Open source wiki vendor MindTouch is releasing a series of major new features Monday and some of them are quite interesting. People used to talk about MindTouch for its outlandish stunts - like working with nutball John Gotts on the short-lived Wiki.com platform and hiring a Bono impersonator to walk the exhibit floor at DEMO. Those days seem like the distant past as now the MindTouch software gets attention on its own.
Ian Rogers, VP Video and Media Applications at Yahoo! (prior to that GM of Yahoo! Music) has just published an epic post based on a talk he gave at a music industry conference in December. In it he outlines his vision for an open Media Web. It's very long, but is an excellent overview of how current Web music and video trends are slowly usurping the 'old media' world of the record companies and TV networks. His central theme is that "there is more opportunity in leveraging the scale of the Web than trying to create scarcity." He says that we can "do this together by creating a loosely-coupled value chain including users as value creators."
There is a brilliant post on Fred Wilson's blog
called What My Kids Tell Me About The Future of Media.
In the post he analyzes the habits of his teenage children. From movies, to TV shows, to books and video games, he looks at their behavior to understand where we are heading. While this is of course a biased sample, the exercise is very insightful.
I had a similar idea independently. My sister Julia was one of the first users of Facebook. She is now a senior at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University and will be graduating in May. I thought it would be interesting to interview her about the Facebook and her experiences with it over the years. What follows is the 15 question interview.
One of the highlights of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) each year is Bill Gates' keynote speech, available here as a webcast. Every year ReadWriteWeb analyzes Gates' keynote, highlighting the main themes and trends that he discusses. This year there were a slew of products and partnerships announced. It was less futuristic vision and more beta products and what's coming in 2008. In other words, it was much less about Internet-connected fridges, and more about what you can do now on your Xbox 360.
Yahoo! announced tonight that it will be turning its mobile service, Yahoo! Go, into an open platform for 3rd party developers. Unlike Google's Android OS, the Yahoo! Go platform will work on more than 250 mobile devices that Go already works on.
PaidContent's MocoNews points out that though Go "comes preloaded on some phones made by Motorola, LG, Samsung and Nokia, carriers in the United States strip the software from the phones."
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
Highlights this week: Richard MacManus ended 2007 with a review of the top 10 Web Tech stories of the year. Marshall Kirkpatrick produced an awesome toolkit to keep track of Web Tech trends in 2008; he also showed how to fall in love with tagging again and asked some big questions on privacy in the Web age. Josh Catone offered a guide to Online Giving to start the new year and he explored how the Web is affecting the US presidential primaries.
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Radiohead's widely heralded experiment with free downloads plus a premium package and request for donations (effectively) remains shrouded in mystery, but Trent Reznor and Saul Williams released some numbers this week about a similar experiment. Those numbers indicate that very few people want to pay for recorded music these days.
Yesterday, we wrote that if the web were an indicator of political results, Ron Paul and Barack Obama would likely be squaring off in the US presidential elections next November. But with the first state contest out of the way, it looks like the web was only half right (any maybe didn't have much to do with it at all). Obama, who was in a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards according to pre-caucus polls, convincingly defeated his rivals. Paul, however, finished fifth -- exactly where he was polling (I incorrectly used his national poll average yesterday as his Iowa poll numbers), and still no where near the winner, Mike Huckabee, who collected 34% of the vote to Paul's 10%.
Kevin Kelly may be best known as the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, but he's also a long-time blogger and the author of numerous books. One of those books, True Films, has just been updated for a third edition. The book collects Kelly's 200 favorite documentaries reviewed on his site of the same name. "I only review films I love and believe others will enjoy. Merely good films are left unmentioned," says Kelly. Previous editions of the book have been sold via Amazon, Lulu, or as a paid download via Kelly's own site. That the book was updated a second time is unremarkable. What is noteworthy, is that Kelly is giving the book away for free as a PDF and monetizing it with contextual text advertising.
