Online BitTorrent client BitLet has released a new service that lets users stream MP3 and Ogg encoded music directly from torrent files. The new music feature, called westeam, works by prioritizing bits at the beginning of each track -- and then subsequent to the one you just listened to, but also gives preference to rare bits to achieve optimal speeds. WeStream is a Java applet that works in any browser that support Java.
The Canadian company AideRSS produces one of my favorite tools on the market right now. Their RSS feed filtering service is very useful in all kinds of circumstances. You can enter any RSS feed and it will score each item in the feed by number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, Diggs and inbound links it's received. You can then get a new feed of just the most popular items from your original feed.
I went out to dinner last night, and when I came home and switched on my TV, John McCain had already won the Republican primary in New Hampshire. But on the Democratic side, it was too close to call -- just about 2300 votes separated Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with the college town of Hanover still left to count. After I watched McCain's speech, I went downstairs to my office, and things were still too close to project a winner. I got absorbed in something and forgot to turn on the TV, but I kept my eye on a new site called Politweets.
When you go on vacation, you no longer pack canisters of film for taking vacation photos - you just pack a digital camera and a handful of batteries. If the hotel has wi-fi, you might even upload photos from the day's activities to flickr in the evening. However, when it comes time to send postcards back home, you still have to browse through the assorted offerings from the gift shop, emblazoned with hokey "wish you were here" sentiments overtop images that look nothing like the place you're visiting.
In this post we look at web 2.0 services that give you more options with digital photos - postalz and scrapblog.
This is a guest post by Nitin Karandikar, author of the Software Abstractions blog.
Recently I was looking at the log files for my blog, as I regularly do, and I was suddenly struck by the variety of search queries in Google from which users were being referred to my posts. I write often about the different varieties of search - including vertical search, parametric search, semantic search, and so on - so users with queries about search often land on my blog. But do they always find what they're looking for?
Our digital lifestyle network blog last100 has a great round-up of the latest announcements at CES. Steve O'Hear is seeing a lot of products that bridge the gap between the PC and TV, or bring Internet content directly to a television. Highlights include the SlingCatcher (Sling Media), D-Link’s newly launched PC-on-TV Player, TiVo Desktop 2.6 (TiVo), and Internet-connected TVs from Sharp, Samsung and Panasonic.
In October, Radiohead released their new album, In Rainbows, as an online download with a name-your-own pricing scheme -- you only paid if you wanted to, and only as much as you thought the album was worth. Our unscientific poll showed that a majority of ReadWriteWeb readers thought that downloadable albums were worth between $5-14 -- though we framed the question such that we can't make any determinations about how many people would actually be willing to pay that much.
The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.
Ah, what a difference a caucus makes. In November, when ABC and Facebook announced their partnership for US political coverage we, like many other tech pundits, expressed skepticism. We noted that polls on the Facebook politics section were drawing just around 1,000 participants -- "a microscopic number" compared to the 17 million US members of voting age on the site (now over 18 million). But just over a month later, things seem to have turned around completely.
Microsoft announced a $1.2 billion takeover offer for Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer. FAST's board of directors unanimously recommended that shareholders approve the deal, and 37% of the shareholders -- including the company's two largest institutional investors -- have already irrevocably accepted the offer.
