Zotero, the popular open-source research and bibliography tool, just announced the latest version of its Firefox plugin (1.5b1), which now allows users to synchronize their databases between different machines, as well as a number of smaller updates that will make it even easier to create and curate bibliographies with Zotero.
Zotero also announced a new online component to its plugin, which, in conjunction with the new synchronization features, automatically creates an online backup of your database on Zotero.org.
Content creation at Wikipedia is slowing down. The already small number of active regular editors is on the decline and Jimmy Wales has called for live edits to be held for approval on many pages, a step sure to slow contributions even further.
The tapering of fresh content doesn't have to mean Wikipedia's death, though. The site contains a gargantuan amount of human created and tended but largely machine readable and structured data. That's a potential gold mine in terms of a potential pay-off in innovation. Wikipedia can offer developers opportunities to glean analysis, supplemental content and structured data from its years-old store of collaboratively generated information. All of that is possible, but Wikipedia as a platform can't be taken for granted.
MicroPlaza provides you with a personalized memetracker based on the links that your friends share on Twitter. While we have seen a fair number of Twitter memetrackers, none of them feature the degree of personalization that MicroPlaza offers. If you follow a very diverse set of people on Twitter, you can also track micro-communities thanks to MicroPlaza's 'Tribes' feature, which lets you organize users into different groups. MicroPlaza is currently in private beta testing, but you can get a glimpse of its non-personalized features on its home page.
Bebo, AOL's social network, added a lifestreaming feature today that allows users to pull in updates from Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious, as well as from Facebook and Myspace. Bebo also introduced another new feature called 'Lifestory,' which displays your updates in a scrollable and zoomable timeline that is somewhat reminiscent of ThisMoment. With LifeStory, you can quickly create new events on your timeline and add photos, videos, and text. This feature, however, is not integrated with your lifestream.
Zcapes is a new "augmented reality" application that lets you instantly transform any object or event into a mini blog using your mobile phone. But this is no ordinary blogging platform. Instead of focusing on publishing, Zcapes focuses on integrating streams from the "Live Web" into whatever blog you create. The end result is a Zcape page that taps into the real-time conversations surrounding an event, activity, thing, or group.
Particls, the one-time RSS feed organizer and alerting service, has today launched a new project they're calling "Particls Fountain." Although it's hinted that the service will eventually do much more, today its goal is simple. Particls Fountain will function as a replacement for the long-gone Twitter Track feature that once allowed you to follow topics of interest by keyword.
PC manufacturers have been introducing biometric technologies into their products over the past several years; the implication being that such technologies are inherently more secure than the traditional password, especially given the lack of attention given to password creation by the majority of users.
Several years ago, MythBusters proved that the fingerprint security system is seriously flawed and can be easily broken, and just last week at the Black Hat Conference, Duc Nguyen, senior researcher at Bkis, proved just how easy it was to circumvent facial recognition technology on laptops using a simple low-quality photograph.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're big fans of the Times Open strategy, the program that focuses on making the data of The New York Times more accessible to the developer community. We heralded the launch of the program, covered the first available API, and marveled at the access to content the APIs have begun to provide. Now the Times has taken another momentous step forward: bringing developers together for Times Open, the publication's inaugural API seminar.
Late last week, Microsoft Research released an interesting paper [PDF] about a Web browser it calls Gazelle that's constructed in such a way to act like an operating system with the browser kernel exclusively protecting resources and sharing across Web sites.
The idea behind Gazelle is to create a browser that is more secure for the now typical dynamic pages we find on the Web. According to Microsoft, Gazelle is different as no existing browsers, including new architectures, have a multi-principal operating system constructed in such a way that provides the browser-based OS exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources.
Tonight's Academy Awards ceremony will be the 81st in the award's venerable history. The film industry's biggest stars have gathered in Hollywood, the Oscar statuettes are safely tucked away in the Kodak Theatre, and we've compiled a list of sites for you to get your Oscar fix online.
From where to watch the event (and how, if you're not in the United States), to how to blog for prizes - including Oscar schwag - you'll find it here. If you know of any sites we've missed, please share them in the comments.
