With Google (GOOG) releasing 100,000 invites to test the beta version of the much-hyped Wave, one enterprising blogger decided to capitalize on all the buzz surrounding the new messaging and collaboration tool by selling his invite on eBay (EBAY).

Hagan Blount, a 30-year-old food blogger based in Baltimore, had been listening to the chatter about Wave and hatched the idea to auction his invite on eBay. “I figured there’s a whole lot of buzz. I wonder how many hits this would get?” he said.

Of course, Mr. Blount hadn’t yet received his invite, but he said that a software developer friend of his who did not wish to be identified had promised to procure one for him. Mr. Blount commenced the auction on Tuesday night, and by the time he had woken up at 6 a.m. Wednesday, the day that Google would be releasing Wave invites, his auction had already received 12,000 hits.

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Vitaminwater ventured into the world of crowdsourcing Tuesday with the launch of a new Facebook application in which users compete to create the energy drink’s newest flavor, even down to the bottle design, to the tune of a $5,000 prize.

The new “flavor creator” app features a cartoon of a lab-coat-clad woman who instructs users to vote on their favorite flavor or combination of flavors, based on the most buzz-worthy results culled from online sources like Google (GOOG) News and the food photography blog Foodgawker. Ginger, for example, takes the top slot for generating buzz online.

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Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, believes in logic the way Tina Brown believes in buzz. He rarely approves a story idea unless the writer backs up the thesis with data.

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Last summer, well after Twitter had become the buzz of the New York and San Francisco Web crowds but months before its current moment at the apogee of Internet hype, I visited the start-up at its hip South of Market offices and wrote a feature on the company in Fortune. Its title, “The true meaning of Twitter,” now feels like a quaint moment in time when the very definition of the company’s name, let alone how you use its product, needed explaining.

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The battle over Yahoo’s search business, as witnessed over the last few days, seems both ridiculous and petty. And it takes the attention away from what is Yahoo’s true value: a media aggregation platform. Yahoo is the place a lot of people–some 400 million–visit to get their news, sports scores and email. I have always liked that business, and yesterday I experienced, first-hand, the enormous strength of Yahoo.

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Twitter, the eponymously named San Francisco company and our favorite narcissistic pursuit, may not have a business model, but it surely has the buzz. Whether it is their new round of funding or their inability to keep the service running–the blog world loves to twitter about Twitter.

After talking to some reliable sources, I have a theory that could help Twitter solve its scaling conundrum and make money.

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We have seen it so many times: Any new service from Yahoo, however good or different it may be from others in functionalities, will never be able to shake off the catching-up-on-the-joneses tag. Such is the case with two new services Yahoo is launching today.

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