The bookmark has evolved since Mosaic's "Hotlist" in 1993. Now when we save a web page, we can rename it, describe it, categorize it, tag it, and even share it with others via a service like del.icio.us. But what if you only want to save a piece of a website? Maybe a specific paragraph, or image, or caption, or video? You could bookmark the entire page, but in a long article, your bookmark loses context when you just want to save a couple of paragraphs in the middle of the document. Enter Clipmarks and rival service Web-Chops.
Both services utilize a browser plugin that lets you snip out sections of websites and save them for later use. Clipmarks offers their service on Firefox, IE, and Flock, while Web-Chops currently only works with IE (though the download page promises Firefox support soon).
Davide Casaleggio sent a tip to Read/WriteWeb about a video his company produced exploring the future of media. It is a very cool 6-minute video, which takes some educated (and imaginative) guesses at how the Web and media will evolve over the next 40-50 years. In the short movie, Google, Amazon.com and Second Life are the big winners - with Google buying Microsoft, Amazon buying Yahoo, and Second Life becoming the dominant virtual world.
Plenty of interest this week in our poll, asking which online collaboration platform do you use? So far, after over 1,100 votes, Google Apps is way out in front - 47% of respondents use it. Basecamp is next with 20%, with Zoho on 10% and ThinkFree 6%. The two Microsoft options, Office Groove and Office Live, have only 2% each. Sign of the times, ay?
There's still time to cast your vote; and remember that the poll is multiple-choice.
Last month at the D conference, Real Networks announced the next version of RealPlayer, which features one-click downloading and saving of online video. This week last100 editor Steve O'Hear got his hands on RealPlayer 11 and thoroughly tested it.
Yesterday was the Day Without Google, a one-day blog event organized by AltSearchEngines. A lot of people tried to last a day without using Google's ubiquitous search engine, and in this post we take a look at the results. TheRegister has already covered the event, in an article provocatively entitled Blog calls for Google boycott. WebProNews also had a good report. Note that our intent wasn't to "boycott" Google - Google is number 1 for a reason, which is that it's the best search engine around. The reason behind the 'Day Without Google' was purely to encourage people to experiment with and test out some of the hundreds of Google competitors; maybe even catch a glimpse of the future dominant search engine. Anyway TheRegister article included this great quote from AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight:
Yesterday was AltSearchEngine's Day Without Google, which challenged users to drop the big 5 search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, Ask, and AOL) for an entire day, and instead use an alternative search engine. Taking a cue from Richard MacManus, who said he would be checking out Hakia, I decided to go with a natural language/meaning-based search engine, too: Lexxe (pronounced "Leksi").
Suffice it to say, while I got by, I missed Google and Yahoo!. Lexxe says it is powered by natural language processing and urges searchers to ask questions in plain English. It then attempts to give you an answer based on what it determines are the top results. Unfortunately, more often than not, the answer is gave just wasn't right, and the results it gave weren't much stronger than Google's.
As has been reported in TechCrunch and on other places this morning, Open Ads has received a $5 million VC investment led by Index Ventures. The other firms participating included First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
I included Open Ads as potentially part of the solution I proposed last month in my post Google's Vulnerability - An Open Ad Network. Interestingly, Josh Kopelman, of First Round Capital, explains his firms' investment in Open Ads as:
Co-founder of Clipperz, Marco Barulli, recently contacted Read/WriteWeb to let us know about their recently launched online password manager - available in both english and Japanese. In this age of social networks, the Web Office and Best of Breed web apps, it can get tricky to keep track of all your usernames and passwords. I tend to rely on Firefox to store these, but even then I find myself cursing at the computer more often than I should, due to a forgotten username/password that got cleared out of the cache (or I'm testing out a new browser, etc). This is where services like Clipperz, and its direct competitor PassPack, come in.
Scouta is a web app that provides you with media recommendations, based on preferences and interests you display by your selections within the application. If that sounds complicated, think Pandora, but for all media on the web (including media available outside the US). Or think Last.FM without the fuss about neighbors. To be honest, neither of those comparisons is quite right either. It's more like YouTube, except all the side column content is actually interesting to you.
Scouta is virtually unique. It takes the recommendation model that everybody seems to be doing with music and expands it to all types of media. The closest similar product I've found is StumbleVideo, but again that is limited to only videos. Scouta allows video and audio - so your media can range from music videos, to movie-length documentaries, to podcasts or songs.
I've done a lot of telecommuting in my life. My first real writing gig came when I was 16 as a freelancer for a computer magazine whose offices were 3,000 miles from my house, and since then I've worked for a number of blogs, web startups, and computer game companies in an online, virtual office environment. During that time I've found that the key to a successful distributed team is communication. The difference between the ventures that failed and those that succeeded was how well set up the communication structure was for the team.
We all love Basecamp, which I think is an invaluable app for distributed teams (we use it here at Read/WriteWeb). It's a superb way to communicate and keep track of every facet of your project. But back when I started telecommuting, there was no Basecamp, so we had to cobble together our own solution, mostly from opensource software. These days, there are is even more great software available to teams who want to assemble their own virtual office. Below are some of the tools every team needs to create their own Fakecamp.
