ReadWriteWeb

Swirrl is a wiki-like application that was built using Semantic Web technologies and launched as a beta last week. We heard about it in the comments to our post about the lack of commercial RDF applications on the Web.

As with most Semantic Web apps, it's a little difficult to describe what Swirrl is. On its homepage Swirrl is said to be "like a wiki, but better." The further explanation is that it's a web application that "allows your team to store, share, edit and analyze information." Basically its a data collaboration app. The main feature of Swirrl is a wiki interface, for editing web pages. But it also has spreadsheet and database functionality too.

From the dynamics of social networks to market bubbles, science has a lot to say about the world of technology.

One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of a clockwork Universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled world of Quantum Mechanics. The new world is the one where Godel forever cut hopes for completeness in mathematics and Turing showed that computation, like the future, is fundamentally unpredictable. Despite these unexpected setbacks, modern science is wonderful, powerful and thought provoking - and relevant to technologists.

In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blogsearch just relaunched and looks radically different. Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier) - with the hottest topics from the blogosphere aggregated on the front page. Readers can drill down in 11 different categories, from technology, business, sports and entertainment. Google says you can use Blogsearch to see what the world is talking about.

The user interface isn't nearly as nice as leading tech blog memetracker Techmeme, but the new Blogsearch has some major advantages.

This week we interviewed one of the founders of online music service last.fm, Richard "Mr Scrobble" Jones. We wanted to find out last.fm's reaction to the launch of MySpace Music and the rise of Imeem, discuss business models in online music, and find out what's new at last.fm. We're running the interview in 3 parts, over 3 days. See also Part 2, on business models and Part 3, on design and features.

We started out by asking about the increasing competition in online music this year.

Music-based social networking site Imeem has launched a re-design, which according to a blog post by founder/CEO Dalton Caldwell makes it "easier for you to discover and enjoy new music on imeem". Imeem has been growing its market share steadily over the past year and its licensing deals with all 4 major record labels makes it unique among online music services (both MySpace and last.fm have only 3 of them). But one of the few issues that Imeem has had up till now is a kludgy design that makes it difficult to navigate and a bit of an eyesore - not unlike MySpace's design in fact. This re-design aims to change that.

Note-taking and Optical Character Recognition service Evernote may not have a whole lot of users yet, but the users it does have absolutely love it. There's a whole lot more to love, and more reasons to use Evernote, with a slew of announcements the company made today.

Freshly announced were support for automation through scripting, full XML data imports and exports and the much anticipated Application Programming Interface (API) that will let 3rd parties integrate Evernote into their applications.

The all-too contentious relationship between Apple the developers who build apps for the iPhone has gotten a little friendlier this morning with an announcement that Apple will drop the requirement that developers sign a Nondisclosure Agreement regarding the software. NDAs are, by their nature, threatening, awkward and unfriendly. Sometimes they are necessary but when concerning software that thousands of people are developing on - an NDA probably isn't very realistic, either.

Shouts of joy rang out through the iPhone dev community this morning when the announcement appeared on the Apple site.

Mumboe isn't just another enterprise collaboration suite. Instead, they focus on doing one thing and doing it well: making business agreements searchable. That's a very unique need they fill, which is why is why they already have 3000 customers using their free Express solution after only having launched earlier this spring. To compete with the handful of other vendors in this narrow space, Mumboe has now added a new feature called On-Demand Contract Intelligence, which takes advantage of the service's semantic processing engine to deliver something the others don't: automatic extraction of data.

At the Flash on the Beach 08 conference being held in Brighton, England, Adobe's Senior Director of Engineering, Paul Betlem, confirmed that a Flash Player is in development for the iPhone. The information was provided in answer to a direct question from an audience member during the Town Hall meeting sessions held during the conference, historically a good source of Adobe news.

RDF is the cornerstone of The Semantic Web, yet there still very few commercial RDF apps.

In the latest issue of Nodalities, a magazine about the Semantic Web by UK company Talis, there is an article by Talis CTO Ian Davis about the state of Semantic Web applications. Davis says that we're still in "Generation Zero" of the Semantic Web, because there are relatively few compelling apps. Specifically he notes that "there are still only a handful of applications that incorporate RDF at their heart and none of these are using the full potential of the Semantic Web." RDF is the Semantic Web's equivalent of the Web's HTML - its chief characteristic is the ability to ascribe meaning to data.