Between the iTunes Genius Sidebar, Amazon's recommender system and Pandora's virtual DJ, recommender systems are now getting close to knowing my tastes better than I do.
There's a certain seductive attraction to the idea that collaborative filtering and artificial intelligence could hand us our heart's desire before our hearts even think of it. Think of the time and effort I could save if I didn't have to make decisions about what to eat, buy, wear, listen to, watch or read. When it comes right down to it, free will is a genuine time suck, and seriously cuts into my blogging schedule.
In a memo from the Office of Management and Budget last week, Director Peter Orszag outlined the implementation guidelines [PDF] for the new stimulus bill, requiring all government agencies to provide a feed to disclose funds allocated, and optimize Web pages in an effort to help the public find relevant information through search engines.
"For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription."
"By 2010 we will have run out of IP addresses if we don't do something about it," Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and the man commonly referred to as "the father of the Internet," told ReadWriteWeb last month. (Video embedded below.)
With the number of Internet-enabled devices particularly mobile phones soaring, very few IP addresses remain vacant, and with only about 20 per cent of the world connected to the Net, that's a problem. And consumers, if you think this doesn't affect you, think again. That latest gadget you bought - is it IPv6 compatible?
Curious Squid has released Pingle, an application for the iPhone which lets you update your status across a selection of social networks at once. Using Ping.fm, Pingle will update Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Flickr, FriendFeed, Delicious, Tumblr, and more including many blogging platforms.
The app works on both the original 1G iPhone and the 3G iPhone, and is available in the iPhone App Store for $1.99
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we review the action from the Mobile World Congress, find out why many people blacked out their social networking profiles this week, continue our series on recommendation engines, analyze Yahoo's progress in search innovation, look into the Internet in cars, and more. Also check out the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
YouTube today introduced a new feature that allows publishers to invite others to annotate their videos. Just a few weeks ago, YouTube introduced a new annotation feature that made it easier for publishers to add speech bubbles or spotlights to their videos. Now, you can send a special link to your friends so that they can easily add their own witty comments to your videos.
Two days into the new Presidential administration, Barack Obama issued a memo calling on the still unfilled new office of Chief Technology Officer to make a list of recommendations for an Open Government Directive. The recommendations are due within 120 days of that memo, which called for "a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration." What would you like to see on the list of recommendations?
This morning the highly effective nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation launched a new microsite called Our Open Government List, where anyone can make suggestions for government transparency and all of us can vote on our favorite ideas. It's like Digg for steps to open up public data.
According to a recent study by Burst Media, a majority of web users are aware of the fact that a lot of websites and ISPs track, collect, and share information about their online activities. Over 80% of all respondents indicated that they were concerned about online privacy in general, but interestingly, only about half of all respondents under 24 thought that websites collect non-personally identifiable information.
"There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds," said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That's why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance have banded together to advance the use of mobile phones to better aid those in need of healthcare in the developing world.
A new report from Forrester Research revealed some surprising information: apparently Baby Boomers aren't exactly the technology Luddites that people think they are. In fact, more than 60 percent of those in this generational group actively consume socially created content like blogs, videos, podcasts, and forums. What's more, the percentage of those participating is on the rise.
