Bees can see ultraviolet light that the human eye cannot see. Snakes and mosquitoes can see infrared light. The Firefox (browser) can see things that the human eye can't, too, but a lot of it doesn't get used for anything. So far.
Microformats are one thing that the browser notices while serving up web pages. This type of markup designating certain types of information has just begun to be leveraged in real use cases. Alex Faaborg, Principle Designer on the Firefox team, has some interesting ideas about how the browser could leverage the microformatted information it comes across.
This morning, the Wall Street Journal features an article about professional blogging, a topic that is obviously very close to our hearts here at RWW. Mark Penn, the article's author, even cites some of our own numbers, though the most astonishing number he arrives at is that America is now home to over 452,000 professional bloggers who use blogging as their primary source of income. If these numbers are indeed true, then that would mean that there are now almost as many bloggers in the U.S. as lawyers (550,000). We do, however, have our doubts.
You've heard the grumblings. Web 2.0 is declining, it's so last year....no wait, maybe Web 2.0 is just dead. But is it really? Or has it just become so ubiquitous that it no longer needs a special label anymore? Former Forrester analyst and Groundswell author Charlene Li predicted that social networking would become "like air" - that is, social networks would be everywhere. And now they are. So are blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites, and everything else that comprises "Web 2.0." But does that mean the era of Web 2.0 is over because it finally hit the mainstream?
Today, the white label application builder called LOLapps emerged from stealth mode to announce that they now have 44 million unique visitors using their tools. The company has been operating since early 2008, allowing users to create both quizzes and gifts on social networking platforms like Bebo, Facebook, and others. A user-generated content builder like this may seem like no big deal, but for LOLapps, it's big business.
Healthline, a leading provider of intelligent health information services, today announced two additions to its stable of medical search tools: TreatmentSearch, the first treatment search application for the web, and DocSearch, a recommendation tool for recommending specialists based semantic parsing of symptom or health condition information. Other Healthline tools include SymptomSearch and DrugSearch. The integrated suite of Healthline Clinical Applications is now available on Healthline.com.
Web photo retouching service Picnik just announced a new partnership with Photobucket-based Twitter photo sharing service Twitgoo on its blog. The alliance will allow Picnik users to quickly share their retouched images on Twitter for free. In addition, twittering Picnik users can also apply the image as their Twitter background or update their Twitter user icon. Twitgoo uses your Twitter login to enable these extra sharing features.
Chips, dip and government data are everyone's three favorite things to take to a party, right? Ok, so government data is actually quite boring on its own, but in these exciting times of democratized programming, government data can be turned into some pretty exciting mashups.
That's just what the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation is aiming to make more possible with its work to make government and related data more available with its new Apps for America contest. More than 40 open source applications and websites making use of that data entered the contest and today the six fabulous winners were announced. We've got a five minute screencast tour of the winners below.
Google released two new labs projects today: Similar Images and Google News Timeline. Similar Images, as the name implies, allows you to restrict image searches to pictures that are similar to a source picture while Google News Timeline presents a new interface for searching Google News. Google Labs has now also moved to its own Googlelabs.com domain and sports a new interface.
Aviary, a sophisticated online collaborative image editing tool suite, today released a much awaited API. The interface will allow any 3rd party website to add image editing tools right into its existing offerings. This technology could quietly change the way many people experience images around the web.
Aviary's products are stunning and we expect that many people will be very surprised to find new image editing tools now available on their favorite websites.
University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson has successfully tested a "brain wave monitor" to Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service.
Either the gates of Hell have begun to open or this is a grad student who really knows how to publicize his work by riding the bandwagon of popular culture. Both are probably true.
