I am a fan of online storage services, to the extent that I do follow things.  Omnidrive is one of those services that I profiled briefly more than a year ago, and at the time I really liked it.  In fact, at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2006, Venturebeat annointed Omnidrive winner of the Launchpad portion of the conference.

Well, it looks like Omnidrive has hit the deadpool.  

Both Omnidrive *and* the blog for Nik Cubrilovic now forward to a page called Financial Amnesty, which I’m not linking to, because its on the dodgy side of sketchy.

Now, I have no idea if Nik and Omnidrive have been hacked, and perhaps that’s why there’s a redirect going to this site, but given how quiet Omnidrive has been in the recent past, and other whispers of its impeding demise, if this is the truth … well, it doesn’t appear to be any surprise.

What’s that?  New rumours of Digg being sold?  Pardon my giant yawn.

Jeez, over the course of the year there’s been about 9-12 different times that I read Digg was going that direction.  Whoops — that’s probably only three — but it *felt* like a dozen times.  Yes, its going to make a good fit for someone.  Or at least that’s the current thinking.  Rather, unless its new overlords don’t muck up the geeky left-minded gen-x’er consumerist universe that it panders to.  I mean, its possible that they might, but if they’ve got more than a lentil-for-a-brain, they wouldn’t.

Oh, and also a given: the new Digg overlords, whomever they might be, will also be paying by the goldbrick in truckloads — and that’s saying something, as the price of gold (like the Canadian dollar) has gone way up as of late.  Yes, yes, Kevin Rose and Jay whas-is-name will be as rich as kings, congratulations and all that.

No, I think there are more interesting and un-predictable issues when Digg gets scooped up, such as:

• If it gets snapped up by some mainstream media giant with deep pockets, how might it get integrated into current properties, if it all?
• Will Digg lose any of its geeky cachet-cred once it — literally — sells out, and furthermore, will it even matter?
• Would the parent company, if its a media company, stealthily start pushing its own stories — and affiliated company’s stories — to the top?
• Could the top Diggers find themselves actual employment by the parent company — *finally*?

I’m sure there are other interesting questions that no one’s even thought of.  But come on, everyone, Digg will be sold at some point.  The question is to whom and for how many sacks of gold.

I can’t decide if this is brilliant, or merely the sign of how far over the shark “Web2.0″ has gone.  What I’m talking about is a deck of cards, a la Iraq’s Most Wanted, except that these cards feature Web2.0 companies, such as Digg, Odeo, Facebook and Flickr.  The 52 card actually-usable-card-deck was created by a bunch of consultants at trommsdorff + drüner, a German marketing company.

And while it would be easy to pan this as mere tchotchke’s of a technology trend, it looks like there might be real substance behind the cards.  Each card identifies a particular web2.0 company detailing things such as what kind of revenue streams it has, how it “empowers” users (which is funny as much as it is arguable, since some assert that users are in fact, being “used”), and tries to sum up the company in terms of its business sustainability.

Without having a look at some of the actual cards, its hard to know what they actually look like, feel, (or, for those interested, play with), and more importantly comment on the kind of information on these cards.  For those who want to be brought up to speed with Web2.0 players, however, I can see how it might be useful — in a flash-card kind of way, if you, for example, happen to be the kind of person who finds that kind of tool useful.

And at 7,99 Euro (+ shipping),  it seems like a pretty reasonably priced tool.