the global leader in classifieds with top positions in Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, and sites in more than 1,000 cities across 20 countries. The acquisition of dba.dk and bilbasen.dk gives us technology and expertise we can leverage across our classifieds portfolio to create better customer experiences,” said Donahoe.

Despite obviously not being short with money, eBay will cut its workforce by approx. 10 percent which translates to about 1,000 employees and several hundred temporary workers. As they say, this reduction will “simplify and streamline eBay’s organization, improve the company’s cost structure and strengthen the overall competitiveness of the company’s existing businesses.” I bet it’s great consolation to the folks that are about to be laid off.

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The Boyd Company recently regards Omaha as one of the most affordable US cities (with annual operating expense of $12.9) to operate a data center and in order to compete with its neighbour New York City that costs double charges, Nebraska has been developing incentive programs to attract investors and companies. DataCenter Knowledge is reporting that Yahoo also applied for tax incentive under Nebraska Super Advantage program, which requires:

Nebraska Super Advantage program, which requires a minimum investment of $100 million and the creation of at least 50 high-salary jobs paying a minimum average salary of $68,700.

Yahoo should have selected Omaha because of its incentive programs and its corporate residents that includes eBay’s PayPal and HP unit in Omaha’s periphery city, La Vista. We all know that the past few months were not in the favour of Yahoo at all, the company was experiencing sudden execs exodus, its managerial block was facing major swifts and above all it experienced a low record ($17.75) stock closing few days ago. In order to stabilize its company and boost its efficiency, it recently hired Bain consultants to shave off few employees. Yahoo new data center in La Vista, Nebraska reveals that it is trying best to keep up with the current situation and re-gain a stable market place by enhancing its operations.

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Editor’s note: For up-to-the  minute information, just click through on the name of the search engine.

If Web 1.0 was about linking information then Web 2.0 is really about linking people as pointed out by Mills Davis from Project10. The social network phenomenon is creating an unprecedented and growing amount of buzz and is already channeling significant amounts of traffic around. IceRocket Blog Trends reports about 400 posts a day referring to the phrase “social network”. Nielsen BuzzMetrics Blogpulse shows an increase of 200% in 6 months from 0.015% blog share of voice in March 2007 to over 0.045% in September 2007.

After years of stagnating online white pages, a myriad of people search engines have emerged and Facebook joined the party last week by allowing its profile pages to be found. Never before was personal information so readily available. Looking for an ex, a long time friend or classmate? Checking out a potential hire? Planning a family reunion? Anyone owe you money? People search engines let you find information about other people from crawling, indexing, aggregating, consolidating and normalizing content from Web sites, social network affiliations, photos, blogs, news, public records and other user generated footprints. People search engines are also surfacing privacy issues, encouraging some to manage their online reputation like consumer brands should.

The social search space is growing broader, including submission and bookmark sharing, implicit and explicit voting, tagging and cloud navigation, commenting, and now an emerging “people search” category. Social search has become social networks’ underlying glue. Search is the Internet OS!

The people search space is getting crowded in a world where technology categories have often historically had just enough room for 2 leaders and a rotating third player. Mashable reviews about 40 social search engines and AltSearchEngines now maintains a Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list on a monthly basis.

Buzz monitoring picks up on noise long before Comscore’s panels can register statistically significant traffic levels. Online buzz is an interesting directional proxy for online sentiment and future success even though some started earlier and are better at generating buzz.

Spock; claims to be the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people with over 100 million people already indexed. In addition to scouring social networks, Spock does a nice job at differentiating its feature set by letting users vote. And the Spock Power score determines how much influence you have each time you vote or add a tag, image, link, or relationship. Complimentary tour below.

Wink; Technologies is a People Search Engine that makes it easier to find people across the Web. Wink claims the largest index by providing search of over 200 Million profiles across social networks and on-line communities. Wink lets you add friends, monitor Web presence activity and includes a messaging platform taking it closer to some social networks. Wink recently expanded the sites it queries to include some people search sources, such as The Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia.

