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Yahoo’s popular photo-sharing site Flickr will release on Monday the two new geography-related features we reported on a month ago: Flickr Places and a new world map.

While we have not yet had the opportunity to test these new releases, the Places feature appears to be the most substantial of the two. Flickr has chosen 100,000 locations across the globe (such as cities, states, countries, and regions) and created pages to display photos taken at them. So, for example, if you want to check out photos of Moscow, you can visit a Places page for that city and see a collection of photos from there. These pages will also show other local information such as maps, weather, and current times.

Flickr already has an interactive map for discovering geo-tagged photos taken at various locations around the world. Map improvements will largely be to the user interface; “hot tags” will now appear instead of simple, pink dots and a stream of photos called a “photo ribbon” will appear when you click on one of these hot tags. It appears as though photos will be linked to the map using traditional geo-tragging methods (there are no signs yet that Yahoo has integrated FireEagle with this mapping feature in any way).

These two improvements will be available to all Flickr users and in eight languages.

We recently reported that Flickr had passed the two billion stored photos mark.

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The speculation over Amazon’s new ebook gadget, called the Kindle, ends on Monday afternoon during a special Amazon press conference in New York. Newsweek’s Steven Levy claims to have had the device for weeks and wrote a glowing seven page cover story review of the Kindle this weekend. He finds no fault with the device.

The Kindle isn’t the most elegant looking gadget ever created (in fact it looks like it came out of the 70’s), but it packs an impressive list of features and could finally bring ebooks mainstream. That’s something Sony couldn’t accomplish with its much more elegant Sony Reader.

The reason Sony failed? Perhaps because their device requires syncing with a computer to download content. That’s the Kindle’s killer feature - cellular and (probably) wireless internet access that will let users download content directly to the device from the Internet. And the cellular connectivity, which generally costs $60 or more per month, will be included with the device for free says a source close to the company.

Kindle users will also be able to browse the web, and Amazon is offering access to some blogs for a monthly subscription fee (some bloggers are wondering why Amazon is charging for this).

The Kindle will cost $100 more than the $300 it takes to get a Sony Reader. It uses the same screen technology - E Ink - as the Sony Reader. that means the display will be viewable in full sunlight and uses very little power.

Amazon isn’t supporting the industry’s open standard around eBooks. Instead they are using their own proprietary format from Mobipocket, a company they acquired in 2005.

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Yahoo has signed 17 new newspapers to its newspaper partnership grouping, taking the total number of partners to approx 555 since launching in November 2006.

New partners include The Columbus Dispatch and 16 regional newspapers owned by The New York Times Company, but as the Wall Street Journal points out, not the NY Times itself.

The partnerships consist of three main services; syndication of local content on Yahoo, advertising powered by Yahoo on paper websites, and perhaps the biggest selling point: wholesale access for newspapers to list job ads on HotJobs. The last point provides a value-ad for newspapers when selling job listings as delivers the ability to sell for both their own print publications and online at a time where job advertising in moving more and more online only.

Google has this year started to cut its own syndication deals, but still doesn’t come close to the range and scope of Yahoo’s partner base.

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Facebook is said to have offered $85 million to acquire Zhanzuo.com, a Chinese social networking site with seven million users.

According to The Times, Jack Zhang, Zhanzuo’s chief executive, and Mark Zuckerberg have been discussing the deal but it has not been accepted yet, with a spokesperson saying that the result of the talks will be disclosed towards the end of the month.

The acquisition would give Facebook a base from which it can tap into the growth in what will soon be the worlds largest online marketplace by user numbers.

Zhanzuo ranks in the Top 250 sites in China according to Alexa, but strangely both Alexa and Compete show a big drop in traffic for the site over July and August. Although Alexa may not be the most accurate metrics source, the massive drop for the site at once might suggest issues with governmental blocking; the site primarily operates on a .com domain as opposed to a .cn (.com’s are more regularly blocked or redirected), and there is no other logical explanation for the massive and immediate drop in traffic. I’d suspect that the site may find it has more problems in the future should it end up owned by Facebook.

Zhanzuo was funded by Sequoia China and Morningside Capital.

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We covered Startup Weekend Atlanta a week ago. Now the team has rolled in to San Francisco for a multi-day event with the single goal of building a new startup, from idea to launch.

The new company will be called helphookup, a site to connect people who want to volunteer their time to good causes with the people who need help. Follow their progress here.

The group says 132 people showed up to co-found the startup.

If you’re at the event, please tell us how it’s going. Any fights yet? Squabbles over equity? When will the site launch? Tell us all the drama.

Update: The first comment below says these events are a waste of time from a ROI perspective. I disagree. Yes, it’s unlikely any of these startups will be a commercial success, but the opportunity to spend time with people who share your interests, make new friends, etc., is well worth the time. See my thoughts here and comments to that post by participants.

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The hype around widgetizing the web may have died down a bit, but PollDaddy - a company obviously focused on polls - will be pushing that widgetizing process further along with its version 2.0 release today.

PollDaddy 2.0 will mark the company’s foray into providing a fuller suite of data-collecting widgets. Starting today, PollDaddy will distribute a new online survey tool and, within a month, the company will provide a more generic form generator that will be capable of making things like contact forms. Around the same time, PollDaddy will release a quiz generator as well. All of these new embeddable tools will build upon the success of the company’s ubiquitous poll widget, which has attracted 70,000 users and is viewed across the web 70 million times per month. The most active poll ever deployed was for R.Kelly’s MySpace page; it garnered 1.2 million responses.

As part of this second version, PollDaddy will also provide better reporting, tracking, fraud detection, and voter location features. While the current services will remain free, some of these new features will cost a premium of $20/month. PollDaddy is also revamping its code base, moving over to Amazon S3 to handle increased traffic, and looking to provide Open Social integration by mid-December.

Aside from adding new functionality, co-founder David Lenehan says that PollDaddy will increasingly focus on building widgets that integrate seamlessly into websites and don’t actually look like widgets. This integration, he says, will signify “a real coming of age for widgets.”

PollDaddy is a two-man, self-funded operation based in Ireland that has been providing widgets for about a year now. The company looks to close its first round of financing in the next six months.

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A thread on Digg relating to a new dinosaur discovery in Africa is raising eyebrows and not for the right reason.

The thread on the “Nigersaurus” (here) contains comments such as “I wonder what made this thing extinct? AIDS?.” Digg’s comment system has buried some of the comments from immediate view, but reading them simply requires one click. Ethan Kaplan asks whether Digg has now become racist jokes and bad science and goes on to make that point “they banned the key for decrypting HDDVD but let this shit on here? Bad form.”

Certainly most people will find the more extreme comments offensive, but with the picture (above right) I can’t help but think that its worth at least some derision, although without the racism chucked in. Have the Digg commenter’s gone too far and should Digg censor the thread? or is this political correctness gone mad and the thread should be left as is? Let us know what you think.

(image credit: news.com.au)

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