I’ve been exploring some of the implications of openness at large scale and identifying how value is created. One way to think about that is by positioning openness and empowerment against control and ownership.

For a good 500 years, spanning the 12th to 17th centuries, the Republic of Venice was the world power of maritime trade, with an influence that spanned Europe, Africa and the Far East. Its influence today is greatly reduced, but it’s still a fitting venue to discuss the future of the digital economy as we’ve been doing at the Digital Economy Forum.

Millward Brown released its yearly BrandZ report today ranking the world’s most valued brands, down to the penny. While Millward Brown is the trusted source for overall brand valuation, one thing its don’t seem to take into account is a brand’s social valuation. So we did it for them. Yes, what follows is a rejigging of the league table.

We’re actually being slightly conservative here, given the new data from comScore. Incredibly, Facebook served up about one in every three online display ads served in the U.S. And that was just for Q1, a seasonally slow quarter.

Part of Apple’s phenomenal growth story over the last decade can be seen here in Europe. A decade ago, Euro Mac addicts were hard to spot. Now they seem to be everywhere. Fittingly, it’s Apple gadgets like iPhone, iPod and iPad leading the charge with mobile-mad Europeans.

Late last month we cited the latest IAB UK statistics to point out that the social media ad spend — the fastest growing in all of digital — last year grew a staggering 200% to top £132 million in Britain. We have some new projections for the U.S. market and the growth in social spending is even greater.

We’ve given a fair bit of attention here to Google’s new algorithm changes, which reward high-quality sites while punishing the so-called content farms that cut and paste what’s in the news. Last night, Google unveiled the second and final (for now) phase of the “high quality” roll-out that will impact all English-language searches around the world. For anybody who publishes content to the web, the changes are BIG.

Google launched +1 [on March 30], basically its answer to Facebook’s Like button. When you click on a ‘+1′ icon displayed on a URL, it shows up in Google search results when you are signed in. And if you have social connections within the Google empire (e.g., Gmail contacts) you will see which of your connections has +1?d the URL. While I am digesting the possibilities I thought it might be helpful to summarize some initial reads on the +1:

Topsy provides a real-time search engine for social networking sites with particular focus on Twitter. It works through content and relevancy keywords, then it rates the discussion based on the influence and reach of the participating users. This, the company proclaims, is the forefront of Search 2.0.

When Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com invested $32 million in Hubspot, the deal made history. This is the first time this trio has ever teamed up to invest in the same company. What exactly is the big attraction?