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Ali Abdulemam arrested - Internet actually cares. The big (and bad) news this week was the arrest of Bahraini blogger and forum moderator Ali Abdulemam. He was arrested as part of a crackdown against democratic speech in the country.

Abdulemam was well-liked and proved to be an inspiration for bloggers in the Arabic and Muslim worlds. He was a family man and was big on engagement. In part because of who he was, in part because of how blatant the falsehoods that powered his arrest were, his arrest has lit up the Internet in a way that no imprisoned blogger has in years.

Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia had this to say about Ali.

The most exhilarating thing about social media to me is that it allows us to extend and amplify our dreams and concerns. One of the most bracing things that can be done with innovations in the social web is to take that innovation and turn it to uses the creators never thought of. An example of both these aspects of the web is Vacant NYC.

In a DIY response to a combination of homelessness, vacant properties that could be leveraged to ease that homelessness, and what they feel is a municipal disinterest in both, New York-based group Picture the Homeless, inspired by crisis-mapping outfit Ushahidi, are using crowdsource mapping to identify vacant property and lots in that city.

Google Apps has hit the six month mark. It has 200 apps and about four million customers.

It has provided another example for for how marketplaces can help create services that extend what a SaaS can offer. It's a model that has worked for Salesforce.com and other services such as Sugar CRM.

But what is proving hot on Google Apps Marketplace?

I have been meaning to get to discussing blue-sky opportunities at the roundtables, and this week we did some of that. During this week's roundtable we discussed an area that deserves a serious look from entrepreneurs: Rural BPO. Whether it is in the emerging markets or in the U.S., it is my sincere belief that there are numerous entrepreneurial opportunities to be tapped into. Today, I invited entrepreneurs to come up with ideas, apply the 1M/1M methodology to it, and come discuss with me at these roundtables.

Readers - if any of you have ideas, I am keen to hear from you, as well as help you refine them.

Yesterday we went over some the ways entrepreneurs can set themselves up for success with VCs by building a relationship far before they ever need funding. Part of that strategy involves picking the right VCs based on experience, success and, yes, even how well you get along. There are several factors that should be considered when finding the right VCs for your startup, and Atlas Venture partner Fred Destin reminds us this morning of another significant one - how a VC manages reserves.

Recommendation engines will often rely on the wisdom of crowds to suggest music. But there are a lot more ways that can be used to determine what music a person may like.

Paul Lamere writes a lot on this topic. He's a former researcher at Sun Labs where he explored ways to organize, search for and discover music. He's the author of Music Machinery, one of the best blogs out there about music and technology. Lamere now works at Echo Nest where he manages the company's developer community. Echo Nest is a music intelligence company founded by Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman, who met at the MIT Media Lab while pursuing their doctorates in music understanding and synthesis research.

Science fiction author and Wired blogger Bruce Sterling passed along the interesting augmented reality video embedded below. It's an iPhone app from the Japanese company Sazanami called Amazing3D that lets users augment still photographs with playful 3D objects which they can then interact with. While it's not the most amazing example of augmented reality (actually it is pretty fun to play with), it did remind me that there have been several great kid-friendly AR applications developed recently. As augmented reality evolves and finds its most successful niche markets, toys, games and children could be some of the most efficient avenues to success.

Blogging platform WordPress has been working hard lately to increase a sense of community on the site. Last month, WordPress.com users got the ability to "like" each others' posts and today, the site is introducing a subscription feature.

Last month we compared the addition of the "like" feature to Facebook and this month, we can't help but notice that the subscription service brings WordPress a little bit closer to fellow self-publishing platform Tumblr.

Today sees our first full interview here at ReadWriteHack, with Richard Clark, a web developer from New Zealand. Richard is a coder who runs a one-man business designing and implementing code, networks and systems for clients at every scale, from tiny silicon valley startups to national corporates and government departments.

He has designed and built web applications for problems as diverse as energy network modeling, social media, stock market tracking, video processing and intelligence analysis.

We caught up with Richard to ask a few questions about his web development career.

RSS is not dead, but with Bloglines, one of the most venerable web-based RSS readers is about to close shop next month. According to a report on TechCrunch, Bloglines' parent company IAC will make an official announcement later today and shut the service down on October 1. In the early days of RSS, Bloglines was the go-to feed reader for early adopters. Over the last few years, however, the company struggled to innovate and hold on to its users.