I'm very pleased to announce that Marshall Kirkpatrick has joined ReadWriteWeb in a full-time capacity, as our new Vice President of Content Development. The grand title reflects Marshall's senior position within ReadWriteWeb, where he will be responsible for driving a lot of our upcoming content developments. These include premium content, publishing system enhancements, and more magic things. Marshall will also continue to be ReadWriteWeb's Lead Writer, so don't worry his writing isn't taking a backseat at all. He will be going full-time at RWW sometime over the next couple of weeks.
AOL Senior VP of Programming Marty Moe held a conference call for all the bloggers in the Weblogs Inc. network this afternoon, a week after cutbacks and work slowdowns across the network put staff into a panic and shed a negative light on the business of blogging in general. Moe told staff that in fact, Weblogs Inc. is growing fast, seeing record traffic and consistent revenue growth.
Immediate staff reactions though have been anything but positive. While Moe tells a story of aggressive growth, we're hearing that the bloggers who made the business are feeling manipulated and let down.
The popular social bookmarking service Del.icio.us launched a complete redesign of its service today. Ever since it was bought by Yahoo in 2005, the company added very few new features and the redesign had been rumored to be in the works for almost a year now. The new design and features are mostly focused on enhancing the speed of the service and improving its search capabilities. Del.icio.us can also now be reached at delicious.com and will start using this as its standard URL.
Tests on Twitter, wiki-style study groups, students quizzed on yesterday's most popular YouTube videos and the biggest hits on Del.icio.us/Popular - is this what the future of education is going to look like?
In some journalism schools around the US, it just might be. Would that really be so bad? Though many may disagree with us, we think there is some merit to teaching new media in journalism and other schools.
iLink, a social network analytics technology from SRI International has recently been integrated into three online communities used by the military: Platoon Leader, Company Command, and the Family Readiness Group. The iLink technology improves the way the military community members share critical information across several different interest areas - from battlefield problem solving to supporting military families. Here, we take a look at the technology the military is using and how it can impact the future of social networking.
We reported on the controversy around Google's Street View in the UK earlier this month. At that time, a number of UK privacy activists had raised concerns over the privacy implications of Street View and challenged Google's ability to automatically blur faces in the photographs used in the service. According to the BBC, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) investigated these concerns and has now announced that it was "satisfied" with Google's ability to blur out faces and registration plates.
Ever since our cell phones started shipping with web browsers built-in, security companies have been warning us about the threat of mobile viruses and malware. While this was likely just an attempt to broaden their reach by selling us anti-virus protection for our phones, some recent numbers make us wonder if there's perhaps some truth to their claims.
One of the conferences we're supporting this year is Defrag. The topics that Defrag explores are very close to our hearts - OpenSocial, Attention, Next-Level Discovery, The Implicit Web, and more. One of this year's Defrag sessions that caught my attention is entitled: Fixing Foundational Information Channels -- Email, Calendars, RSS, etc.
After 4 months of private, invite-only alpha testing, social news network Socialmedian is now open and available in a public beta. During the last 4 months, Socialmedian has taken its motto of shipping fast and iterating faster quite seriously. Today, the service looks nothing like it did 4 months ago when we first reviewed it. Since then, Socialmedian has added a large number of new features and made the UI a lot more functional.
My first post for ReadWriteWeb, just over 1 year ago, started with the premise that search was “game over”, that Google had won and the only space left was (re)search - what users do after the basic search.
None of the search start-ups since then has made me change my mind. None of the cool new user interface features or ways of expressing your search intentions matter one iota, if the core search proposition is not better from day one. Well, enter the latest contender: Blekko.
