ReadWriteWeb

CenterNetworks reported yesterday on the launch of the new TotalWeb tracking service from Nielsen, which includes mobile traffic along with desktop PC traffic in its measurement of top Internet properties. When including mobile traffic, says Nielsen, top Internet sites can extend their reach an average of 13%. Though TotalWeb only covers about "200 leading Internet sites" (ironic for a product called TotalWeb), the data is nonetheless interesting.

A couple of weeks ago we held a competition, asking you to tell us what web 2.0 apps most excite you currently. We had a great response, with 113 comments. I decided to list each web app mentioned in a spreadsheet and count up the most popular. What surprised me was the number of web apps that got at least one mention: 161. No doubt some of those were left by the developers themselves, but many were left by seemingly passionate users. The most popular were the usual suspects: Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Google Reader. The full list after the break...

According to a Nick O'Neill at the Social Times blog, MySpace is charging app developers for the "featured" spots in its App Gallery, which it officially launched last week. The Gallery has featured spots for applications on its main page and on each of 22 category pages. O'Neill is reporting that the price of advertising on the featured spots is between $50,000 and $100,000 per week.

There's just a few hours left in what should be an international holiday - RSS Awareness Day. Thought up by the good folks at DailyBlogTips.com and unknown until this morning to even RSS forefather Dave Winer, RSS Awareness Day is a fantastic idea. May 1st is a lot of things already but what the heck, let's pile another one on. We'd like to take a few minutes to reflect on the world-changing tool that RSS is, and consider how different our lives would be without it.

If you're even peripherally involved in the social news space you are probably familiar with the rather rocky relationship that Digg has with its core community. Fueled partly by a need to counter false accusations from disgruntled community members who claim that Digg is rigged (i.e. that a core group of users decide what content is promoted), partly by the desire to encourage non-core members to participate more passionately, and partly by a need to affect a level of diversity and equality that would appear promising to potential acquirers, Digg has changed its algorithm again and again to artificially favor certain categories over others (i.e. world news and politics over technology) and to favor relatively new users over long-time, active users.

Social news site Digg announced today that it has added semantic markup to fields throughout its site as well as adding support for a handful of key microformats. By adding RDFa and DublinCore markup to news item pages, Digg will now make its content far more searchable by semantically aware search engines.

Combined with microformats that will structure signification of identity and social connections, the new structure of the site could enable any number of interesting mashup possibilities.

One of the highlights last week at Web 2.0 Expo was the launch of Microsoft's new cloud computing play, Live Mesh. Mesh is a new development platform for syncing user data between the desktop and the Web, and across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but it'll support mobile, Mac computers and other devices in the future). It can sync data for single users, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users. Currently Live Mesh is in "technology preview", so it is not a finished product. Even so, we couldn't help but notice the overlap between Live Mesh and a number of Windows Live products.

A report on BBC's technology program, Click, has exposed yet another security flaw in Facebook - one that could comprise users' privacy. This particular hack involves using a Facebook application to steal a users personal information - and the information of all their friends - without the user's knowledge.

Yahoo! Buzz, Yahoo!'s Digg-killer social news site, has updated to add widgets, new RSS feeds, and an indicator of who first buzzed a story. Buzz, which is currently in beta, has also recently added a new round of publishers (including ReadWriteWeb) and says it has sent out over 50 million referrals since opening in February.

Back in February, we covered the first major seller strike on eBay, in which a large group of eBay's PowerSellers launched a week-long boycott of the site in an effort to have their voices heard. The sellers, who were unhappy with recent changes to listing prices and other policies, claimed some success and even USA Today reported a 13% drop in sales. However, eBay denied the boycott had any impact whatsoever on their business. This time the boycott will involve both eBay buyers and sellers, and, unlike the first, no end date has been set.