ReadWriteWeb

I hope you'll indulge me in thanking Read/WriteWeb's excellent sponsors, for supporting quality content on Web Technology. Thanks also to R/WW's super-smart authors and our community of readers, which continues to grow at a great rate! 

If you would like to explore sponsorship opportunities with Read/WriteWeb, one of the top 50 blogs in the world and the premier resource for Web Technology trends, contact the editor Richard MacManus at readwriteweb@gmail.com.

Our current sponsors are:

Atlassian is a leading wiki provider for enterprises and it has a new product called Confluence Hosted, which I encourage you to check out. Right now you can try Confluence Hosted free for 30-days.

Wild Apricot is a long-term supporter of Read/WriteWeb. Wild Apricot offers web 2.0 products for non-profits - one of their largest user segments is professional associations. Probably the most popular area of functionality in Wild Apricot is the online member database, which features goodies such as online application forms, automated renewal reminders and much more.

Zoho is also a long-term R/WW sponsor. It's a Web Office suite and they recently added a Web Conferencing application called Zoho Meeting to their excellent range of office products. 

Userplane has been a sponsor since December. Part of AOL, Userplane is the premier provider of communication software for online communities.

Compete has been supporting Read/WriteWeb since the start of 2007. Not just a statistics service to rival Alexa, Compete also provides search, analytics, shopping deals, and a personalized homepage.

ElephantDrive came on board as a sponsor this month. It is an online storage and backup product, with a new WebDAV client coming in April. This will allow users to map a network drive directly to their ElephantDrive account.

Digication has also supported R/WW since December. It is an e-learning suite of tools, designed by educators for educators. Digication is all about bringing teachers and students together in a seamless learning environment.

Eurekster is an innovative kiwi startup that provides the community powered search box on Read/WriteWeb. It is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.

Every Friday afternoon PST, Read/WriteWeb publishes a Weekly Wrapup of news, reviews and analysis from the past week. I know a lot of people are too busy with their jobs to keep up with Web tech news on a daily basis, so the Weekly Wrapup is the perfect opportunity for those people to catch up with the most relevant Web Tech news from the week.

We offer the Weekly Wrapup in an email newsletter and also as an RSS feed. Here is the form to subscribe to Read/WriteWeb's weekly email newsletter:

And here is the RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb/weekly

Incidentally, how much demand is there for a DAILY roundup of Web Tech news from around the blogosphere? If there is sufficient demand, than that is another option. Let us know in the comments...

The Read/WriteWeb Job Board has now been combined with the Job Boards at two popular Web Business blogs, VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock. This means that when you post a job to the R/WW Job Board, it now displays on VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock as well as Read/WriteWeb. I'm not sure what numbers the other two blogs do, but by my calculations this gives your job postings exposure to 2-3 million page views per month. Allow me to explain the background to this change....

The blog job board market is a very tough one. There are lots of options for blogs and job posters alike. So I believe that for blog-based Job Boards going forward, unless you are big enough to go it alone (and I think top 10 sites like Engadget and Techcrunch are probably the only tech blogs capable of that right now), partnerships are key.

Here are the latest job postings on the combined RWW/VB/AC Job Board:

Software Engineer or Architect at SpongeFish in San Francisco, CA
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/d97af26327a5612868fe4335a 9068f17/?d=1

UI Web Wizard Designer at Prolific Publishing in Burbank, CA
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/bae03ad3ae1937601a3fc6e31 15eceaa/?d=1

BitWine is looking for web design advisors
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/0d5325e31b33e5f5d8c7991bd 7576a52/?d=1

Product Manager at Green Dot in Los Angeles, CA (Monrovia, CA)
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/df1ef57ad22bf5dd26a0dcb94 b5255fb/?d=1

Sr. Software Engineer/Architect at Maya's Mom in Palo Alto, CA
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/32ed56b35f4f74304629a5784 7343967/?d=1

Sr. Scalability Engineer at AmieStreet in New York, NY (or telecommute)
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/ae33cf64de8b6a0c3727cfa90 a669c3c/?d=1

Senior Software Engineer at DonorsChoose.org in New York, NY
(midtown-west)
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/afd95d1532b1cacf2569e0670 c4c0c15/?d=1

Rather than spending the night writing posts, I've been wrestling with CSS and various other design issues - the result is a new menu and content tab structure for Read/WriteWeb. The design work on all the tabs was done by the amazing Mike Rundle (he also did the logo a couple of months ago). There are still a few minor things for us to update, but I decided to release in 'beta' mode tonight. You may need to do a hard refresh of the page (shift-F5) to see the changes.

