Updated

--Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital backs YouTube, the video company, Om Malik reports. We reported on YouTube here. If you remember, this is the company ambitiously dubbed the "Flickr of video." Sequoia has invested $5 million, and now values the company at $20 million, Om says. Yes, Web 2.0 funding is indeed in full frenzy.

--Not Silicon Valley related, but here's a blurb by Business 2.0 about the new news aggregation site, Inform, a start-up that is about to launch, and which crawls 1,000 news and information sites, as well as blogs, and then indexes and categorizes it all. We too bumped into Inform CEO Neal Goldman at Web 2.0, and he was obviously excited about it. It already has 55 employees, which astonished us. That is big for being able to remain in stealth, but it is East Coast after all. Goldman is the guy who built Capital IQ, which was a service that carried info about private equity and other financial information, and let Bloomberg and other users access it. It was sold to S&P.

So when you type in "Murdoch" it shows you stories about Rupert Murdoch, but also asks if you really meant some other Murdoch instead. Then for each story, you can search for similar stories by topic, people, places, organizations, and other categories. It also does a good job of grouping together related stories.

--Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of the WordPress blog provider, is worried about the acquisition by Verisign of Weblogs. Calls the process sketchy, shady, and likens it to a cute girl dating the high school bully. He says people should be concerned about what it means for the ping ecosystem.

--Related, Verisign acquires Moreover, the online news aggregation and business information site. Rafat reports on this here and follows here, noting how Verisign apparently beat out Google.

--Squidoo is a start-up that says it wants to make it "easy for anyone, even a newbie, to teach people about topics they care about." Now our minds are really beginning to glaze over at some of this stuff. But Jeff Jarvis seems to like the idea, which is Seth Godin's latest.

--Tagyu, though, seems more compelling. It is yet another one of these Web 2.0 start-ups, also mentioned by Jarvis. When you are writing something, and you want to tag it according to category, so that search engines and other folks can link to it, Tagyu helps avoid you having to worry about thinking up appropriate tag words. It suggests the tags, by comparing the text you've written to tags on other text. Great feature, but probably not a stand-alone, right?

It was created by Adam Kalsey, ex of Pheedo, only last Wednesday, so it has data only since then. Even so, it's very good. It's a clever use of reverse-folksonomy: Use the wisdom of the crowds to make your stuff wiser.

--Oracle buys Innobase, puts squeeze on MySQL.

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