Thank you to our sponsors, for supporting our mission to provide in-depth coverage of Web apps and trends. To enquire about sponsor slots on ReadWriteWeb in November, email us for a Media Kit.
NEW: we now include RSS advertising as part of our main Sponsor package.
Why sponsor ReadWriteWeb? It is one of the most popular blogs in the world, according to Technorati, and reaches an influential audience. Our site is read by tech and media professionals, early adopters, developers, designers, analysts, CIO's, VC's, media execs, leading thinkers. Email us now for more details. Here are our current sponsors...
The internet is really exciting. There's a whole lot of information on it - an overwhelming amount, even. Years ago we first looked at it in monochrome text, then we started looking at it through a search box on an empty white page. What's next? Is it huge War Games style multi-monitor displays? A swirling UI somewhere between Tom Cruise in Minority Report and David Bowie in Labrynth?
Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now!
Yahoo's SearchMonkey platform allows publishers to easily write applications that integrate structured data from their own sites into Yahoo's search results. Most of these applications still have to be turned on explicitly by the user, but Yahoo has also started to integrate some of them into its regular search results. Today, Yahoo turned on results from the Citysearch and Zagat SearchMonkey applications for all users.
Semantinet today announced the launch of its first product, headup.com. Headup is a browser extension that cross-references data from all your social networks, including Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, Last.fm, Digg, and FriendFeed. Headup integrates directly into these sites and allows you to quickly get more information about your friends' activities on other networks. The extension only works in Firefox and is based on Silverlight 2, which Microsoft just released this week.
Semantinet provided us with 400 invites for our readers. You can find more details about how to claim yours at the end of this post.
Calling all entrepreneurs! On Tuesday, October 21 at 11am PT/2pm ET, we're partnering with leading entrepreneur and strategy consultant Sramana Mitra to bring you a Web 3.0 product strategy roundtable online - using Dimdim's open source web conferencing platform. During the 60-minute session, entrepreneurs are invited to pitch Sramana their product ideas in a 3-minute presentation. She will review the material in real-time and provide 3-minutes of feedback on each plan.
The session is open to 500 people but only the first 10 to sign up have the opportunity to pitch Sramana. To register and find specific submission details, please visit here.
Google today updated its iGoogle homepage by improving its integration Google Reader, Gmail, and Google Finance. These gadgets can now make use of iGoogle's canvas feature, which allows a gadget to take up the whole screen. This is especially useful for the Google Reader and Gmail gadgets, which now bring almost all of the features of the actual services to iGoogle.
Google has also updated the iGoogle interface and a number of content providers have updated their gadgets to make better use of the canvas view as well.
International recommendation technology provider Strands has announced the five finalists in the Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-Ups. From music to video to pharmaceutical drug development recommendations, these plucky startups from all around the world will now present at the Association for Computing Machinery's Recommender Systems 2008 conference in Switzerland and one will be offered a $100k investment from Strands.
In a world more swamped with content options every day, recommendation technology is poised to make a huge difference in our experience online. We identified recommendation tech as one of the 5 most important trends for 2008 but we may have jumped the gun just a little bit. Below is a quick profile of each of the five Strands finalists working to bring more of this paradigm into the present market, followed by our thoughts on which one we're most interested in.
On Tuesday, Flock revealed the new version of their social browser, Flock 2.0. At the time, the company made a point to mention that most Firefox extensions would work in their browser, too, including one of our favorites, Greasemonkey. However, yesterday, Flock Community Ambassador Evan Hamilton sent out an email to all Flock developers about some changes the company had decided to make. The email made it clear that Flock had not just decided to support Firefox add-ons, they were killing all the Flock-specific add-ons, too.
A new tool for businesses dealing with the issue of multilingual communications was launched this week from a company called SDL. The SDL Automated Translation Solutions tool attempts to solve the language barrier problem by providing instant translations of web content, Microsoft Office documents, instant messages, and emails. It also allows for integration of automated translation into corporate intranet infrastructures and business applications. Has the global language barrier just been broken?
Back in the day, online display advertisements used to be all the rage. And then Google AdWords came along and blew the lid off of online advertising with its simple text-based ads and its cost-per-click model. Advertisers were able to quickly create a terse, compelling chunk of text. Users were clicking. Revenues were rolling. All was right with the world.
But recently, something changed. Now, we're suddenly seeing a renaissance for the display ad. Today, Google is getting into the mix with the release of do-it-yourself display ads.
