Sometimes, news on the web is noticeably slow - especially in the weekends. It's ironic in a way, considering that millions of articles get written everyday and many go unnoticed. To address this need, here are six social media sites to help you find more great content.
This is a guest post by Corvida, from the social media blog SheGeeks.
Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. The big news was Google App Engine - we provided extensive coverage and analysis. Also this week we looked into further use cases for Twitter, we analyzed the pros and cons of offline access to web apps, as well as why we need web apps on the desktop. We gave you seven tips to make the best use of your RSS Reader, we advised on the best places to find open data, and we looked at business development 2.0 and marketing 2.0 trends.
Lots of Internet TV-related coverage on our network blog last100 this week, including news that Blockbuster is readying a set-top box in junction with the company's recent acquisition of online movie service Movielink; a version of the BBC's TV catch-up service iPlayer is now available for the Nintendo Wii game console; and Joost competitor Babelgum is moving away from being purely a content distributor to also commissioning original and exclusive content of its own.
The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has apparently decided to end its policy of taking a "digital snapshot" of all public congressional and federal web sites after each congressional and presidential term. According to NARA, which is understandably drawing heat for the policy change, they shouldn't need to archive those web sites because federal agencies and congress should be doing their own archiving. I read about NARA after reading a very timely piece from Leland Rucker about the nature of information archiving in a totally digital world, and it got me wondering: what happens to all this content on the web 250 years in the future?
Robert Scoble blazed a big trail by blogging and producing video as a technical evangelist for Microsoft from 2003 through 2006. No longer at Microsoft, Scoble now produces media for media's sake at FastCompany.tv. Others have followed his lead, knowingly or not, and job titles like "social media evangelist" are no longer nearly as rare as they used to be.
Google will stop at nothing in its quest to index the world's information. Last year it ate through 100 exabytes of data, but there's still a lot that it can't get access to. Known as the deep web (or hidden web, or invisible web, etc.), it is estimated that the majority of online data is hidden safely from Google's prying eyes -- private intranets, unlinked pages, some non-textual content, and until today dynamic content returned via form input was all inaccessible to the search engine. Google today announced that its Googlebot web crawler would begin to fill out HTML forms and crawl the results.
Music futurist Gerd Leonhard has just released an informative video explaining what music 2.0 is and how the music industry should change to adapt to 'web 2.0' principles. The video is embedded below. Some of the themes are that control doesn't work (e.g. DRM and trying to control networking) and that music is meant to be shared. Even iTunes comes into some criticism - iTunes works great, says Leonhard, but it "is a locked community". Ultimately, Leonhard says that "open is king" and that "we have to give up on the idea of control and move to an open ecosystem in music." Check out the video!
I first used LinkedIn for business development and wrote about the experience here. In summary, it is one the best new sales tools since the rolodex - as Alex Iskold noted this week. But like a rolodex, it is only as good as the contacts in it and the skill of the person using it.
Recently I have been using it for headhunting. From talking to both Xing and LinkedIn management, I understand that headhunting is the primary use case - at least as a revenue driver for them.
Git is a decentralized version control system created by Linus Torvalds that is used by a number of open source projects, most notably perhaps the Linux kernel. GitHub is a new hosted Git repository service that's being called a "social network" for programmers and with good reason. It also already has some high profile projects of its own on board: Ruby on Rails, Capistrano, Merb, Prototype and Scriptaculous, among others. "[GitHub is] the way SourceForge should have been," gushed one beta tester.
The mobile version of the Firefox browser is now available for download in the form of an early prototype. This download of the browser, code-named "Fennec," is only intended for developers as it is still in the pre-alpha stages. It is also only recommended for Nokia N810 devices. Even so, the browser already shows a lot of promise.
