USA Today has turned its website into a big experiment in social networking. The changes made by the newspaper let their visitors “browse and engage” their content in several new ways. USA Today opened a new blog called ‘Community Center’ where they will track story comments and user-submitted photos.

The world of SEO has another cloaking debate in process, as both Matt Cutts and Philipp Lenssen brought up the topic in relation to the WebmasterWorld forums. Cloaking is the process of showing a search engine one type of content in response to a query, while showing a human visitor different content. Brett Tabke called WebmasterWorld’s practices a defense to stop numerous botnets from abusing the site. By saying: “We have finally found a system that everyone can live with and keeps the content open for everyone, but slows down the bots.”

Google revealed in its annual report that they had been questioned by the SEC about their methods of accounting for income taxes. The company received a letter from the SEC on March 16, 2006, that asked about several issues, with tax accounting among them. The dispute has not been settled, as Google noted in their report that they had discussed the tax issue with the SEC as recently as January 2007.

Does Wikipedia rely too heavily on Google for its incoming traffic? A Hitwise study shows that the online encyclopedia is the 3rd-most popular destination to which Google sends its users. It is the #1 external domain visited from the Google main search page also. As a larger percentage of Wikipedia’s traffic is becoming comprised of these types of referrals, could Jimmy Wales and friends eventually find themselves eating out of Google’s hand?

According to some reports, Blake Irving is set to resign his post as a Corporate Vice President in Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform group after nearly fifteen years of service with the company. Microsoft officials have declined to make any official statement, but it is speculated that the in-effectiveness of the Live branding strategy may be a contributing factor to Irving’s departure.

Have you upgraded to the latest version of WordPress? If so, you may want to double-check your installation. WordPress creator Matt Mullenwag issued a warning to users last Friday, citing that the hosting servers had been hacked and that version 2.1.1 of the popular blogging software had been infected and could be remotely exploited by a third party. Mullenwag is asking users to get the word out about the vulnerability and is urging WordPress users to upgrade to version 2.1.2 as soon as possible.