Ziki; is a next generation search engine focused on people, powered by people. Ziki has developed its own algorithm to collect and organize information relative to a person. The platform also includes several community features such as networks, recent activity updates, similar profiles and views reporting.

PeekYou; has been in stealth mode since October 2006 and officially launched in beta this past July. PeekYou’s differentiation claims revolve around i) de-duping numerous identities into one consolidated snapshot profile and ii) platform openness.

ZoomInfo; contains profiles on more than 36 million people, including biography, employment history, Web references and other Web links such as blogs. Founded in 2001, ZoomInfo is a “relative” industry veteran, more focused on the business world, closer to LinkedIn-type content. The company also gives access to executive profiles requiring a paid subscription.

pipl; positions itself as The most comprehensive people search on the web. pipl aggregates more than social networks, also including public record information from PeopleData such as addresses, birthdays, passenger records from ellisislandrecord and more. Unlike a typical search-engine, Pipl is designed to retrieve information from the deep, sometimes referred to as “invisible” Web, estimated at 500 times that of the surface Web.

Ex.plode.us; is an easy way to find friends and those with common interests, no matter what social network or service they use. You can search for names or interests. Not unlike other engines, the company’s vision is to build an application that acts like the glue between social networks, breaking down silos and opening up the web using open standards. In addition to crawling and aggregating social networks, ex.plode.us lets you add friends and comments on friends’ profiles.

Rapleaf; founded in 2006, is positioning itself a bit differently. Use Rapleaf to build, promote, and manage your online reputation. Rapleaf’s application is a twist on eBay’s seller ratings and emerging B2B brand monitoring plays like Andiamo Systems, Converseon and BuzzLogics. The Rapleaf score is calculated using data from ratings given about a person and other online information such as social networks. Members can also export their reputation score widget to blogs and other networks. As pointed out by Stefanie Olsen from Cnet, Rapleaf has no visible link to TrustFuse, but TrustFuse’s privacy policy mentions that the company is a wholly owned subsidiary of TrustFuse. And TrustFuse sells data to marketers so they can better target customers.

Naymz; not unlike Rapleaf, is positioning itself as the place to maximize your business and job opportunities by promoting your good name and reputation. A little like LinkedIN, Naymz has developed a confidence level index. This reputation index is calculated from a number of variables, including profile completeness. Naymz goes one step further and lets users subscribe to someone else’s recent Web activity such as blog posts and profile updates.

WikiYou; “A Wikipedia for people” according to TechCrunch, is the unauthorized biography of every person on earth. WikiYou also aggregates friends and let’s you discuss, comment on someones profile and add videos.

As for traffic, the space is in its infancy and the jury still out. ZoomInfo is way ahead with about 1.3 million unique visitors a month. Most everybody else remains below 100K visitors according to Compete and QuantCast. This said, all are significantly increasing usage traction and visitors are giving them a trial, generating around 5 pages per visit.

People search engines face a number of challenges from directing comprehensive crawls, to de-duping content, extracting meaningful entities and even more fundamentally differentiating value propositions and building rational business models. What’s next? Are people search engines viable as standalone destinations or will they be rolled up as a feature by better integrated social networks. And general purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo! will eventually better integrate people results leveraging their respective “OneBox” and other vertical intercepts. Critical success factors are actually very much in line with traditional algorithmic search: relevance, comprehensiveness, speed, ease of use and trust. The people search engine industry is still in its infancy and if Web 2.0 is about linking people, Web 3.0 could very well be about connecting and making semantic sense of people’s knowledge.

eBay on Wednesday announced that it has dropped seller fees in an attempt to save you some money and increase the number of listings on each page.

According to the company, sellers will now be levied a flat 35 cent listing fee and will base fees on the successful sale of items instead of the fact that you’re simply listing them.  Of course, that drop in rates will only impact those trying the company’s Buy It Now feature.

Although I commend eBay for trying to increase the number of listings on the site and trying to make customers happier with the service, I see so many glaring problems with the company that I don’t even know where to start.