The reason for the content tabs is to provide topical ways to navigate through R/WW's content - and also to help focus our writing on those topics. One inspiration for the tabs was Gigaom.com, who implemented them last year in their re-design.

Let us know what you think, bearing in mind that we haven't 100% finished it yet.

A quick thank you to Read/WriteWeb's excellent sponsors, for supporting quality content on Web Technology. Thanks also to our fast growing community of readers - your comments and encouragement spur us along every day. If you're a fan of R/WW, you may like to sign up to our MyBlogLog community too.

R/WW's current sponsors are:

• Wild Apricot - If you're running a small non-profit, Wild Apricot provides easy to use online tools so you can focus on your mission.
• CentralDesktop - a collaboration platform for businesses; it has all the flexibility of a wiki with the structure required for business.
• Compete - not just a statistics service to rival Alexa, Compete also provides search, analytics, shopping deals, and a personalized homepage.
• Edgeio - distributed online classifieds, with more than 100 million items in over 16,258 cities from over 162 countries.
• Userplane - the premier provider of communication software for online communities.
• Zoho - has an extensive list of web-based office products and productivity tools.
• Flock - social web browser which is one of the most innovative browsers around. Version 1.0 is coming soon.
• Eurekster - innovative kiwi startup that provides the community powered search box on Read/WriteWeb; recently released 'write your own search results'.

My personal thanks as well to the R/WW team of writers and guest contributers.

OK enough of the back-slapping, time to pump out more Web tech posts...

To usher in the new year, we're very pleased to announce the new Read/WriteWeb Job Board - brought to you in association with JobThread. While there are a few prominent and excellent job boards run by other tech blogs, there are a couple of differentiating factors with ours:

1) It's less expensive! $100 for a month, half the price of some of the others.

2) We think that a lot of super-smart people hang out on Read/WriteWeb, for the in-depth articles and conversations. And employers want to attract the best brains, right? :-) 

But actually we love the other tech blogs with job boards too and one day, who knows, we might all join together. We're all part of the same extended community after all.

About the R/WW Job Board

For job-hunters, The Read/WriteWeb Job Board provides job opportunities for Web Technology and New Media professionals, at startups and tech firms all over the world.

For employers: Read/WriteWeb is a premium tech weblog which reaches hundreds of thousands of developers, designers, executives and thought leaders in the Web and Media industry. So if you're looking for the smartest and most innovative staff - people who are one step ahead of the rest - then you'll find those people in the Read/WriteWeb community!

Check it out

Just a quick admin note about a few things. Firstly, Read/WriteWeb has been growing so well in recent months that I'm in the process of expanding the site. Key to this is continuing to provide premium content on web technology - and building a community around that. So I want to thank all the regular and loyal readers of R/WW - especially for all the comments you make, which puts the 'write' in Read/Write ;-)

In related news.... in order to focus more on R/WW, I've reluctantly given up my ZDNet blog. I enjoyed my time writing there and especially the series of posts I did on Web Office, which got me thinking about that space a lot! Of course, all the topics I used to cover on ZDNet will now be found on R/WW.

Sponsor Opportunities

There are a couple of sponsor slots opening up shortly in the sidebar, which sell for a very reasonable CPM. On Read/WriteWeb, you are guaranteed to reach a large number of smart, influential decision makers and early adopters. So if reaching that audience (and supporting premium content about Web Technology) is your goal for your new web 2.0 product or service, send me an email to request more details about R/WW sponsorship.

