The TechCrunch 40 - Part 1

TechCrunch is to technology what the Drudge Report is to politics... one of the most influential news rags that can make and break a man, a company or a country.

The TechCrunch40 is a list of top 40 start-ups that are making waves across the world. TC recently hosted the TC40 conference and featured these start-ups.

Here are some of the relevant start-ups you will want to follow and even try out if you part of the blog revolution.

Multimedia
Viewdle - Imagine if you could hone the google links around all of your blog assets to make sure that users would be even more inclined to click on them. For example, imagine if you could change the links dynamically based on who was in a 30-second clip playing on your blog. Say you plug an interview between Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn, and the links spanning back and forth between Hugh's Romney book and Steyns indispensible America Alone. Cool. Enter Viewdle.

StoryBlender - I bet the folks at HotAir will love this one. Online collaborative video building. Good stuff!

MusicShake - Koean-based company to help the non-Mozarts among us. Interesting story and approach to this one.

Social Networking
TruTap - We talked about something like this previously. IM, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Digg... all of these profiles. No way to manage them all. This is where TruTap comes in. Another one featured in the TC4 is Orgoo.

Flock - Quoting from TC40 :"A social web browser. When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.

Teach the People - This of this site of How things Work with Social networking. Interesting field with a growing host of start-ups. 1 GB of storage, voting, docs, blogs, and other treats make this an interesting place to watch.

Publishing
8020 Publishing - Publish your own magazine online! Become the next big National Review!

Honorable Mention
Faroo - Right now thousands of people are looking for Steve Fossett and his presumed downed plane using satellite images of the Nevada landscape. Faroo takes the notion of the power of individual computers to rival Google's network farms of massive servers. In short, imagine if you could index everypage a user actually visited on their own computer. Cool stuff!

I'll let you digest these for a moment. Back with more in a few...