ReadWriteWeb

Similarr is a new search mashup that turns search results into highly targeted discussion forums. The site mashes search results from Live.com with a customized version of the open source phpBB forum to create a search engine the encourages discussion about its results. There is certainly room for improvement, but as a concept, Similarr might actually make some sense.

Open source wiki and application platform Deki Wiki, powered by MindTouch, is releasing a new version of its software today that makes it easy to switch between multiple languages for the content and interface of any page on a wiki. The company claims now to offer the first polyglot application on the web and it's something we think our international readers will really enjoy.

MindTouch also announced that Deki Wiki has been chosen as the new framework to power the Mozilla Developer Community site, some great validation for a company that often seems to stand so far out on the bleeding edge that it could make potential users feel uneasy.

Earlier this this year, we commented on the infamous Steve Jobs quote "...the fact is people don't read anymore," arguing that, people do read, they just prefer to do it online. However, in this transition from page to screen, a question has risen: are people really reading online content or just scanning page? Apparently, it's the latter.

When I was a kid, I made dumb videos that a total of 5 people actually watched -- me and the 4 other kids I made them with. But today, a kid with a funny video can be seen by millions of people, whether he is swinging a golf ball retriever or lip syncing to a German pop song. There is an Internet shooting star falling to earth every day. Someone creates a video that goes viral and generates millions of views, and for some this flashes and fades, but others are parlaying these flashes into commercial success.

According to web measurement firm Hitwise, MySpace commands 73.82% of all social networking traffic. The data comes from Hitwise's special social networking category, which tracks US traffic 57 leading social networks. MySpace took nearly 74% of all traffic to those sites in April, with Facebook second at 14.8% and MyYearBook third with 1.33%. Overall, social networking traffic is down 16% year-over-year.

Here at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco Neil Young just announced that his whole life's work will be made available on in a dynamically updating collection delivered on Blu-ray disk. After his Keynote announcement I was fortunate enough to participate in a small group interview with a handful of other bloggers. Young offered interesting replies to questions about Trent Reznor and music piracy, about MP3 sound quality and about the way the web enables his extensive work on electric cars.

The new browser-bookmarking service, iterasi, which we covered back in February of this year, has just launched their public beta today. This service is meant to complement, not compete with, today's standard lot of bookmarking tools, like del.ici.ous, ma.gnolia, and diigo, as iterasi doesn't simply save a URL, but instead provides you with a way to bookmark the "dynamic web."

I'm here at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco where Neil Young, legendary rocker and the provider of the soundtrack to my early 20's, is announcing a very cool project with Sun Microsystems. For the first time, Young's entire collection of published media will be available for purchase, beginning today with the first of five volumes.

Young's collected works after more than 40 years of making music and film would be a massive enough project - but the most interesting part of the announcement is that the media will be delivered on Blu-ray Disks that will check for updates when new content is available and download it to your local device.

See also our interview with Neil Young, done after his keynote presentation.

A new report from Royal Pingdom reveals that Twitter unsurprisingly led social networks in downtime for the first four months of 2008 with a total of 37 hours and 16 minutes. The good news is that even with all that downtime, that's still a 98.72% uptime percentage for the first third of the year -- which isn't terrible. Can we really complain about a free service thats "only" up nearly 99% of the time?

A new report from Forrester Research predicts that mashups will be coming to the enterprise in a big way -- to the tune of a $700 million market by 2013. Mashup platforms that make it easier for consumer to create mashup applications, such as Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, or Microsoft Popfly, are beginning to have analogues in the enterprise space. "Mashup platforms are in the pole position and ready to grab the lion's share of the market -- and an entire ecosystem of mashup technology and data providers is emerging to complement those platforms," says Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young.