One of the developments flying under the radar on Valentine's Day was Google's somewhat quiet launch of a new Chrome extension to partially fulfill their long-promised punishment of content farms. Google will be relying upon crowd-sourcing. In essence, they've added a potentially abusable "dislike" function to their web-browser. Internet users will be able to block sites, after which Chrome will send the data back to Google who will then use the data to de-rank those sites for the general population.

It will be interesting to see whether this change and future ones by Google will torpedo these recent content farm investors.

While U.S. patent filings remained mostly level from the previous year at 44,855, Japan, China and South Korea saw a dramatic increase, continuing their trends from recent years. China in particular can boast a 56.2% meteoric increase from the previous year to 12,337. 2nd Place Japan reported a 7.9% increase.

The new stats published by the World Intellectual Property Organization underscore Asia's overall rise in economic and technologic power. Other upcoming economic players didn't fare as well. India remained mostly level at 1,109 filings, up ~%15 from 2009 but fairly level with their 2008 performance. Brazil declined  ~11% to 442

The total digital communications-related patents dominated growth with a 17.3% increase probably reflecting a bit of the results from Moore's Law and the high speed of electronics advancement in general. A 17% rate equates to a doubling every ~5 years ...

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LinkedIn filed last Thursday to raise $175 million in an IPO, which if successful will make the company the 1st publicly traded social network. The company does not expect to be profitable in 2011 due to investments in growth.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner talks during an interview during the Reuters Technology Summit in San Francisco, California May 17, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Robert Galbraith

Aiming to merge most of their manufacturing heartland into one united municipality, China plans to combine 9 cities into one.  The sprawling super-city will be 26 times the size of Greater London, twice the size of Wales, house 42 million people and will account for 10% of China's economy.

This enormous urbanization project is only one of several the Chinese government has in the works, some of which are plans to create urban areas with 50 to 100 million people in residence.

This post is a follow-up on Logic-Cool's previous entry about Google's pending downgrade of content farming sites on search rankings. Apparently, Google's potential bad news mattered not at all to investors.

Demand Media employs an army of low-paid freelance writers and filmmakers to upload roughly a million articles of content per month to take advantage of search engine rankings. Their IPO was expected to bring in $140 million. Instead, they pulled in a whopping $151 million. 

They keep raking in big money, so it looks like content farms are here to stay. Please note, the links to Demand Media above are not affiliate links. They're only posted to showcase the company's ongoing aggressive campaign to fill the Internet with their material.

Google recently declared war on content farms, and many are screaming that the sky is falling...or at least starting to crumble.

So, what's a "Content Farm"? Many would say a geek news site like Logic-Cool is a content farm, as well as news aggregators such as The Drudge Report or The Huffington Post. The term usually applies though to websites that specialize in creating text for the sake of text.

Content farms can be big business. HowStuffWorks.com (bought by Discovery for $250 million) and About.com (bought by the New York Times Company for $410 million) are both content farms. They receive hundreds of millions of visitors a year, and even Google itself reportedly bid on About.com. Yahoo acquired AssociatedContent for $90 million.

More generically, you see content farm businesses often on Craigslist and other job sites advertising for writers willing to compose articles for a ...

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Here's one of the quirkier stories of the Internet age, showcasing the sheer power of social networking. Rapper and former drug dealer 50 Cent currently has over 3.8 million followers on Twitter. He also owns a 12.9% share of H&H Imports, the company responsible for releasing his new line of headphones.  Last year, the company operated at a loss of 3.3 million with only $198,000 in cash remaining.

After plugging his company on Twitter, insinuating "big money" for those who bought stock, 9.24 million shares were traded in the 2 days following, causing their value to soar. This netted 50 Cent a profit of $10 million...if he sells his shares.

Perhaps realizing his actions might precipitate an SEC investigation or potential lawsuits, 50 Cent deleted his original Twitter posts and then posted a disclaimer of financial risk for would-be Twitter investors.

Now here's a fascinating website.   The concept is very simple.   If you need investment money for a project (and I mean any project whatsoever), simply pitch your idea and the amount of money you need.   Then, the website simply lets random people decide if they want to back you. If you can get 100% of the money you request, then the money is yours free and clear.  No one will take a stake in your business.

It may sound like I'm pitching Kickstarter.com, but I'm not.  I was researching to find funding for one of my own projects and I came across it.   The website has been featured a few times in New York Times and Wired.com as one of the most innovative ways to raise money for your business.

Check it out if curious:

http://www.kickstarter.com