I resisted the headline 'Desktop RSS Readers Are Dead', but our latest poll of which methods people use to read RSS feeds is showing a clear trend - more people are using browser-based RSS Readers and less are using desktop Readers. This week's poll is almost identical to a poll we did 6 months ago, which gives us an opportunity to compare results. We're currently asking: How do you primarily read your feeds? It currently has 1,335 votes (after a couple of days), compared to 1,197 just over 6 months ago in January.
Here is the comparison:
On Friday I viewed a demo of
the latest version of the Deki Wiki product from
MindTouch, with Co- Founders Steve Bjorn and Aaron Fulkerson. The latest upcoming release, called "Deki Wiki Hayes", is described as a wiki and platform for developing collaborative web applications. The company says it's similar to CMS web frameworks like Drupal, Mambo, Joomla and DotNetNuke, but a wiki in nature.
In a sense MindTouch is transforming the Wiki, from the Web’s best collaborative authoring tool into an open source service platform with a Wiki heart. Their Deki Wiki Hayes release is perhaps the most extendable Wiki tool available today. The product is OS and programming language agnostic. Deki Wiki Hayes allows developers, administrators and users to create or integrate Wiki capability into web apps.
Since we launched last100 (a Read/WriteWeb network blog) just over eight weeks ago, I’ve been obsessively trying out every Internet TV application that I can get my hands on. Here’s a quick recap of the Internet TV apps we’ve profiled so far. And if you enjoy this post, make sure you subscribe to the last100 RSS feed!
Note: Many of the following applications offer very different features and solve different problems. This post isn’t designed to be a product comparison — because it would be like comparing apples with oranges — but instead serves as an overview of some of our coverage to-date.
After having my iPhone for a little over two weeks it is clear that it is the best gadget that I ever owned.
I am not a gadget guy, but I certainly appreciate elegant design and useful tools. iPhone's ease of use, intuitive
interface and great set of built-in applications amount to a device that is hard to resist. People who have not yet seen
it think that it's over hyped and not a big deal. Well, I'm here to say that it is a bid deal.
People who own other intelligent devices from Motorolla, Blackberry or Sony Ericsson have pointed out that features found in iPhone have been around on the market for a while. That is true, iPhone certainly is not the first touch screen device and not the first smart phone. But it is likely the best executed one to date. It packs a punch across the board, but it also excels in little details that make a big difference. In this post we will take a look at 10 simple things that make a user like me very happy.
In May AOL purchased a controlling stake in German ad-serving company AdTech AG to compliment Advertising.com, the ad network it purchased in 2004. Today, AOL announced the purchase of Tacoda, a behavioral targeting company founded in 2001. Reuters reports that this is a cash deal worth around $275 million, which is within the range given by other reports.
AOL's most recent purchase continues a major consolidation trend in online advertising this year. Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion (though faces FTC scrutiny), Yahoo! paid $680 million for Right Media, and WPP spent $649 million to purchase 24/7 Real Media.
This past year has been a very eventful one in the M&A arena, with many of web 2.0's biggest names being snapped up. A few stand-outs include the likes of YouTube, Photobucket, Feedburner, Last.fm, and StumbleUpon.
Yet, there still remains a number of juicy, mouth-watering targets available on the market. This may be a great opportunity for traditional media, as well as some of the Internet behemoths, to make a leap into the new web world. Let's explore some of the most sought-after names still available on the market.
Back in January Amit Agarwal wrote a post called "How to Reduce RSS Stress In Your Online Life" in which he talked about managing enormous lists of RSS feeds. It's likely that your feed list doesn't top 1200 like Amit's, but even with just 20 or 30 feeds, the constant stream of news can get overwhelming. At the time, on my own blog, I advised people to simply read fewer feeds, but now a team from Ontario, Canada led by programmer Ilya Grigorik thinks they have a better solution: AideRSS.
AideRSS, which launches today, is a new type of RSS filtering service that uses a proprietary system called PostRank to determine the best posts on each blog. I first read about PostRank on Ilya's blog last December and remember being very intrigued and thinking, "There's a web service in this." Just over 6 months later, Ilya's idea is being born as AideRSS, which I have been playing around with for a little over a week.
Today Nokia has acquired the media sharing service Twango. Twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media. Read/WriteWeb wrote an in-depth profile of Twango back in January, in a post entitled Twango Tackles Lucrative Media Sharing Market. Well it turns out it was a lucrative exit for Twango!
Nokia plans to use Twango to enable users to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices. As we explained back in January, Twango is similar to eSnips, Multiply and PeopleAggregator, in that it combines media sharing with social networking. Twango was founded by a group of 5 ex-Microsoft employees in fall 2004 and officially launched in October 2006.
Over the weekend the final book in the Harry Potter series was released. In the first 24 hours of release it sold a staggering 72.1 million copies worldwide, blasting out of the water the previous record book launch (held by the last Harry Potter book). "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" actually made more money than the latest Potter movie in the past two weeks of release. It's not often that a book bests a Hollywood blockbuster in sales. So the question is, how can you tap into some of that magic?
The tool kit below will help you write your novel from start to finish, publish it, and bring it to the masses without having to lay out a lot of cash and without having to download anything.
Today I spotted a link on YouTube to "Try out the NEW (beta) version of this page!". Clicking through, I saw a fresh design for their video pages - not a huge re-design, but there were some subtle improvements. The main navigation and theme is largely the same, but links have been re-ordered, usability had been improved, and there is a splash of Ajax in the beta.
