ReadWriteWeb

This past week saw the Conversational Marketing (CM) Summit in New York, an event organized by Federated Media (which sells advertising on ReadWriteWeb). It was a stimulating event because of the good mix of all of the participants in the advertising eco-system (publishers and media, advertisers and marketers, advertising agencies, and advertising technology startups). The sessions included many case studies of large brands that use social media to engage customers in different ways, as well as new technology from startups. My one overriding impression was that creativity, in all its forms, is back. There was a real sense of a return on creativity.

Portland, Oregon based startup Urban Airship demonstrated a beta service at today's Apple developers conference that will handle the heavy lifting for small iPhone app shops seeking to utilize the new push notification functionality and the ability to sell goods in-app instead of sending customers to Apple's store.

The service uses RESTful APIs and Open Source code libraries to handle "the tedious, annoying, difficult and troublesome parts of the development process" and offer outsourced scalability solutions.

As much fun as we all have poring over lines of code every time an anonymous commenter alerts us to a broken link, missing image, or misspelled word, small-potatoes page edits are hardly the most enjoyable part of running and maintaining a website.

A new tool called DeepTrawl allows site owners to proactively find such errors, then highlights the relevant bits of code in a proprietary editor where webmasters can edit and save their files in seconds. Especially for those who maintain multiple sites, this service could prove invaluable. Although the options are sophisticated, it's the app's speed and simplicity that impress us most.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off this morning in San Francisco and ReadWriteWeb is at Moscone West to cover the keynote scheduled to begin at 10am PDT; you can check the current time here.

9:30 am: The crowds are lining up outside and there's lots of speculation about what might be announced. Will Steve Jobs appear? Will they show an Apple tablet? Will the Snow Leopard OS be made available? Will there be a new iphone? Will the old iphone (3G) become the cheap iphone ($99) - or will a new cheap one put in an appearance? Read on for our coverage below.

Financial services company Morgan Stanley released an incredibly ambitious new application this morning called Matix and many of its features will make hard-core web users hopeful that apps like this will emerge in other sectors as well. Matrix is a Rich Internet Application, or software that sits on the desktop but leverages web connectivity, and it's pretty as can be.

Adobe worked closely with the company to create what it believes is an app that pushes the envelope with regard to what can be done with Adobe technology. We believe there are a number of trends in play here that go beyond Adobe as well and are likely to be key features for many apps in the future.

The good old days of print journalism are becoming just that - good old days, the domain of old timers who reminisce about tape recorders and digging through other people's garbage bins.

While such reminiscences undoubtedly wrench a wistful sigh from the breast of those who lived and worked in those heady days (like, before 2002), educating young would-be journalists about how early adopters and the tech-minded are consuming and helping distribute news is a necessary step to ensure the evolution rather than the extinction of American news services. Northwestern University has taken productive steps in that direction this spring and is set to present five interesting, student-created news apps this week.

For many of us, Finding Nemo may mark the last occasion we spent any significant about of time thinking about the ocean.

For World Oceans Day, Google has come to the rescue with a cool collection of visualization apps that use Google Earth to encourage analysis of the big blue. According to last night's post on the Google LatLong Blog, "To help get our heads around the watery part of our planet, we've collected a few visualizations of both issues facing the ocean and cutting edge science. Have a look at the problem of plastics in our oceans, find out about where currents might take your trash, the health of the world's fisheries, and what the latest satellite data says about the state of the ocean."

About two months ago, we reported that two Current TV journalists, Laura Link and Euna Lee had been detained in North Korea on March 17. Today, we received the sad news that North Korea's Central Court found both reporters guilty of "a grave crime against the nation" and illegally crossing the border into North Korea. Link and Lee have been sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp. This sentence, of course, comes at a time when US-North Korean relations are already tense. The U.S. government says that it is 'deeply concerned' about this verdict.

Today from AdaptiveBlue there comes a new version of the semantic browser extension Glue (previous coverage) which allows you to create a browser-based social network around the things you and your friends find online. This latest release, four months in the making, finally makes Glue compatible with Internet Explorer - a move which Glue's creators hope will allow them to tap into a wider, more mainstream audience.

It's no surprise that people spend their weekends goofing off, relaxing, and entertaining themselves, but our weekly downtime activities also have major implications for mobile application marketing, as it turns out. According to new data from Flurry, a mobile analytics company, consumers are over 30% more likely to download an application over the weekend than during the week.