A large group of international tech rock stars are at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich today and friend of RWW Martin Källström of pre-launch search startup Twingly sent us a rough transcript of a particularly interesting panel this morning.
In this discussion, titled Humans Disrupting Algorithms, WIkipedia founder Jimmy Wales talks about his new search engine Wikia Search, Jason Calacanis talks about his human-powered search service Mahalo and there's cameos by Google bigwig Marissa Meyer and international man of mystery Michael Arrington. Wikia Search and Mahalo are taking very different approaches to search. It was an interesting enough conversation that I read it from start to finish and thought readers here might want to as well.
In post on his blog today, my friend Allen Stern takes issue with Digg winning the "Best User Generated Content Site" award at Friday night's Crunchies Awards. Allen, who provided the web with excellent live blogged coverage of the event based on the video stream describes the scene online after Digg's win: "The chat room went off on the selection simply because Digg is not a user-generated content site."
If you could capture and use the names, ages, genders and demonstrated interests of the specific people who visited your website - would you? A whole lot of people providing services online would. While we've covered the movement for standards-based Data Portability a lot here lately, the newly announced MyBlogLog API is an alternative path to similar ends being taken by a proprietary company. Announced last week just before the Yahoo! OpenID announcement, the MyBlogLog API could end up being of even greater importance. Really.
The New York Times ran two stories today affirming the usefulness of citizen journalists and microjournalism tools to the reporting of major news stories. In October we reported that citizen journalism had gone undeniably mainstream after both Reuters and CNN embraced citizen journalism techniques and amateur reporting itself in the coverage of important news stories (perhaps most notably at the time, the California wildfires). Today the Times writes in two separate stories how techniques and technologies pioneered by citizen journalism are changing the way we get news.
paidContent reports that Finnish handset maker, Nokia, is in talks with Facebook to put social networking on the company's mobile phones. The placement of Facebook on handsets could be "as prominent as the YouTube button on the main screen of iPhone," says paidContent. As part of the deal, Nokia could could also purchase a stake in Facebook. Though the talks are at a very early stage, as paidContent says, there are a number of reasons why this makes sense for both companies.
According to the New York Times, MySpace is planning to launch a startup incubator that would nurture the development of new web companies, presumably to feed its growing widget universe. "[MySpace CEO Chris] DeWolfe is nurturing another project that promises to help MySpace grow: an incubator that will form new companies and function like a start-up," writes Brian Stelter in today's paper. "The company, tentatively named Slingshot Labs, will be financed by the News Corporation but exist as a separate company. Mr. DeWolfe anticipates that it will nurture four or five consumer Web sites at a given time."
Flock, the Social Web Browser, has announced that the Flock 1.1 beta will launch in just two weeks. The browser, built on Firefox code, is designed for social interaction on the web, with features built into the browser just for this purpose. Flock chose last week's Macworld conference to show off the new version. With the upcoming release, several new features will be added, including Yahoo and Gmail support, Picassa integration, and a friend activity feed.
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: we covered the big news coming out of Apple's annual conference, Macworld; ReadWriteWeb co-hosted the Crunchies on Friday, recognizing the best in Startups over 2007; Alex Iskold wrote about 'The danger of Free'; we provided in-depth reviews of Earthmine (a Crunchies winner), Sharpcast, Xobni; we took a look at the burgeoning lifestreaming market.
The Crunchies event last night in SF was a blast. Thanks to everyone involved, but especially Michael Arrington, Heather Harde and the team from TechCrunch - who put in a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make this a success.
I also must apologize for publishing the list of winners at 7.30pm PST, just as the show started. Allen Stern and others (e.g. on Twitter) noted their disappointment about that. I'm very sorry, it was a mistake on my part and due to a miscommunication among the Crunchies team.
While the Crunchies award ceremony is in full swing at the historic Herbst Theater in downtown San Francisco, we've got the winners for you right here. Over 100,000 votes were cast, and many of the races were very tight, but in the end there can be only one winner (per category). So without further ado, the winners of the first annual Crunchies Awards are...
