One of the big trends in 2008 has been the emergence of what I call Semantic Apps - a kind of 'Web 2.0 Meets Semantic Web' app typified by startups like Twine, Hakia, Quintura, Powerset and others. Another growing trend is health 2.0, web-based health apps and services. What's interesting is that those two trends are crossing over, with semantic health search engines beginning to make an impact.
Two such apps to cross our desk lately were 1) CureHunter, which claims to be able to find cures for diseases using semantic technologies; and 2) Go3R, an app that claims to provide information transparency "for the prevention of animal testing".
Twittermethis (as in, "Riddle me this") is a new Twitter marketing experiment from blogger Jim Kukral. The idea is simple: Everyday Kukral asks his followers on @twittermethis a question. The first correct response to come back to him is awarded $5 via PayPal. Why? Jim's motivation for the project was to see how successful he could be at using Twitter as a marketing vehicle. So far, about two weeks after launching, he has just over 300 followers. But Twittermethis is an excellent example of the kind of marketing Twitter is perfect for.
Today, Last.fm is announcing some stats on their free streaming radio service and its impact on music sales. Contrary to what the labels would have you believe, it appears that free music is, in fact, good for the industry, leading to increased revenue for Last.fm's partners, like Amazon and iTunes, who are benefiting from January's launch of the site's free on-demand music service.
With diesel prices in the US hovering at just under $4/gallon nationally -- up over a dollar from last year -- independent truckers especially are starting to feel pain at the pump as operating costs are driven higher and higher. One idea to combat the all-time high fuel prices that's apparently being kicked around inside the trucking community is a protest strike. As we're seeing with a growing number of social movements, the organization of this idea seems to be coming together through online channels like social networks and forums.
Today, a story on Techmeme caught our eye. It was entitled "We Need a Wikipedia for data," and the article, written by X-Googler Bret Taylor, discussed the difficulty of finding open data sets on the internet, something which could spur innovation, allowing programmers to build new applications the likes of which have never been seen before. What was interesting about this story, in addition to, obviously, the concept of a Data Wiki itself, was the amazing and insightful commentary around this concept, not just on the blog, but all over the net, something which led to the discovery of some pretty good data sources that are already available.
Kip Kniskern over at the LiveSide blog spotted a Microsoft job advert that appears to give some insight into a cloud computing platform under development at Redmond that could compete with Google's just released App Engine or Amazon's suite of web services. The utility computing platform, codenamed "Red Dog" according to the job ad, is under development at Microsoft's Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team and aims to see a version one release within the "coming year." What little info is provided by the job posting is rather obscure, but there are a few juicy tidbits to be had.
The new Google Gadget Builder for Organizations looks like the easiest way there is to build a widget for webpages or a gadget for iGoogle. Intended for nonprofit organizations, the Gadget Builder lets widget authors combine RSS feeds, YouTube video playlists and links to donate or join the email list serve for your organization.
That sounds great, until you start kicking the tires. On the same week Google launched it's ballyhooed App Engine, which offers powerful Google-style development architecture and gobs of free hosting and scaling - nonprofits get stuck with a substandard builder for widgets that Google won't even host for them.
Earlier today our Josh Catone interviewed 37Signal founder Jason Fried about the striking similarities between one of Google's App Engine demos, HuddleChat (a real-time chat application) and the Campfire app from 37Signals. Fried told RWW that "we're flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we're just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout". He went on to say that "we thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for." Well Fried's protests seem to have worked, as Google has now taken down HuddleChat.
Today, Adobe is releasing the 1.0 version of its Media Player (AMP) software to the public. The player, which is an offline Flash video manager comparable to the Veoh player, was first released as a beta on the Adobe Labs site last September.
AMP runs on Adobe's cross browser Adobe Integrate Runtime (AIR), which saw its 1.0 release in February. AMP is available immediately as a free download for Windows and Mac from the official site.
Fifteen or so years into the evolution of the web, we already have many of the key ideas and technologies in place to start describing and sharing personal preference information - or what we might colloquially call "taste" - in order to personalize web experiences. So, why haven't we yet seen widespread adoption of web personalization? Mostly because user expectations and online business models haven't yet evolved to the point that user-controlled, ‘open taste’ sharing is a viable option. However, the dataportability.org initiative suggests that we may have reached a turning point.
