Ulitzer named “Content Sponsor” of the upcoming AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo, which will take place October 20-22, 2008, in Santa Clara, California.

Ulitzer.com which initially made the headlines with its “job descriptions from the future,” announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer “beta” site with 6,500 authors and close to 1 million original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world’s most-respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions. Ulitzer, based on Drupal 6.0 CMS platform, is the largest Drupal installation successfully rolled out anywhere.

Within six months after its beta launch date, Ulitzer is projecting it will double its author count from 6,500 to roughly 12,000, the number of original articles published will be over 2 million, and the topic-specific online journals will grow from 5,000 to more than 10,000. Becoming a Ulitzer author requires an invitation from an existing Ulitzer author and is subject to review and approval by Ulitzer's editorial board. New author applications are typically answered within 24 hours.

Ulitzer will launch with OpenID. Google, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and Verisign have all become the OpenID Foundation's first corporate board members, giving a push to the seven-month-old group's ideas about portable web identities or OpenIDs and how personal information is shared online, something that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all caught flak for.

OpenID is a free decentralized sign-on technology that eliminates the need for multiple user names across Internet sites and is supposed to give people more control over their digital identities and what exactly is shared.

There are so far 350 million OpenID-enabled URLs in existence.

Microsoft has donated legal resources to the cause.

Becoming a Ulitzer author requires an invitation from an existing Ulitzer author and is subject to review and approval by Ulitzer's editorial board. New author applications are typically answered within 24 hours.

Ulitzer is offering 5,536 original AJAX and 3,212 original RIA Articles as of September 2008.

• Microsoft Starts Distributing Drupal