According to eBay’s second quarter numbers, profits are up 50 percent to $376 million, but its listings are down once again by 6 percent.  And in a protest of eBay’s ridiculous idea of charging more to increase profits and (hopefully) listings, the company witnessed a 13 percent decline in listings — a figure that is simply unacceptable for a site of this magnitude.

But it’s as if all that doesn’t matter.  As I just noted, profits are up and things have been going relatively well for eBay when all things are considered.  Let’s not forget that part of those profits can be attributed to other sectors in the company’s business like PayPal and Skype, and that as listings continue to decline, it can only enjoy a profit for so long.

Suffice it to say that eBay has lost its way and is only successful today because no other online auction site has been able to offer the kind of community and marketing eBay has.

eBay was originally created to be an auction site; nothing more, nothing less.  But today, the site lets you buy products outright through its Buy It Now feature and has significantly reduced the number of real auctions on the site.  A quick glance at the company’s main page will tell you everything you need to know about today’s eBay: it’s just as much a retail store as it is an auction site.

But that’s unacceptable.  eBay is an auction site and the only reason it was ever successful in the first place.  Why would it want to abandon its roots in favor of competition with Amazon and other online retailers?  It doesn’t make sense.

eBay’s problems go far beyond retail.  The company’s page hasn’t been updated in years and it’s still the same, ugly, Web 1.0 website that makes it too difficult to find anything in a reasonable amount of time.

And that’s why I think some companies could jump on the auction bandwagon and supplant eBay in that space.  Right now, eBay has few competitors and none that can compete to the same magnitude.  But that doesn’t mean that eBay is unbeatable.  Quite the contrary, eBay is vulnerable.

All it will really take is a site that’s well-designed and has some strong financial backing with a focus on online auctions to knock eBay off its pedestal.  eBay is too anti-customer and too focused on everything other than its auctions to truly stand up to a real online auction competitor.  Granted, a slew of companies have tried and failed, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.  In fact, I’m willing to bet that the majority of eBay users would be more than happy to move to an alternative if that meant getting away from eBay’s draconian policies and downright ludicrous money-making schemes.

eBay is not the impenetrable force it once was.  It may still enjoy profits and sit atop the online auction hill, but it’s not going to last forever if it doesn’t start adapting and changing its business model to a strategy that adequately reflects its original vision: Online auctions.  And for goodness sake, update the site — it’s poorly-designed and much too old.

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PayPal an online payment company that has grown upon the success of eBay has finally decided to walk a different path as reported by Cnet.

The company has decided to juice out more payments from its Merchant services rather than from eBay’s sellers and buyers. The name, Merchant services is that given to the payment software provided by PayPal to other companies like, Starbucks, etc for their online payments. That is a pretty huge leap for a company that was acquired by eBay about six years back.

PayPal President, Scott Thompson said at RBC’s Capital Markets Conference that the change had come in time and not earlier as PayPal already faced serious competition form Google Checkout and even Amazon.com (which is pretty new at this). He added:

We’ve had organic growth with eBay, but as merchants migrated off the eBay platform (by building their own sites), they’ve brought us with them.

Now this is underlined by PayPal’s current success; which has been more than impressive. PayPal serves around 33% of the top 100 e-commerce sites in the US alone and had generated total revenue of $602 million in its second quarter, with a total payment volume growing by 35% or $14 billion in cash.

Those numbers were for the US alone; Thompson sounded confident about the international growth as well and estimated the international business to exceed that of the US. He stated:

By the back half of 2009, the international business will exceed our North American business.

The company has been stepping up its efforts for mobile but there hasn’t been much success in the US. Though the company has revised its strategy and shifted it towards underdeveloped markets like China and Russia where the need for such a service is direly needed. Let’s just hope that this break away proves more successful for PayPal.

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Alibaba, a Chinese based B2B portal, has broken its silence on the on going crisis in which Yahoo finds itself (see our complete coverage of the Yahoo drama). Alibaba group CEO Jack has issued a statement that no matter what happened to its major shareholder Yahoo, the company would maintain its independence.

