ReadWriteWeb

Any fan of the Discovery Channel looks forward to one special week every year: Shark Week. Next week will be Discovery's 20th Shark Week and they've pulled out all the stops and fully embraced web 2.0 on their website. There's a Shark Week widget that lets fan embed shark news and features on their blogs or social networking profiles (they launched the widget in Facebook flavor, as well), there is a weekly podcast, and earlier this month they let the crowd decide their primetime schedule via an online vote.

But the most impressive feature of the website, is the Shark Week Video Mixer -- a very well done flash video editing tool stocked with clips of sharks to let users create their own video mashups. I'm not sure if Discovery made the editor in house or if it was licensed from a third party, but it is one of the nicest flash editors I have seen, mimicking well the traditional timeline feel of software editors that people are used to, such as iMovie.

Last night we broke the news that web hosting company Media Temple is bringing virtualization to Dedicated Physical Servers, with its Nitro product. Today there is further virtualization news, with HP acquiring two companies in this domain: a $1.6 billion acquisition of Opsware (which Netscape founder Marc Andreessen co-founded, under the name LoudCloud) and a $214 million purchase of Neoware.

Opsware makes automation software for data center operations. As the WSJ explained, it originally focused on Internet "hosting" and related services during its first three years in existence. Neoware is a provider of thin client computing (where a computer depends primarily on a centralized server for hosting applications and processing data) and virtualization solutions.

If you believe the hype, today marks the start of a new era in American politics, where citizen journalism gets its moment in the limelight. Or it marks a low point in American politics where serious discourse is put in the hands of the same people who watched a video of a baby giggling 19 million times. That's right: tonight is the night of the CNN-YouTube Debates.

I wrote in June about how Google was changing the American political landscape, and that will not be more evident than tonight when eight Democratic presidential hopefuls take the stage in South Carolina -- a crucial early primary state -- for a debate sponsored by CNN and YouTube in which all of the questions were submitted by users of YouTube. The Republicans get their chance in September.

This week we'll be exploring RSS products. To complement this focus, our poll is asking: how do you primarily read your feeds? We asked a similar question in January, so we're looking to see if the trends have changed since then. But this time we're also asking what is your primary means of reading RSS, because nowadays there are so many different ways - and I for one use multiple methods of reading RSS. Here is our poll:

Media Temple, which hosts Read/WriteWeb, is announcing a brand new product at Hosting Con in Chicago this coming Tuesday evening PST. It's called the Nitro and Read/WriteWeb is the first to bring you this news. Nitro is a Dedicated Physical Virtual Server (dpv), but it comes with the same virtualization technology that powers their virtual dedicated server solutions (dv).

Last week the personalized start page Pageflakes announced its latest version, nicknamed Blizzard. It introduces social networking functionality, themes, a slick Ajax UI, and more. What struck me about the new look was how much it reminded me of Facebook, or at least how much it wants to be like Facebook. The same can be said of Netvibes, Pageflakes' main competitor. I wondered: does this mean that Pageflakes and Netvibes are moving away from the 'start page' market (which has intense competition from MyYahoo, Microsoft's Live.com and iGoogle) and more into the social networking / widgets domain currently dominated by MySpace and Facebook? Josh Catone wrote about this trend at the end of May, in a post entitled Who Can Compete with Facebook?. He wrote:

At the beginning of this week we introduced a new comments feature on Read/WriteWeb, called SezWho. Basically it introduces comment rating, reputation and filtering to this blog. SezWho was created by one of our occasional writers, Jitendra Gupta - whose team installed it onto R/WW. You can check out the full list of features in the SezWho FAQ, but in this post I want to summarize how it improves R/WW's community.