ReadWriteWeb

Facebook's getting its own movie, Ashton Kutcher is the social web's unpaid spokesman and now NBC is launching a show dedicated to mobile apps.

What's the world coming to? Call me old fashioned, but where I come from, a geek is a geek and a mainstream actor with an iPhone is still just a mainstream actor with an iPhone. The Oprahtization of technology is at least a bit demeaning, from my point of view. Sure, this trend brings exposure to our heroic exploits, but it's often done through stereotypes about geeks and an air of naïveté about how technology really works. What do you think? Am I being a curmudgeon? Is all this mainstream-tech integration really a good thing?

According to a report released today [PDF] by Reporters Sans Frontières, the number of bloggers around the world arrested because of their online work jumped from 59 to 151 between 2008 and 2009, an increase of 155%. Additionally, one blogger died in prison and 61 were physically assaulted. The most infamous cases perhaps occurred during the violent unrest in Iran following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed reelection. But RSF said the number of overall arrests and attacks can actually be traced to crackdowns in at least 10 countries.

"The number of countries affected by online censorship has doubled from one year to the next - a disturbing tendency that shows an increase in control over new media as millions of netizens get active online," said Lucie Morillon, head of the group's Internet and Freedoms Desk.

Thanks to the recent proliferation of do-it-yourself iPhone app services, the next big thing in Apple's App Store might just be vanity apps. Take, for example, Appsfire's Ouriel Ohayon, who just announced the launch of his own iPhone app. Ohayon used Odiogo Apps to create this personalized app. Odiogo, which mostly focuses on providing text-to-speech services for news sites and blogs, allows users to add RSS feeds, Twitter updates and photos from Flickr to its apps.

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. So far we've explored these trends: Structured Data, The Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality. The fifth and final part of our series is about the Internet of Things, when real world objects (such as fridges, lights and toasters) get connected to the Internet. In 2009, this trend has ramped up and is adding a significant amount of new data to the Web.

In this post we'll see how companies as big as IBM and as small as Pachube are building up this new world of Internet data and services.

OpenID, the open standard for federated user identity across multiple websites, is led by the OpenID Foundation. That organization announced the election of its newest Board members today. These are the people who will be moving and shaking OpenID on a policy and standards level.

While systems like Facebook Connect and Twitter Auth are making fast progress in offering website users easy access to their primary identity, social and activity data when visiting sites all around the web - OpenID technology is making progress as well. Here are the three new leaders elected to help advance that agenda.

Britain's Conservative Party plans to offer a £1 million taxpayer-funded prize for a website that can "harness the wisdom" of voters. The price will be given to the team that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies. According to the Guardian, some of the ideas for this site include services that help to identify wasteful government spending or rate the quality of schools and hospitals. It is worth noting, though, that the Conservatives will only give this prize away if they win the 2010 elections.

Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest. Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer. You heard right, in a few years your cyborg eye will talk to you. In an article with the IEEE Spectrum, Parviz relays the challenges of custom-building semi-transparent circuitry into a polymer lens roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter.

Ever since two friends and I staged a two-week jaunt around the Midwest to attend a great new conference earlier this year, I've been more and more aware of a growing trend: the social media road trip.

While on the road this year, I've come upon long-term social media road warriors such as Mark Simonds of the Twitter Road Trip, brand ambassadors such as Sara Lopez and conference-hoppers such as Dave Delaney. I think we've all heard about Tara Hunt's widely publicized karaoke/book promo tour. There's even a SxSWi session about the phenomenon this spring. For folks intent on packing up the hardware and hitting the road, here are ten tips for success.

One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible.

Twitter's Director of Platform Ryan Sarver followed up on earlier public announcements this weekend with an email to developers explaining plans to raise the limit on the number of times an application can request information from Twitter for a single user to 10 times what it is today (from 150 req/hr to 1500/hr), and to offer everyone the same kind of paid access to the full "fire hose" of user updates that Google and Bing enjoy. People who build cool Twitter apps say this is very big news.