While speaking at a press conference at the Second APEC Business Advisory Council SME Summit in Alibaba’s home city of Hangzhou Ma said:

As to the sale [of Yahoo], when this happened, I told the team, no matter what happens we will do things our own way. We are the people who make the decision. It will not change our vision. It will not change our independent management of the company.

Yahoo purchased 40% stakes in Alibaba in August 2005, in exchange for a cash transaction of $1 billion and handing over of Yahoo’s China unit to Alibaba. Yahoo still control those stakes, in addition to the 10% listed stocks. Alibaba has rapidly become one of the top Internet companies of Asia ever since its IPO in November 2007.

Alibaba Group also maintains Taobao.com, a consumer auction site, which competes with eBay in China. Ma has confirmed that Taobao will begin charging fees starting from October this year. The site which now controls 70% of the consumer-consumer e-commerce market charged no fees during its initial five years of operations. This is one reason that enabled the site to wipe out eBay’s dominance of the said market segment in China.

China has recently seen a surge in Internet economy and has taken over U.S. to become the largest Internet population on the planet. Given the growth trends in the Chinese markets, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba alone would turn out to be quiet significant in case the American Internet giant manages to remain independent.

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The memo was kind enough to provide some of the new vice presidential roster of MySpace profile addresses for us. The rest we had to hunt down, and we present them all to you (so next time you have a MySpace question, you’ll have someone aside from Tom to turn to!).

Angela Courtin (www.myspace.com/acourtin) is MySpace’s new SVP of Marketing, Entertainment and Content.  This is a new position, and in it Angela will be attempting to raise the profile for entertainment content events and promotions. Angela came from MTV, where she did marketing for their West coast ventures.

Of all the new hires, she hands down has the most customized profile page (albeit set as private), and lists her mood as “bouncy.”

Tish Whitcraft (www.myspace.com/tishwhitcraft) is the brand spankin’ new Senior Vice President of Customer Care. Her goal will be to build a more scalable globabl customer support system than Tom’s inbox and generally increasing satisfaction levels site-wide. She comes from Yahoo as well, but most recently served as a VP at VoIP startup “ooma.”

Her latest blog post shows that she’s a proud (if only recently recently returned) Californian (”it should be its own country!”) who lists her mood as “electric.” She’s a proud parent, a Libra, and enjoys friends, real estate and golf.

Jason Oberfest (www.myspace.com/joberfest) is the new VP of Business Development, a position that will enlist his services in finding new partners and developing new projects for MySpace, all of course with the goal of increasing the bottom line. This will encompas commercial programs offered to developers under the Platform and Data Availability APIs. Jason comes from the LA Times.

This guy may have been born in Philly, but quickly graduated to the position of Fresh Prince of Martha’s Vineyard, where he grew up. According to his written profile, this is where he acquired his love of surfing, Charlie Rose and Radiohead.

Jason is “stoked.”

Abe Thomas (www.myspace.com/abethomas08) serves is the fresh veep over Online Marketing, a broad title intended to encompass “developing an overall strategy for new customer acquisition.” Abe was a leader at eBay and PayPal, and was responsible for eBay’s PAid and Natural Search program as well as eBay’s India Internet Marketing program.

Not only is Abe a new employee to MySpace, but apparently a new user. He recieved is first “WELCOME TO MYSPACE” comment earlier this month from his buddy Jeff (a 36 year old newlywed from Los Angelos). While originally born in the Phillipines, he likes to consider the Bay area his home now, and spends much of his time “chasing his kids.”

He’s feeling “anxious.” (Relax, Abe! You’re hired!).

Manu Thapar (www.myspace.com/manuthapar) joins MySpace as the SVP of Engineering. He’s the guy who will be running the company’s infrastructure, security and “high priority projects.” He’ll be using his operations experience from Yahoo (where he oversaw more than 250 engineers) to create offshore development teams for MySpace.

A serious job for what appears to be a mysterious and serious man. His profile is marked “private,” and all we know about him is that he’s feeling “adventurous.”

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