TechCrunch has the scoop on a big new feature launching tomorrow evening at the tech-blog meme aggregator Techmeme (minus buzz words, it's a news tracking site). The new Techmeme leaderboard will list the top 100 blogs that have appeared as headline links on Techmeme over the past 30 days. The page will be at http://techmeme.com/lb, which is currently password protected. In a preview image, posted below, TechCrunch was the top blog on Techmeme last month and Read/WriteWeb was #6.
We're in great company on that list, and it looks better than the Technorati 100, where we're now at #22 - but this Techmeme leaderboard will face some criticism as well. I love Techmeme, I've checked it multiple times an hour since it launched in 2005, but below are my thoughts on this leaderboard.
Adobe has acquired Waltham, Mass.-based Virtual Ubiquity for an undisclosed sum, and in doing so has officially entered the web office fray. Virtual Ubiquity are the creators of Buzzword, an online, collaborative word processing application powered by Adobe's Flex framework. It runs cross-browser in the Flash player and just might be the best word processor on the web.
That sounds like hyperbole, but after playing around with Buzzword for the past couple of days, I'm nearly ready to trade in Microsoft Word -- nearly. I've been long hesitant to trade in my faithful Microsoft Office suite for Zoho, ThinkFree, or Google offerings, but Buzzword addresses a number of my niggling concerns and even manages to do some things far better than Microsoft does.
With this acquisition, Adobe appears to be announcing their intentions to go head-to-head with Google and Microsoft in the coming office wars. Microsoft has long held the dominant position when it comes to office software, but that may be about to change due to the increasingly more usable nature of the growing field of web office applications. And because of a planned Adobe Integrated Runtime version of Buzzword, Adobe has designs on the desktop, too.
Adobe will today release to the public for the first time their Adobe Media Player on the Adobe Labs site. It will be released as a public beta, with a final version scheduled for the first half of next year. We first covered AMP when it was announced in April at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference.
Somewhat similar to the Veoh player, AMP is an AIR application that will allow users to watch Flash video content from the web online or offline. Unlike Veoh, however, AMP does not scrape content from the web, but instead is seeded by content publishers. Adobe will even offer co-branded versions of the player to publishers who can use it to monetize their content via advertising.
Adobe today announced Adobe Share, an online document sharing service. Users will be able to get 1GB of free storage space to share and store documents in their own secure space on the web site.
The service is simple to use and offers some nifty features, including a gorgeous online file viewer. To share a document users simply upload or choose from their library, enter email addresses of those they want to share the document with, make any notes, set file permissions (i.e., do you want users to be able to download a document or just view it?) and then share. Before documents are shared, the Share service performs a virus scan and creates a thumbnail in the background.
I've been away the last half of this week, so this Wrapup is a condensed version. If you're in catch-up mode like me, here are 10 of our best posts from the past week:
On September 8th and 9th, over 100 teams of between 1 and 4 programmers and designers got together to compete in a 48 hour programming competition called the Rails Rumble. The idea was to create the best web application possible in just 48 hours, start to finish. Teams were only allowed to create paper mockups of their design, database diagrams or do other preplanning before the competition started. No coding or designing until the 48 hours officially began.
92 teams succeeded in completing full (or mostly full) applications. After a couple of weeks of peer judging, the winners were announced Friday night at the Ruby East conference keynote.
The Rails Rumble was modeled after the Rails Day competition, which ran last year and in 2005, but not this year. The main difference being that teams had an extra 24 hours for app creation during the Rumble. In my opinion, Rails Day was a bit more fun to watch due to their cool 'spectate' app that let fans watch SVN commits in near real-time -- though you have to be a real geek to think that's fun to watch.
The third annual Podcast and New Media Expo, formerly known as the Portable Media Expo, started today in Ontario, California and runs through the weekend. The event has become a favorite of podcasters and video creators from all over the world.
Keynote speakers at the conference this year include serial investor Howard Lindzon, investor in the CBS acquired video blog Wallstrip, Jim Louderback, CEO of Kevin Rose-affiliated Revision3 and Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine of Ask A Ninja.
Podcasting News reports that you can keep an eye and an ear on the action at the Expo this year in a number of ways, including an official Twitter feed and audio interviews both live and rebroadcast from the surprisingly successful startup BlogTalkRadio (see our review of the service last month). Live BlogTalkRadio coverage will be provided by About.com Guide to Podcasting John C. Havens and will will start tonight at 5:30 PST (12:30 AM GMT). Coverage kicks off with an interview with Paolo Tosolini of Microsoft on the value of corporate podcasting and new media production. The whole event schedule is here.
Technologies like podcasting, easy live broadcasting and Twitter have changed the conference experience forever; a conference full of specialists in the use of these technologies should be particularly interesting to watch from outside.
I just tried to digg a story on Center Networks recapping what appears to have been a successful first get together for fans of the blog (I was bummed that I wasn't able to attend). I thought it was odd that a recap post had over 40 diggs -- usually those only appeal to people who attended and don't fair very well on sites like Digg, unless maybe they're about a big conferences like the MacWorld or DEMO. When I clicked through, however, I was sent to this story, entitled "echouchou.cn," has a description in Chinese and links to nowhere. Huh?
Reading through the comments, it appears that a lot of external (and even some internal?) diggs are being redirected to this page. As I write this, the story has 46 diggs and comments indicating 6 sites (not including Center Networks) that are apparently unknowingly sending diggers its way. The story is 348 days old, but the comments are all within the past couple of hours. Bug? Hack? Who knows... it sure is odd, though.
Does anyone have any info on this? Is this something you've seen before? Leave a comment below.
Update: Turns out it was a bug. From Digg programmer Steve Williams: "We're aware of this problem, and we're working on it. I believe the digg buttons are working correctly now, but we're still looking for the root cause. It wasn't a hack." (via the Digg page for this post)
Some people love words. They are delighted by the appropriate thunder of the word "cacophony," or amused by the ironic spelling of the word "phonetic," or tickled by just how difficult it is to remember how to correctly spell "mnemonic." So where do lovers of language gather on the web? We've hunted down the top sites for logophiles and listed them below. Be sure to leave your favorites in the comments.
Wordie calls itself a site "like Flickr, but without the photos," which is an apt description. The web site is a social network for word lovers who list, discuss, share, and keep track of their favorite words. So far their 5,000 members have listed over 275,000 words. The current favorite? "Schadenfreude," an unfortunate word that describes taking satisfaction or pleasure in the misfortune of another.
The always interesting Hitwise web traffic analysts have released statistics this morning indicating that Slide.com has overtaken Flickr in at least one country, New Zealand (the birthplace of Read/WriteWeb), and has doubled its market share in the Entertainment - Photography sector over the summer.
The most recent public numbers from Hitwise on Slide's US market share were from April, when the now shuttered Yahoo! Photos, Flickr and Slide all lagged far behind Photobucket.
Back in New Zealand, though, Slide.com now trails only Fox's Photobucket in NZ, thanks largely to the company's wild success on the new Facebook platform. Hitwise says Facebook drives more than 59% of the traffic to Slide.com. Slide was one of the first companies to take the strategy of releasing lots of little mini-apps in Facebook, many of which have been incredibly successful.
