Wired magazine has been telling us what's hip
and cool in technology since the birth of the Web. In this post, we look at the elements that make up Wired - and how it continues to evolve as both a print and online publication.
Led by its current editor in chief, Chris Anderson (since 2001), Wired has always stayed true to its original style and format. From jargon, to gadgets, to tech breakthroughs and the people behind the technology, Wired has remained on cutting edge and, at times, defined it. Also over the past decade and more, Wired and other Conde Nast publications have adapted well to the print-online duality. Today the company maintains a print edition, an online edition, a rich set of logs and, recently launched, Geekipedia. The print edition brings subscription revenue as well as advertising dollars. The online edition is free, supported only by advertising.
The print edition of Wired costs $10 a year. Considering that a pack of cigarettes in New York costs $9, it seems ridiculously low
(and much healthier than smoking!). But actually, in our day and age people do not want to pay for information.
Magazines and traditional media are rapidly giving way to free online content. Yet, Wired is worth paying for - because in print, its design and other attributes are are gorgeous.
last100 editor Steve O'Hear has been pondering the future of Internet TV and he sees set-top boxes as key. A set-top box, according to this definition, is "a device used with televisions, allowing users access to enhanced and sometimes proprietary features such as digital channels, video-on-demand, and Internet access".
Here is what last100 had to say about this future for Internet TV:
AltSearchEngines has just released its latest Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list. ASE tracks over 1,000 "alts" in all, so choosing the top 10% is a pretty big deal.
One trend that ASE editor Charles Knight is beginning to see is that some of the alts are getting larger. Charles noted: "We have always said that there are 4-5 major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) and 100 Top ASE. But we may have to revisit that. Some ASE (maybe - blinkx, GigaBlast, Exalead, picsearch, Answers.com, Eurekster, Quintura - this is a new concept) seem to be growing larger than a typical ASE, but are not ‚Äúmajor‚Ä? yet either."
Exalead was chosen as the Search Engine of the Month for October - it is a Web and image search engine.
Check out the entire list and accompanying analysis over on AltSearchEngines.
At this morning's keynote at the Adobe MAX event in Chicago, Mark Anders and Steven Heintz of Adobe gave a sneak peek of a new application being developed by the company code-named "Thermo." Thermo is what they're terming a "rich internet application design tool." Its goal is to allow designers to create Flex-based RIAs without the need to touch any code and to create a more seamless workflow between designers and developers.
With Thermo, designers can build a web app UI and the MXML code to control it is automatically rendered by the application. Developers can then access that code and tie the UI to the rest of the application. Some conference attendees were rightly reminded of Visual Basic, but Thermo seems much smarter -- and, of course, is aimed at web app developers.
Bloglines, the IAC owned online feed reader, made a number of different announcements this morning - most importantly that the company now supports OpenID. At least it is starting to support OpenID, more on the details below.
By some accounts Bloglines is the market leader in online feed readers - by others it trails behind Google Reader. Regardless, the company has been a key innovator in the space for some time and the product is widely used. We reviewed the most recent major overhaul of Bloglines in August.
As of today Bloglines users can use their Bloglines login info to sign in to other sites that support OpenID login. This is good news, but more than a bit underwhelming at the same time. Big companies can announce all day long that they will now let you log in to other sites with their ID - it's time for them to support OpenID login on their own site using credentials from other vendors. Bloglines' GM Eric Engleman told me this morning that Bloglines will do just that in early November. Let's hold them to it.
In the mean time, Engleman said he was excited to be able to log into sites like the new Plaxo and social bookmarking service Magnolia using his Bloglines OpenID. Readers interested in a good pros and cons article on OpenID should check out Wendy Boswell's excellent post on LifeHacker last month.
The news search engine features that we wrote about at Yahoo! in early August are now live on their site. The enhancements include Yahoo!'s Search Assist, which is an improved version of their search suggestion feature, and a number of new Yahoo! Shortcuts. Shortcuts are self contained information widgets that appear at the top of results for certain searches and draw content from other Yahoo! properties.
