Vancouver, BC's city government posted an agenda for next week's council meeting that outlines its interest in adopting open data, open standards and open source software for all of its data and information resources. Vancouver hopes this new policy will help create new opportunities for its city, recently named "Best City Archive of the World".
We've added a lot of great events to our guide this week. Check out what's coming up, below. In this feature on ReadWriteWeb, we provide a weekly roundup of upcoming social Web events. We'll publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.
Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.
Social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter are often the go-to applications for career networking, but now Facebook users can contact people who have interviewed, worked, or are currently employed at the places they want to work at next with a new app called Inside Job.
Inside Job, developed by Arlington Soho, works on the premise that having a contact on the inside of a company will improve your chances of getting hired there. Here are its main features:
San Francisco based social networking and blogging company Six Apart announced today at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic that it is introducing plugins that will work on rival Wordpress sites and other blogging platforms.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we give you a blow-by-blow account of the Twitter replies policy debacle this week, explain why the new Google Search Options and rich snippets are so significant, analyze what 'Web 3.0' means, and more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.
Socialthing! founder Matt Galligan and Digg's Lead Arichitect Joe Stump are each leaving their day jobs behind to focus on Crash Corp, an alternate reality mobile gaming venture.
The concepts behind alternate reality (or augmented reality) interactive gaming are futuristic in themselves. Gamers are freed from their PCs and permitted to roam the face of the earth like normal, social human beings while remaining in-game. Adding mobile and social aspects to the mix pushes the oeuvre into mind-blowing territory. Adventures are location- and proximity-based, IRL interactions spring from in-game teamwork: The mind reels. And don't let's get started on revenue streams, which will occur to you at a rate of one every half minute from the time you read this post until well into next week.
Wolfram Alpha, the new "computational knowledge engine" from the makers of Mathematica is scheduled to officially launch on Monday next week, but starting tonight, Alpha will 'soft launch,' starting with a live webcast of the launch preparations tonight. After that, Alpha will gradually open its doors to everybody throughout the weekend. We have had a chance to test a preview version of Alpha for the last seven days, and we are quite impressed with what we have seen so far. Here are some resources for getting up to speed with Alpha, as well as some recommendations for getting started with this powerful, but sometimes frustrating new tool.
Given how much user activity goes on every day on Facebook, the company has to be working on some kinds of recommendation technologies. Charming invisible robots that say, "If you like this, then you'll like that." Full-time Facebook watcher Nick O'Neil thought he spotted one in the wild this morning, but his readers make a convincing case that he was wrong this time.
The feature O'Neil wrote about appears to be nothing more than the latest FriendFeed rip-off: truncating repetitive activities. (Ex-Googler Paul Buchheit's FriendFeed is like a Facebook R&D lab without stock options.) Whether Facebook is doing more than that publicly or not, you know they have to be working on recommendation behind closed doors.
Zotero, the popular open-source research, bookmarking, and bibliography tool, just released version 2.0 of its Firefox plugin, which, among other things, adds support for sharing libraries with groups. With this new version, users can now easily collaborate in groups and create group libraries. While these new functions are obviously available in Zotero's Firefox plugin, the most interesting changes have happened on Zotero's website, where groups can now create private and public sites to share their collections.
Yesterday, we reported that Nielsen Online's April numbers showed that the number of unique streams on Hulu grew 7.9% since March, though the number of unique users dropped slightly to about 7.4 million. As the New York Times reports this morning, however, Hulu questions these numbers and argues that they grossly underestimate Hulu's real reach, which comScore, another online measurement firm, pegs at 42 million.
