ReadWriteWeb

Joining the NFL and other sports organizations in the raining-on-our-parade camp, the NBA has declared pre-, post-, and mid-game social media verboten, according to a Sports Illustrated post this evening.

According to a memo sent out to teams today, no mobile or other communication devices are to be used from 45 minutes before a game starts until after the players have finished performing their athletic duties, including postgame locker room interviews. The ban affects players, coaches, and "basketball operations personnel." We are unclear whether cheerleaders are included in this perplexingly named category.

Bitstrips for Schools makes us want to go back to the third grade.

Bitstrips is an online tool for quickly and simply creating web comics, and the company has just launched a new product custom-tailored for the classroom. Kids get to be creative; teachers get a new, interactive tool to reinforce learning; and everyone goes home smarter and happier.

A new feature introduced today by Google lets users quickly preview forum discussions within search results.

The new feature will apply to sites that have a large number of relevant posts for a user's search query. Users will see the topic of the thread, the number of posts, and the date the thread was posted.

On the Delicious blog today, the social bookmarking site has announced a slew of enhancements in addition to the usual bug fixes for their most recent release.

From their interactive graphs to their iPhone-optimized mobile site to their tracking of who shares what items when, Delicious is showing a deep understanding of where the real-time web is heading and how traffic in this environment works. They're giving users and content creators the tools they need to optimize for this environment. Read on for a complete list of Delicious' new flavors.

Twitter just announced a major new feature soon to launch: the ability to create sharable lists of users around topics of interest. This will tackle several problems with one feature: the ability to discover diverse high-quality users quickly and easily and the undue power Twitter HQ has had as the only curator of lists on the site so far.

Curation of dynamic topical expert sources is an act of poetry. Just like Twitter has caught on faster than RSS, Twitter Lists will probably catch on a lot faster than OPML has. If you've seen the new service TweepML then you've got the idea. This is going to be a very big deal.

Google is now giving webmasters the ability to prompt users for automatic translations of their pages. With the new website translator gadget, site owners can paste a short snippet of code into their websites and instantly increase their reach to up to 51 languages.

The gadget will automatically detect a user's preferred language, and if that user's language settings differ from the content on the gadget-enabled website, a frame will appear over the web page, prompting the user to click a button for instant translation of all text content.

Today, Google announced a new search offering for mobile devices. The redesigned search experience will free handset users from having to type by including browseable categories. Local mobile search will also integrate with saved Google Maps information on a user's computer.

At first glance, this seems to be a great new tool to streamline the flow of information between our online and offline worlds. But how well does Google's new local mobile search work in reality?

Google will unleash 100,000 invites to use Google Wave later today. While Wave itself is obviously an exciting product, Google is also trying to create a developer ecosystem around Wave and has selected six Wave extensions to feature as good examples of what developers will be able to do with Wave: a competitive Sudoku game from LabPixies, a teleconferencing extension from Ribbit, video chat from 6rounds, travel planning from Lonely Planet, a weather widget from AccuWeather, and a map widget courtesy of Google Maps.

Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

The City Council of Portland, Oregon unanimously approved a resolution today that directs the city government to open data to outside developers and encourages adoption of open source solutions in technology procurement.

Like the creation of railroads and highways fostered economic development in the past, giving software developers access to a landscape of municipal data could be the beginning of a foundation for a new era of innovation.