...seem to be the hot area in the VC circles in USA for the moment. Technorati - the blog search engine is in the process of getting fresh VC funds. OM is covering the story - also for getting a better context read one of his older posts predicting that this will become a crowded industry for all sorts of early financiers. Also, worth noting is Olivier's prediction that ultimately all those applications involving RSS feeds, weblogs (or collaborative software type of things) will converge to a common umbrella and Ebay is the likely integrator. And even though both Ebay and those tools have sharing information and trust in common (besides identity) I am a bit skeptical on the whole tool convergence stuff as there are too many basis to cover. Consolidation - yes, as critical mass is an important variable in the social software combination. The industry is too young though.