ReadWriteWeb

"The electrifying redemption of America's revolutionary declaration that all human beings are free and equal, would not have been possible without the additional empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with the Internet," Al Gore said during his speech at last week's Web 2.0 Summit.

In the first of three videos (embedded below), the former vice president and chairman of Current TV discussed among other things: World 2.0, politics, the ongoing fight to save our planet, the importance of democratizing the television media, and the significance of "puppies having a purpose."

This week the ReadWriteWeb team was in force at the Web 2.0 Summit, an annual event that covers the state of the Web industry. This year's theme was 'Web meets world'. ReadWriteWeb had access to video coverage of the event, via TechWeb (one of the producers of the event along with O'Reilly Media). We've got a widget below that has links to all of the main sessions, with a few more probably to come over the next day or so. In this week's Weekly Wrapup, our regular newsletter, we provide a summary of our posts and video.

After a year in the making, and with very little fanfare, Microsoft last month launched Small Basic, a free programming language aimed at kids. Unlike Scratch and Alice, tools designed for kids to learn programming in a 'codeless' environment, Small Basic is essentially a small version of the BASIC language.

While Google Docs has been ramping up recently, it seems the Google Pack has been cutting back. Sun's $70 productivity suite StarOffice, which was added to the free Google Pack just over a year ago, is no longer available as part of the Google Pack download.

LimeWire - an eight-year old P2P service that manages to survive despite the best efforts of the RIAA - isn't resting on its laurels. In fact, despite the turmoil in which they find themselves embroiled, the company continues to make efforts to improve the service.

In March of this year, they launched an iTunes-esque music store. Now, according to the LA Times, LimeWire plans to add more social features to its service. Better late than never.

Yesterday, an all-star panel at the TechWeb/O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit took a closer look at the implications of the current shift towards cloud computing and discussed the possible business models around it. The panel featured Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch, Salesfore.com's CEO Marc Benioff, Google's Dave Girouard, and VMware's CEO Paul Maritz. The panel was moderated by Tim O'Reilly.

What hot events should I attend in my industry? That's a frequently asked question in many professional conversations. LinkedIn today offers a great way to answer that question with the launch of its new Events feature.

LinkedIn Events offers not just event search, but recommendations based on the contents of your profile, sophisticated information about attendees and updates about the events in your LinkedIn update feed. Eight thousand events are already listed and event organizers can ad more.

Popular online activity-monitoring service FriendFeed just announced IM integration and the way they implemented it is really smart. I'm now getting an IM every time someone comments on one of my items in FriendFeed, and I can reply with a comment on that very same item from inside my IM client. It's a great way to keep on top of conversations and keep them flowing.

If you've never used FriendFeed before, it's a must-see application for sharing and discussing cool stuff on the web. This new feature addition is going to make it even better.

According to a recent guest post on the Hitwise blog by Dustin Woodward, a Seattle-based SEO and web analytics specialist, the long tail of search might be even long than many of us assumed. Looking at Hitwise's data set of search terms used in the last three months, Woodard calculates that the top 1,000 search terms only account for about 10% of all search traffic. Woodard found about 14 million distinct search terms in Hitwise's data, with 'myspace' still being the most popular search query.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer is always good for a controversial statement. His latest came during a Q&A session after a speech to developers in Sydney, Australia. After a question about the relevance of Internet Explorer, Ballmer commented that Microsoft "may take a look" at using the open source browser engine WebKit for Internet Explorer. While this was surely just a throw-away comment, the tech blogosphere immediately jumped on it.

At another meeting in Sydney, Ballmer also announced that Microsoft was definitely not interested in reconsidering an acquisition of Yahoo.