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The Oyster card is an RFID smart card used for electronic ticketing on London public transport services, notably the London Underground and buses. Other countries have similar smart cards. A couple that I've come across in real life recently were Boston's CharlieCard and Wellington's Snapper card. Some smart cards are used for other types of micro-payments as well as transport - for example Hong Kong's Octopus card and Japan's Suica card.

The Oyster Card and others like it are significant from a web technology perspective mainly because they introduce RFID technology to the masses; and this data will eventually end up being utilized on the Internet.

Updated at 4:45 PM PST with a response from Google.

Google has reportedly sent a letter to a high-profile Caribbean investigative website called The TCI Journal saying it will supply the IP addresses used to access the Journal's primary GMail account unless the Journal supplies a legal counter-motion within the next two weeks. A libel suit filed against the Journal in Santa Clara, California Superior Court concerns its reporting of government corruption in the Turks & Caicos Islands.

This case is just the latest to be followed closely, reported on and even participated in by the controversial public interest document-exposure organization Wikileaks, a website where a staff of journalists and lawyers vet sensitive documents submitted by anonymous independent sources. The status of the case was summarized tonight by Julian Assange, Investigations Editor at Wikileaks.

Despite the fact that he is perhaps one of the world's most famous gangsters, Al Capone wasn't first imprisoned for bootlegging, racketeering or the gangland execution of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. Instead, Capone was first imprisoned for tax evasion. Whether you're a law abiding citizen or a tax dodging criminal, there's something eerily omniscient about the taxman. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article by Laura Saunders, our all-seeing state revenue agents have increased their power to catch tax evaders through Facebook, MySpace and Google.

Prior to 2001, gilded hard cover encyclopedias were cracked to fact check everything from raptor names to State capitals. Today the world's most popular English encyclopedia is more often used to identify pop culture icons and social media companies. A recent Telegraph article listed the 50 most-viewed Wikipedia articles of 2008 and 2009 and while the results are slightly inaccurate, they're pretty interesting. Below are this year's most visited Wikipedia pages measured in hits per day.

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Red hot Augmented Reality browser Layar announced an upgrade to its service today that adds social features to the act of looking at data on top of the world around you. If you're using Layar to look through your mobile phone's camera and see real estate listings for the buildings nearby, social network messages left by your friends in a particular place or Flickr photos from the area - you can now share that data set's layer with anyone else by sending them its URL.

Layar hopes that it will eventually offer thousands of layers to view the world through and this feature will allow users to tell their friends by email, Facebook, Twitter etc. how to "see the world as I see it."

This is part 1 of a three-part series on the fundamental characteristics of the real-time Web.

Like cloud computing less than a year ago and social networking two years ago, the real-time Web is the new black on the tech circuit. The trend has been publicly bandied about this summer, starting with a few industry get-togethers, followed by several enthusiastic testimonials from investors (notably angel investor Ron Conway's widely posted list of ways for Twitter to monetize). It was then capped by a glowing report in BusinessWeek in early August.

You may not know it, but most of the images in Wikipedia are actually hosted on its sister project, Wikimedia Commons. If you find a favorite image on the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, click through and you'll quickly find yourself at its original page at the Commons project. With over 4.9 million freely-licensed media files, it's a treasure trove that supplies nearly all of the photos for Wikipedia.

Now you can annotate images from Wikimedia Commons in a fashion very similar to Flickr. The big difference with the new feature is that annotations can be added by anyone, and no account is necessary. While they don't show up directly in Wikipedia yet, a new version of the system that will appear in the free encyclopedia is under development.

Here is this week's ReadWriteWeb events guide. Remember to download the calendar in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We 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.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we explain why augmented reality is ramping up (and look at three new iPhone examples), analyze the top websites in the U.S., check out new Twitter statistics suggesting that teens don't tweet, review recent Wikipedia changes, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).