I never thought one of our network sites would be outed by Valleywag, but that's what happened today :-) I'm pleased to introduce Read/WriteTalk, a brand new podcasting show produced by Sean Ammirati and myself. Sean is the driving force behind the show, so all credit goes to him for setting it up and doing the podcasts. By day, Sean is the VP of Business Development and Product Management at personalization startup mSpoke - so Read/WriteTalk is a part-time gig for him. There are still a couple of minor design issues that we wanted to fix up before announcing Read/WriteTalk, but now that the site is out there we'll tell you what it's about.
The tagline behind the show is "The People Behind The Web" and Sean will be interviewing a number of major players in the Web Technology industry over the coming months. The opening podcast features Jason Calacanis and - as well as the Samurai quote that Valleywag picked up on - Jason gives a lot of informative details about his background and experiences as an entrepreneur. Jason also reveals how he came up with the idea behind Mahalo, the people-powered search engine he founded this year, and how he went about launching the product (also see our review of Mahalo). To add spice to the podcast, there are also a couple of none-too-subtle digs at Valleywag and in particular Jason's arch-nemesis Nick Denton!
We've started a new links blog here at Read/WriteWeb, called Web Tech News. As the name suggests, this mini-blog will cover Web Technology news on a daily basis.
We're focusing specifically on Web news, because that is our niche here at R/WW. We think this will be a handy way for you to keep up-to-date with all the latest Web Tech news, as filtered by the Read/WriteWeb authors. We've got permalink pages for each story, because you may want to comment on them - and also we may integrate this into the main blog some more in the near future.
Here is the RSS feed for Web Tech News.
A huge thank you to our sponsors, for supporting Read/WriteWeb and our growing community and network of blogs. One of our sponsors even made it onto the Conan O'Brien show (see below)! Our sponsors are...
Wine library Tv is one of my favorite video blogs and check out the YouTube clip below to see why. Founder Gary Vaynerchuk teaches NBC's Conan O'Brien that wine tastes just like grass, rocks, dirt, and socks. It's very funny and well done Gary for taking video blogging mainstream! ;-)
ADS-Click enables you to earn money from your Tag Cloud Widget. You select your keywords and then add it to your blog. The company is based in Switzerland, so great to see international startups doing well!
Zoho is a leading Web Office suite, with probably the most comprehensive product range of all the online office suites.
Adicate has developed an online advertising solution called The Hourly Advertising System, which enables you to advertise on Read/WriteWeb on an hourly basis.
Wild Apricot offers Web-based Membership Software for clubs, associations and other non-profits. And still no official word on whether the cartoon character in the advert is a caricature of the R/WW editor!
Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities. Recently they've released both Webchat2 and Webmessenger2, plus they now offer a revenue share program.
Compete is more than just a statistics service to rival Alexa; Compete also provides search, analytics, shopping deals, and a personalized homepage.
Pageflakes is a personalized start page that features "Pagecasts" - allowing users to share their Pageflakes page with the public or a specific group of users. They also recently introduced a social networking component.
Eurekster is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.
At the beginning of this week we introduced a new comments
feature on Read/WriteWeb, called SezWho. Basically
it introduces comment rating, reputation and filtering to this blog. SezWho was created
by one of our occasional writers, Jitendra Gupta - whose team
installed it onto R/WW. You can check out the full list of features in the SezWho FAQ, but in this post I want to summarize
how it improves R/WW's community.
UPDATE: In discussions with MediaTemple after things had calmed down, we agreed that R/WW is better off on a single tenant server. For all its positive points and innovation, ultimately the Grid is a multi-tentant solution - which when you have a critical asset (as R/WW is for me) is probably not the ideal solution. MediaTemple had actually advised me of that originally, it has to be said. So currently R/WW is in the process of being upgraded to a Dedicated Virtual server.
[original post] Apologies for the site downtime - the MediaTemple Grid Server was down for 2.5 hours tonight, meaning R/WW was unavailable during that entire time. Normally MediaTemple is an outstanding server provider, and their customer service is second to none in my experience. However, I have major concerns about the Grid Server - which was touted so highly on TechCrunch in October 2006. Quoting from Michael Arrington's post at that time:
Thank you to everyone who applied for the Read/WriteWeb writer roles we wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The response was amazing, with over 120 people applying. There were a lot of good applicants and the shortlist was brimming with talent. However we only had two part-time positions available and they have gone to: Aidan Henry and Andrew Pipes. You will be hearing more from those two people, as R/WW writers, very soon!
Also a note that Josh Catone will be going full-time on Read/WriteWeb shortly. All of these additions and changes will allow me to focus more on growing the business, although of course I will still be one of the main writers for R/WW.
Thank you to our sponsors, for supporting the world's top Web Technology analysis blog Read/WriteWeb. Our excellent sponsors are:
RedBubble is an online art gallery and creative community that is about to launch globally. They're looking for feedback and is offering AU$50 to spend at RedBubble for the 50 best suggestions.
Steekr is a secured online space where you can store your music, photos, videos and documents. Listen, view, watch your media files in a browser, streamed anywhere and anytime.
Winelibrary Tv is made for every type of wine drinker. Founder Gary Vaynerchuk calls it "wine 2.0" and he was recently profiled by TIME magazine.
Wild Apricot offers Web-based Membership Software for clubs, associations and other non-profits.
Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities, including instant messaging software Webmessenger 2.
Compete is more than just a statistics service to rival Alexa; Compete also provides search, analytics, shopping deals, and a personalized homepage.
Pageflakes is a personalized start page that features "Pagecasts" - allowing users to share their Pageflakes page with the public or a specific group of users.
Eurekster is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.
Also check out the Read/WriteWeb Job Board, where you'll find job opportunities for Web Technology and New Media professionals, at startups and tech firms all over the world.
If you would like to enquire about sponsoring Read/WriteWeb and/or our network blogs last100 and AltSearchEngines, please email the editor for a Media Kit.
Just a quick update on my post last week, stating that Read/WriteWeb is looking for writers to do startup and web product reviews. The response has been overwhelming - over 100 people so far have emailed to say they're interested. So it's taking me longer to sift through the emails than I first thought (and also I have been traveling this week). So a note to all the people who 'applied': thanks very much for your interest and I am in the process of looking at each and every email right now. More soon on this....
It's great that so many people want to write here, and I've noticed an upturn in comments lately too. So the R/WW community is growing! We also got a nice mention in the PC World 100 Blogs We Love round-up :-)
Read/WriteWeb is looking for writers to do startup and web product reviews. Currently we are being inundated with emails from startups wanting us to profile them, but it's no longer something I can keep up with due to my R/WW Network duties (this is my way of saying sorry if I haven't responded to your email lately!).
Read/WriteWeb has two startup reviewers on board already - Phil Butler and Lachlan Hardy - and we are looking for a couple more part-time writers. There will be an incentives-based payment structure for this role. Specifically I am looking for the following qualities:
If you ever wanted to know what I look and sound like, here I am courtesy of Ross Dawson and One Minute World, a neat new service that specializes in one minute video content for streaming and mobile devices. And to preempt the comments - yes I do sometimes smile; and no, I don't know what was happening with my eyes and the head nods (hey, it was a lot more close up than I expected!). :-) Of course I managed to plug Read/WriteWeb's two new network blogs!
Also check out other Aussie 2.0 heads in close-up on Ross Dawson's blog.
