Widely respected web traffic analyst firm Hitwise has just issued a report that we find, frankly, impossible to believe. Hitwise says that last week Twitter saw more web traffic than Digg for the first time.
We've posted the numbers and charts below, along with some thoughts on how this may or may not be possible. You be the judge. We don't believe it though. Why is this important? Because if the leading microblogging service really topped the leading user-voted news site for eyeballs, that would say a lot about emerging new media paradigms.
Doing extensive usability studies has always been a problem for open source projects. Mozilla has decided to implement a new way of tackling this problem for its projects and is moving ahead with the Test Pilot project, which was first announced last year.
Test Pilot is currently only a "still-in-concept platform," but the plan is to build a representative sample of Firefox users that will be recruited to evaluate new interface concepts and features.
Besides email and photo sharing, storing documents in the cloud and syncing them between different computers is quickly becoming one of the most common uses of cloud computing. Syncplicity is one of the numerous entrants in this market, and while it is quite similar to many of its competitors, we have come to like it a lot thanks to its intuitive web interface and ease of use.
One feature still missing from Syncplicity, which came out of beta late last year, was a Mac client. We were able to get some invites to the private Mac beta of Syncplicity, however. You can claim yours at the bottom of this post.
Today Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. As several million people attended the inauguration in Washington D.C., Facebook and CNN invited the rest of the world to watch the moment online. Online visitors to CNN.com were able to use its video player to watch the live broadcast coverage of the event. We also saw what has be one of the most brilliant examples of the real-time web in action: next to the video, the Facebook status updates of those watching streamed by in the sidebar.
Barack Obama was just sworn in as President of the US and though he stumbled in repeating his oath, the speech that followed was delivered flawlessly and was widely praised around the web. (Several readers have told us that it wasn't Obama that stumbled, it was Justice Roberts.) There were quite a few concepts discussed that we suspect haven't been a part of past inaugural speeches. What words were used most often? We ran the full text of the speech through tag cloud generator Wordle.net for one view of the event, and just for the sake of historical context we ran George W. Bush's second inaugural speech through as well. Update: After one reader suggested it, we've also added word clouds from Bill Clinton's second inaugural speech and Reagan's first below. Second update: By reader request, we've added Lincoln's first and second inaugural speeches as well.
The most common words in the Obama and Bush speeches were dramatically different.
Although many of us have been enjoying the speedy new browser from Google, Google Chrome, it's far from perfect. Despite being released from beta status in December, the browser still lacks a handful of features that would make it more of a complete product. One such feature is the browser's lack of support for RSS feeds.
Here in the U.S., your choices in phones running Google's new Android operating system have been limited. If you weren't a fan of the T-Mobile G1 form factor - a design best for heavy texters thanks to its slide-out keyboard - you were pretty much out of luck. No more. Word has it that Samsung will soon be releasing their own Android smartphone for use on both the T-Mobile and Sprint carriers.
There was a time not so long ago when traditional media provided the primary vehicle for voicing "public opinion," how the average person felt about the world at large. But, today, as more and more people move online and begin sharing opinions, the "man on the street" has largely been subsumed by "the man or woman on the Web." Which is a step in the right direction. The problem now? Finding and aggregating those opinions. Public Sentiment, a new site designed to help provide an unfiltered view of opinions on a specific topic, could be the very lens needed to accurately analyze those varied opinions. Its inaugural experiment, "Farewell W, Aloha Obama," demonstrates the potential of the service.
For many of us, our tributaries of social data find their way into our lifestream, an aggregated collection of our online activities. More often than not, that stream appears as a collection of text entries: the most recent item followed by the second most recent, and so on. While the progression is obvious, what's not so clear is the passage of time. Those data points could be seconds apart - or months apart. Enter Dipity, a service that takes those moments in time and plots them along along a timeline, providing an entirely new take on the activities we're pursuing and how they relate.
On Tuesday, January 20th, 2009, America and the whole world will gather to watch Barack Obama be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America. Many have called Mr. Obama the Internet President because of the unprecedented way his campaign used the medium to raise funds, raise awareness, and ultimately outmaneuver John McCain. But what can we do now to help turn this country around? Read on for 7 things every one of us can do on the Internet to help Obama restore America.
