Webstock, a conference for Web professionals, is happening in Wellington New Zealand this week. As usual it's a classy lineup of speakers and a number of international webheads will be jetting in for the event. They include science fiction author Bruce Sterling, Flickr's Heather Champ, Social Web designer Joshua Porter, Dopplr's Matt Biddulph, Institute for the Future's Jane McGonigal, Six Apart's David Recordon, The Guardian's Meg Pickard, NZ Foo Camp's Nat Torkington, Yahoo's Tom Coates, online performance artist Ze Frank, and many more.
Social networks are making it increasingly easy to organize and propagate protests. One that caught our eye today is the New Zealand Internet Blackout, which is using a variety of Internet services to protest against a new law in New Zealand - the Guilt Upon Accusation law 'Section 92A'. This law may have major implications for Internet users in NZ, because it calls for internet disconnection "based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny." This law is due to come into effect in New Zealand on February 28th. The Blackout is in force on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and various websites/blogs.
Even though we live in an age of instant Qik streams, video chats on Skype, and micro-blogging on Twitter, sometimes all you need is a simple chatroom for real-time text chats. TinyChat solves this problem by creating simple, disposable chatrooms. Tinychats works exactly as advertised. It's a disposable, no-frills chatroom, with a deliberately limited feature set. There are no accounts to sign up for and whenever you open up a new room, TinyChat will simply create a new URL for you.
ClikBall is a handsome looking new application built in part by Jesse Andrews, the man responsible for Greasemonkey script repository Userscripts.org. Described literally, ClikBall is a browser plug-in that allows you to share links and messages with friends, groups, privately, on Twitter and on FriendFeed. The service is in Private Beta, but Userscripts visitors were just welcomed in and the Andrews says ReadWriteWeb readers can join (and follow me) via this link.
That description above doesn't really do the service justice - it's the user experience that makes ClikBall stand out. There's something magical about the grace of the app, and there's clearly a premium put on sharing links that lots of other people will want to click on and share.
It's Presidents Day here in the United States but for most people it's just a day off work. Cynics, fair-weather political watchers, "Joe Six Packs" (did you want to avoid hearing that phrase again?) - we present to you below some of our favorite online resources for casual political awareness. We'd suggest that these sites will facilitate a basic foundation of day-to-day political awareness.
These are our favorites, we'd love to hear your suggestions as well.
In August 2008, Twitter killed SMS updates for everybody outside of the U.S., Canada, and India. Users in the U.K. can now only send messages from their phones, but can't receive them anymore. The developers of Twe2 got frustrated by this and decided to take matters into their own hands. Thanks to Twe2's free service, you can now receive Twitter messages on your mobile phone close to anywhere in the world.
Delicious, Yahoo's online bookmarking tool, only forces a very loose organization upon its users. While this straightforward method is great for most users, it can often make finding bookmarks harder in the long run, especially when you manage a large collection of bookmarks on the service. Facette, a new MIT project, is trying a different approach. With Facette, you can create a more organized data set on Delicious, as it forces you to be more specific about how you want to categorize each new bookmark.
Only last week, the Mozilla Project proudly announced a "milestone release" of Fennec, the web browser also known as "Firefox Mobile." The much anticipated software was made available for download in a pre-alpha version for the HTC Touch Pro, a Windows Mobile smartphone. Shortly after its debut, mobile web enthusiasts everywhere began testing the new browser. But then something strange occurred. Instead of surfing the web, testers were stuck staring at a black-and-white checkerboard screen. It appeared that Fennec, right out of the gate, was completely broken.
The most obvious feature of Apture is that it is a pop-up technology. Apture is a Javascript plug-in for publishers that adds contextual information to links - via pop-ups which display when users hover over or click on them. However, because of its association with pop-ups, Apture thinks it's gotten a bad rap. Many people dislike other pop-up products such as CoolPreviews, Snap and a new Microsoft product we covered recently called Gaze. Why? Because pop-ups can disrupt a user's browsing experience and are sometimes even regarded as a nuisance. We spoke to Apture co-founder and CEO Tristan Harris, to find out what makes Apture different.