Coming Soon...

A Jobs Board is going live very soon on Read/WriteWeb and more exciting developments are in the works. Read/WriteWeb is now pretty much my full-time business (I've also cut back on consulting engagements), so you'll start to see this site bloom over the next few months :-)

Just a bit of admin: we've now introduced RSS feeds for comments onto Read/WriteWeb. On each post you'll see a "Subscribe to comments for this post" link (just under the Comments header).

If you want to subscribe to comments for all posts, there is a single feed for that: http://www.readwriteweb.com/comments.xml

I'm hoping this makes it easier for people to follow conversations on R/WW, because over the past few months there have been some fascinating discussions. Indeed a niche community of Web technology enthusiasts is forming here. So naturally I want to encourage that! If anyone has further suggestions to improve the community aspects of R/WW, please let me know...

References for MovableType users: Niall Kennedy and Phil Ringnalda.

Thanks once again to Read/WriteWeb's excellent sponsors, who I'm very grateful to for supporting the aims and ideals of this blog. The goal of R/WW is to provide quality analysis about web technology - and we think this focus on quality reflects very well on our sponsors. It also (may I say) leads to insightful conversations in the comments! So thanks to the following sponsors:

• Atlassian provides innovative enterprise software solutions, such as their wiki product Confluence.
• Zoho has an extensive list of web-based office products and productivity tools (a full Web Office suite is coming soon!).
• Flock is developing a social web browser and they are one of the most innovative browsers around.
• Pageflakes is a personalized start page that has some unique features - e.g. you can share your pages with friends and colleagues.
• Text Link Ads is an advertising network, which recently launched an interesting RSS advertising solution called Feedvertising.
• Futuretext has a new book out called Mobile Web 2.0, which explores how web technologies are changing the mobile industry (my copy is in the mail!)
• AdaptiveBlue has created a Firefox extension called blueorganizer, which got a lot of high praise at DEMO last week.

A special thanks as well to Read/WriteWeb's regular contributers, Alex Iskold and Ebrahim Ezzy (whose next article is coming later tonight). If you're a web technology enthusiast and have a topic you want to explore on Read/WriteWeb, do contact me at readwriteweb AT gmail DOT com.

Read/WriteWeb is growing. Last month was a record month in traffic, by a long shot. And after over 4 years of blogging, last month was also the first month I've managed to earn enough from R/WW to 'pay' for the time I spend writing and editing it. So R/WW is now a professional publication in that sense, although I prefer to think it always has been in terms of how much work has gone into it! :-) My commitment going forward is to build R/WW into the resource for Next Generation Web Technology analysis and news.

I have two groups of people I want to provide a shout-out to. Thank you Read/WriteWeb's initial sponsors (in order of arrival here):

• Atlassian is from my part of the world and they provide innovative enterprise software solutions, so they're a perfect fit for R/WW. And because they were first on board as a R/WW sponsor, they got the top banner spot ;-)
• Zoho is another very innovative Enterprise company and they are building one of my favorite product types - a Web Office.
• Flock is developing a social web browser and they are definitely one of the most innovative browsers around right now.
• Pageflakes is one of my favorite types of applications - a personalized start page. There's so much creativity in this space and with 100 widgets and counting, Pageflakes is one of the very best and most productive.
• Text Link Ads creates simple text ads which drive targeted traffic and grow your search engine rankings. Go check them out if you're a blogger wanting to make money.

Thanks also to FM Publishing, who have been a great help. It's important to note that all of these sponsors allow me to devote more time to R/WW, which means I can continue to grow the site and provide even more quality content.

Also a huge thanks to the guest contributers R/WW has had over the past few months, who have all helped to make R/WW what it is today. While I don't (yet?) earn anywhere enough to pay them for their troubles, it's my aim to make sure it's a win-win for them in terms of exposure. So thank you Alex Iskold, Ebrahim Ezzy, Steve O'Hear, Ken Yarmosh, Ryan Stewart, Ajit Jaokar - who have all at some stage or another this year contributed to Read/WriteWeb.