Recently an expert tried to explain Do Not Call (lists of people who do not wish to receive calls from telemarketers), to telemarketing vendors. He waved two big tomes and explained that telemarketers need to adhere to the rules in both, or risk fines. Unfortunately the two tomes, from different regulators, were contradictory.
The EU-funded OpenKnowledge program is a smart toolkit designed to unlock the hidden resources of the web that can't be accessed by web sites and browsers alone. With a small, downloadable piece of Java code, users can coordinate and share information with each other more directly than through traditional means. To highlight the potential of the OpenKnowledge system, researchers have put it to work in three different areas: healthcare services, emergency management, and proteomics research.
It was two years ago that we first heard of Zigtag, a service that promised to "transform how people search, save and share knowledge & information." Now, after a nine-month private beta, this semantic tagging service has finally launched. But is Zigtag's bookmarking tool intelligent enough for 2009?
One our favorite blogs about consumer Internet trends, TrendsSpotting, has just published a presentation about social media trends. The predictions were gathered from social media influencers, including ReadWriteWeb. Check out the slides below, and also our post from yesterday 2009: Predictions Across the Web. And stay tuned for ReadWriteWeb's own annual predictions post, it's coming very soon!
When we first reviewed Mufin, a music recommendation service that is entirely based around algorithms that can automatically detect the similarities between different songs, we only gave it a pretty average review. Since then, however, Mufin has greatly improved its service and added Facebook and Myspace applications. The most interesting new product, however, is Mufin's iTunes plugin, which brings Mufin's recommendation engine to your own iTunes collection and allows you to create automatic playlists based solely on the musical similarities between the songs.
In our tests, Mufin often performed better than Apple's Genius feature, but for now, the plugin is only available for Windows.
The end of the year is typically a time for prediction posts. We have our own thoughts on what we expect the future to bring (which we will publish this week), but in this post we'll take a look at what some of our friends are discussing about the Web. While not everyone offers a prediction for 2009, we hope their wishes for the future of the Web and their thoughts on what's important right now inspire thought and discussion.
Twenty years after the release of the Morris Worm, one of the first worms discovered on the Internet, the Web has proven to be the primary place where bad guys lurk, looking for poorly secured websites to plant malicious code. And, they find plenty.
According to the 2009 Security Threat Report [PDF] from Sophos, one new infected Web page is discovered every 4.5 seconds. With that in mind, we thought we'd take a look at the top security threats you should be looking out for in 2009.
After World War 2, America built the infrastructure to deliver mass produced products, by mass transit for mass markets. We consumed along the arteries of this infrastructure, in supermarkets, fast food chains and airport malls. We have now passed the high water mark of this long distance, mass culture; the trend now is towards “re-localization”, where we are less dependent on the two dominant grids of the 20th Century - electric grid and interstate highways - as we rely increasingly on the digital grid/cloud.
Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Most people don't know how to write JavaScript, though, so we end up using the Greasemonkey scripts developed by other people who do. There are lots and lots of scripts that have been written and they are fun, useful and easy to run.
It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4-minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.
Just before the holidays, we reported that, based on the raw traffic to its site, Amazon looked to be well on its way to having a great Christmas season. According to a report from Amazon this morning, Amazon's 14th holiday season was indeed its 'best ever,' with 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on December 15 alone. However, while Amazon provided us with a lot of data about how many items it shipped, it did not make any announcements about its revenue or profit yet, which could potentially look less rosy.
