One of the great things about the web today is that you can choose from hundreds of services that will host your blogs, lifestreams, photos, videos, and music. One disadvantage of this, however, is that you typically have very little control over the actual experience. You can't, for example, make changes to themes on Wordpress.com or customize the way your pictures are shown on Flickr. However, thanks to a large number of open source projects, you could do all of this if you hosted your own blog, photo gallery, or mixtape service. In this post, we will show you how to do that and which services we like to run on our own domains.
Next Tuesday, the eyes of the United States - and likely the world - will be on Washington, DC, as Barack Obama takes the oath of office to become the 44th President of the United States. Attendance is likely to dwarf any presidential inauguration in history - with estimates currently predicting at least one million people at the event. Regardless of the attendance, one thing is for sure: with nearly ubiquitous access to cameras and video equipment, this will be the most well-documented inauguration, ever. Now, the Microsoft Photosynth team has announced that they will be making the event even more memorable - by creating a three-dimensional "synth" of the inauguration from your photos.
The era of dominance is shrinking. IBM dominated tech longer than Microsoft did, and Google's period of dominance will be even shorter. As with IBM and Microsoft, a great and wealthy company will remain (after a painful period of post-dominance restructuring). But during the period of dominance, it is hard to imagine anything else. Vast fortunes are lost in attempting a head-on challenge (whether they are search engine challengers to Google, operating system challengers to Microsoft, etc.), and disruption never happens that way. Google has no problem adding enough semantic smarts to see any challenger off. It's the Real-Time Web that will unseat Google. This idea has been percolating for a while, but it took a plane landing in the Hudson River to make it obvious.
Stack Overflow, the software developers' Q&A site created by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, saw 3 million unique visitors last month - just the 4th month the site has been live, according to Spolsky in the latest episode of the Stack Overflow podcast. Now the team plans to create a spin-off site serving what they believe is an even bigger audience, IT professionals.
Traffic wise, the well constructed site appears to be an early and unqualified success. It's also a lot of fun to read. The people behind the long established but widely reviled paid Q&A site Experts Exchange must be struggling to control bodily functions.
Given the constantly growing number of micro-blogging, photo sharing, and video hosting sites, it is getting harder and harder to keep all these accounts updated. One of our favorite application to post media files to a variety of services is Pixelpipe. Pixelpipe takes care of the distribution of your files, so that you can simultaneously post a picture to flickr and Facebook, and send a message with a link to that picture to Twitter. Thanks to a large number of updates in the last few weeks, Pixelpipe has become even more versatile than ever before and now lets you share almost any kind of file.
From the R&D Labs at Ricoh, there comes a new QR code creation tool called iCandy. With this application, you can easily create QR codes that automatically launch and begin playing your music in iTunes. If you don't already own the song, scanning the QR code will prompt you to purchase it from either iTunes, Amazon, or Rhapsody. In addition to iCandy's music-related features, the app can also create codes that take you to any web site with a URL, perfect for bands wishing to promote their MySpace page, Facebook fan page, YouTube video, or anything else on the web.
The share of adult internet users who are involved in social networking online has more than quadrupled in the past four years in the U.S. In 2005, only 8% of adults had a social network profile. As of December 2008, that number was 35%. What motivates those in older generations to go online? Is it the opportunity to professionally network with their colleagues? The answer may surprise you.
Anyone who has ever crashed a computer without a backup knows the painful and arduous process required to restore the machine to its previous state. As such, many of us keep regular backups of the data on our systems, just in case.
But there's another vast set of data many of us are creating on a daily basis that has little to no backup at all - beyond the services that host that content: our lifestreams. Now, a new service - named appropriately enough, LifestreamBackup - aims to provide the peace of mind that your lifestream data will always be just as accessible as the backup of your machine.
Twitter...what is it good for? It turns out this little service is good for a whole lot of things, despite the loud objections of people who've never really tried it. Even among true believers, though, it's been hard to figure out how this much loved company is going to afford to stay alive. How will Twitter make money?
A number of people noticed a new change made to Twitter today that could show just how it's going to happen. Of course this is just speculation, but we believe it's a pretty good guess that this could be what goes down.
Next week we're starting a new series of posts we call the ReadWriteWeb Question of the Day. In those posts we'll answer, with the help of topical experts we know around the web, the most interesting questions submitted by readers.
Just post your questions in comments on any Question of the Day post or email them to tips@readwriteweb.com with the word "Question" in the subject line. Our elves will start processing them immediately.