In addition to the Shortcuts we talked about in August for music, movies, travel, and images, Yahoo! has rolled out a handful of additional Shortcuts for topics like sports, business, health and events. The sports Shortcut, like the one seen below, is especially useful to a fantasy sports addict like myself. Unfortunately, it isn't triggered for all players. For example, a search for New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter brings up a Shortcut about him, but a search for teammate Robinson Cano does not. My guess is the decision whether to launch a Shortcut is based on search popularity rather than player stats (so some good, but less popular players are passed over).
Barnes & Noble.com has launched a re-design, with several new web 2.0 features - including "One on One" podcasts, a large tag cloud on the frontpage, a "See Inside" program that offers a virtual book-reading like experience, and a service called "Live at Barnes & Noble" where you can view webcasts of readings at member stores. Another new feature is B&N Review, a daily magazine with reviews and interviews.
The goal of the re-design was to add more "motion", as well as more content, interactivity, and community. The AP report also noted that Barnes & Noble.com "has become increasingly important to Barnes & Noble Inc. [...] The online seller's percentage of the superstore's total sales have doubled in the past five years to 10 percent."
Embedded chat in a website provides the ability to more closely connect with your readers or customers, depending on the instance. Chat widgets provide real-time feedback and spur thought-provoking discussions - features lacking in e-mail. However the disadvantages should be acknowledged too. In some cases, widgets may slow down the page load or take away from the overall site experience rather than enhance it. However I encourage everyone to give some of the following chat widgets a try and make your own conclusions. Let's take a look at some of the top ones...
MeeboMe is the leader in the space. This spin-off of the original multiple client chat (Meebo) is a nice, simple chat widget. It features publisher status, user nickname editing, and sound control. Also be sure to check out MeeboRooms, launched earlier this year.
Plugoo is a slick little chat widget that enables you to talk with site visitors via your IM client. In other words, you can work as usual without having to keep an eye on the chat box. Then if someone initiates a chat, a message will pop up on your IM. Great concept.
There's been a lot of discussion over the past 24 hours on the new Techmeme Leaderboard, which is a list of the top 100 sources for the popular tech news aggregator - calculated over the past 30 days. The Leaderboard updates daily and each site is ranked with a "presence" indicator, defined as "the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period".
Read/WriteWeb was ranked #6 in the opening list and it has a "presence" of 1.90. As a publisher, I'm proud that R/WW is ranked so highly. To be placed ahead of BBC and Wall St Journal on such a list is awesome. Of course, there are biases in the Leaderboard, but Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera argues in his blog post that biases are present in any automated news aggregator or search engine. See also our own Marshall Kirkpatrick's critique about other aspects of the list. So it's not a perfect measurement, but in the niche of tech news I'd argue it's better than most. Indeed, if you look at how Google News ranks news sources - it doesn't even let R/WW and other 'new media' sites in, so there is a much larger bias right there. Slashdot also has an ongoing bias against blogs, preferring to link to old media sources.
Webmail.us, a business web email service, has just been acquired by leading web hosting company Rackspace for an undisclosed sum. We last covered Webmail.us in August last year as part of an overview of the web email market. At that point Webmail.us provided email hosting services to more than 23,000 small-medium businesses. Currently, over a year later, Webmail.us provides services to more than 72,000 businesses and 600,000 users. Also recently Webmail.us made the Inc 500 list as the #217 fastest growing private company in America.
Webmail.us already had a successful partnership with Rackspace - their entire email hosting infrastructure is hosted by Rackspace and Rackspace is their largest reseller. CEO Pat Matthews has a post about the sale, noting that "the market is really going to open up, leaders are going to emerge, and followers are going to fall behind." He said that Webmail.us decided to sell to "make sure we're positioned to be the leader in our space" (which is business web mail).
