NY-based GoLark launched their events listing service last December. Most have called it a "Digg for events" based on the voting system that GoLark utilizes. The site utilizes an IP lookup and offers you location based events on the initial load. You can select any location you are interested in as well. Currently NYC has the largest number of listed events in the GoLark system.

To learn more about GoLark, I spoke with CEO Harlan Stern (no relation). Harlan describes GoLark as, "a really simple events sharing service." Harlan is most excited about their natural language processor for entering events into the system. This means when you enter an event you can type something like, "tuesday at 8pm" or "every monday at 2am". This can help when attemping to create complex events.

There are tons of events sites online and GoLark has no easy task. They will fight with some of the largest players in the game when it comes to event planning. GoLark seems to focus on fun and entertainment, for example they have the free coffee events listed at Dunkin Donuts and a good number of concerts as well.

The GoLark team is currently made up of three close friends. They have taken bootstrapping to a whole new level. They have rented a house on the beach in New Jersey during the winter to keep costs as low as possible.

Harlan tells me that they most likely won't add an events crawler to index other event planning services including Upcoming and Meetup. My concern with not crawling the other services is that it will be hard to ever convince site visitors that GoLark will have all of the events in their area.

We spoke briefly about their business model and Harlan noted that it will be a combination of ads and a variety of data aggregation offerings.

This is getting a bit boring, but here we go again... Twitter is down. Unlike last night, tonight they are saying that today's service interruption is their fault. On the developer group, developer Alex Payne explains why the service is down currently, "We had another brief cache outage, reverted that deploy, and then killed the load balancer at our managed host. We're working with our hosting provider to bring everything back up. Hang tight, and sincere apologies. "

Earlier this year we highlighted 10 excellent ideas on how to use the time when Twitter is down. Tonight Dave Winer is looking for feedback on Twitter's outage on FriendFeed.

Here are some new ideas on how to use the time:

1. consider loading up Pownce - it's like stocking up on bread and milk when a storm is coming
2. go buy the sarah lacy Web 2.0 book on amazon or grab a 40% off coupon and get it at borders
3. install new ink in your printer
4. open the pc and dust it
5. go get a pizza and a beer
6. check out our great sponsors who keep CN running

This morning I headed down to DUMBO (a neighborhood in Brooklyn) to check out the new Drop.io office. It's a great loft-style space that looks like the team can easily expand past their current headcount.

CN was the first media outlet to cover Drop.io on their alpha launch last November. Drop.io is a private, discreet file sharing service. This means you can share files with only the people you want. The most simple example is a designer who wants to show his or her sketches to their client without putting them on a public file server. Drop.io handles nearly all media types and offers a variety of methods to view the files including rss, mobile and a new embed option for videos.

Drop.io uses a variety of Amazon tools on the backend and in the interview below they note that Drop.io users have already stored several terabytes of data. What makes this even more significant is that Drop.io expires data -- so the reported figures are "active" stats.

One of the issues Drop.io faces is gaining brand awareness. Drop.io may have trouble getting brand recognition becuase its content is all private unlike other file sharing services which promote themselves as people share the content stored on the service.

Come inside to check out my interview below with co-founders Darshan Somashekar and Sam Lessin.

AideRSS is a new service that has created a new way to rank stories that are in RSS feeds. Their new way is called PostRank and combines many of the social services together to form a score for each post within a feed. ReadWriteWeb has a good overview of how AideRSS works.

The idea is interesting and innovative but it clearly skews towards the largest blogs. The larger blogs have a better chance to get more saves on delicious, more chance of getting on Digg, etc. I'd like to see more discovery within the service.

Today AideRSS is announcing Twitter link integration. Now AideRSS will scan Twitter and add links inside of tweets into their PostRank count. They will also display number of tweeted URLs as a metric.

They are also announcing OpenID support for login authentication.

Just hitting the wires -- CBS to acquire CNET for $1.8 billion. There's a call at 8:30AM and we will cover the call live. Ashkan called this one almost down to the exact price.

CNET shareholders would receive $11.50 a share if the deal closes. This amount represents a 45% premium to Wednesday's closing price and above any price at which the stock has traded in about two years. Shares of CNET rose 42% to $11.30 in recent premarket activity, while CBS' stock fell 3% to $24.10.

This deal would bring more technology content to the airwaves. No, I doubt we will see Rafe Needleman calling the next Giants-49ers game, but what we might see is shows like Natali DelConte's Loaded appear on any of the CBS television networks. I can see strong online-tv convergence with this deal.

Here's the release:

CBS to Become a Top Ten U.S. Internet Company with Unparalleled Content and Reach, Boasting Approximately 200 Million Monthly Unique Users Worldwide CNET Networks' CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, CNET News, UrbanBaby, BNET, CHOW and Search.com, Among Others, To Be Combined with CBS Corporation's National and Local Interactive Businesses Continue Reading »

Come inside to view our live notes from the conference call regarding CBS' plan to acquire CNET.

Last month we interviewed Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria from Strands about their business and their acquisition of Expensr. Today Strands is announcing another acquisition -- this time it's NetworthIQ. NetworthIQ will become part of the moneyStrands application which is currently in private beta. No financial details were provided regarding the acquisition.

Gabriel defines moneyStrands as, "moneyStrands is an online money management solution that allows users to aggregate their online financial information in one place, providing them with an instant snapshot of all their finances. It provides users with the best personalized recommendations possible, helping them find new ways to save money and invest."

Mark Hendrickson believes that the acquisitions were made more for the human capital than the actual technology.

The personal online money management category is heating up with a variety of startups playing in the space including: Wesabe, Geezeo (a CN sponsor), Mint, and now moneyStrands coming soon.