Just a quick shout out to all of the Spark clients who made the list of the 250 finalists for CNET’s Webware 100 award.

Spark client finalists made it into six of the 10 categories. Finalists include: FON (Communication), Farecast (Productivity), Last.Fm (Media), Netvibes (Browsing) TellMe (Mobile), Stardoll (Entertainment), and Yahoo Bix (Entertainment). And get this – five of them are Index Ventures portfolio companies (FON, Netvibes, Last.fm, Tellme and Stardoll)!

These companies were selected out of more than 2000 Web service companies submitted to the CNET editors. The rest is up to y’all, as you choose the 100 finalists.

To cast your vote for your favorite, click on the link below. Remember, you can vote for one in each category!

Farecast
FON
Last.fm
Netvibes
Stardoll
Yahoo Bix

Alicia

It struck me last night that our online identities are becoming bigger and larger than our real life identities because others are tagging us. I was cruising Technorati to find all the social media/videos/blogs on Tessa, The Bachelor contestant (she’s friends with one of our employees In one episode her best friend was literally on for no more than 2 minutes of airtime and hundreds of people from her high school jumped on the blogs etc to write about what a Witch she was. One post said (paraphrasing) “I’m so happy to know that when her kids grow up they’ll search her name and read all these posts about how horrible their mother is.” (!) Her online identity in that moment took over her real world ID!

This is happening to everyone though, even me. I was at the MOO party last week and a business acquaintance snapped a butt ugly pic of me and voila – there it was on Flickr the next day tagged donnasokolsky. All I could think was “there are ugly pictures of me online, and I have no control over this. They are there forever.” The accumulation of everything about us on sites like Technorati ( a Spark client) is happening because tagging is superseding search as sites adapt to the changes on the Internet. Google is also revamping similarly.

Dave Sifry is talking about how the internet is evolving in a way that unanimous categories are popping up. No matter what country, age or lifestyle, we all seem to be tagging objects the same exact way – even though there are more than 250MM tagged items on the Internet now! I think this signifies something bigger is happening…pull up a lawn chair and pop some popcorn… it’s going to be fascinating to watch.

Donna

Recently at the Web 2.0 Expo, Sparkpr founder Donna Sokolsky participated in a panel discussion on the hotly debated topic of “PR 2.0, Dead as a Doornail or Still Alive?”

Attendance was OK; it kind of felt like the panel was preaching to the choir since the room was largely packed with marketing types. However, during the Q&A it became clear that quite a few start-up executives made it to the session to learn and ask genuine questions on how to best promote their companies in this changing world of new media.

Donna’s main premise is that the web is forcing everything to evolve, and PR is not exempt. Transparency and understanding who your audience is and new ways they can be reached is key.

See a few choice video snippets from the panel. Thanks to Jeremy Pepper, PR blogger extraordinaire, for inviting Donna to the panel!