ReadWriteWeb

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, is set to begin shortly at 3.30pm PST (6.30pm EST). This week's topic is, you guessed it, Chrome. We will be discussing Google's new open source browser and its potential impact in the browser market. We have 3 very special guests on the show to discuss this: Aaron Boodman from Google, a Software Engineer on the Chrome team; Chris Messina from Vidoop (formally of Firefox and Flock); and Alex Russell from The Dojo Toolkit. We encourage you to listen to the show live and ask questions via the chat.

Electronic Arts (EA) is the leading developer and publisher of some of the most popular games. EA has an impressive track record of releasing hit after hit with 27 titles that have sold over 1 million units. They company has a history of great franchises like the Madden NFL series, The Sims, and Need for Speed. Their streak may now be slowing down. It seems the giant has hit a snag with the recent release of its highly anticipated Spore game. Complaints are rolling in from consumers and Spore fans are beyond disappointed.

Google just announced an interesting update to its Google News Archive, which, starting today, will not only feature the electronic text of a lot more historical newspapers, but also a scanned copy of the actual paper. While having access to the text itself is already great for researchers, having access to an article in the context of the whole paper is even more useful. For now, however, only a select group of newspapers are available in this form and a lot of the historical material is still stuck behind pay walls.

OpenOffice, which, according to our latest poll, is one of the most popular word processors among our readers, just announced the first release candidate for OpenOffice 3. This is the first major release of OpenOffice since 2005. Most of the updates are a lot more subtle than Microsoft's switch to the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, but the team has added a lot of new functionality and user interface enhancements to the OpenOffice suite that make this a worthwhile release for those who already use OpenOffice.

Yahoo! may be struggling financially, but when it comes to supporting the rest of the web with standards and generous links - they are in the lead among the the big search and advertising companies. Yahoo! Buzz has driven millions of viewers to independent blogs writing about the news of the day and now the very popular Yahoo! News appears to be experimenting with putting links to timely blog posts on every news story page throughout the site. Those links could be to your blog.

See the URL hack or the archived link below to find out how to view this new design.

At DEMO08, a new type of job web site launches today: PaidInterviews. Unlike today's traditional (ahem, boring) job sites like Monster.com or HotJobs, PaidInterviews combines social networking with a more sophisticated job matching algorithm to deliver a Web 2.0-style web site that will appeal to today's youngest career-seekers: Generations X and Y.

Recently, Google's photo sharing app, Picasa, was updated to a new version that now does facial recognition and tagging. There are also rumors that the soon-to-launch next version of Windows Live Photo Gallery will do the same. Today at DEMO08, new Mac software, iLovePhotos, claims to do the same. Unfortunately, their interpretation of "automatic facial recognition" leaves a little something to be desired. However, some of their other features like automatic sharing and slideshows look pretty great.

The new surge in Enterprise 2.0 technologies is giving companies, especially small-to-medium sized businesses, more alternatives when it comes to company intranet portals for team collaboration and project management. In fact, it has taken those portals, once only available behind the firewall, and put them online as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. One such SaaS portal for information sharing among company employees launches today at DEMO08: Qtask, a project-centric collaboration environment.

We all know that when we're driving, we shouldn't be on our cell phones chatting away or, even worse, texting. Yet we do it anyway. The problem has become so bad that some states here in the U.S. passed legislation restricting cell phone use while driving or enforcing hands-free use only. California, for example, recently enacted a law prohibiting handheld use while driving (but strangely, texting is OK). Other states also have similar laws on the books. With numerous voice-dialing features and utilities for all sorts of handset models, going hands-free has been relatively easy. That is, unless you need to get directions.

For iPhone users, a new app called Say Where from Dial Directions can help you get directions and other location-based content just by speaking to your phone.

This week we're running a prediction challenge, on the topic of browsers. Google's new browser, Chrome (our coverage), is sure to take market share from the existing players. So we want you to help us predict: which of the following browsers will lose the most share (in percentage terms) between August 2008 and December 2008? Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or a tie or other? You can cast your prediction by visiting RWW Predictions. It'll be interesting to see what the ReadWriteWeb community thinks will happen!