The first time Richard became aware of me was in January 2007 when I left a comment on a poll asking if AJAX was an RIA technology. To my surprise, Richard apparently liked my comment so much that he turned it into a full post. A few days later, I saw RWW feature writer Alex Iskold leave a comment on my personal blog and struck up an email conversation with him -- which I continued a month later when I sent him a congratulations note about the funding he landed for his company, AdaptiveBlue.

Toward the end of February, ReadWriteWeb wrote a post about OpenID that I thought I had a killer response to. So I wrote up my thoughts on my personal blog (sadly, that post has been lost to the ether) and emailed a link to Richard. After receiving a reply, I followed up with an offer to write some guest posts for RWW, saying that I'd been planning to write up a comparison of online IPTV providers. And that's exactly what I did -- my first post was published about 2 weeks later.

After a couple of more guest posts, all three of which landed on the front page of Digg, Richard invited me to hold down the fort while he was away at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in April 2007. I was still writing for that political site, but I thought -- who needs sleep for a week if it gets me a crack at writing for my favorite blog? After that first trial week, Richard hired me on a part time basis, and I worked both jobs until July 2007 when I joined RWW on a more full-time basis.

In the 15 months I have worked here I have learned a ton about blogging, made a lot of great friends, and met a lot of awesome people. ReadWriteWeb has been very good to me, and I'll certainly miss it. It was, however, time for a new chapter in my life. I'll still be blogging, but I'll be joining a new outfit. Where I'm headed isn't exactly a secret (I've told plenty of people), but I'll leave off saying here. If you're curious, I'll announce it soon on my personal blog, mockriot (a very occasionally updated tumblog).

I want to sincerely thank everyone who has read and commented on my work over the past year. It means a lot to me that anyone cares what I have to say and I hope to continue interacting with you at my new gig. ReadWriteWeb will remain my first daily read, and I want to extend my congratulations to Corvida and Frederic. Richard: You've assembled one hell of a team, and RWW rocks because of it!

Thanks again, everyone!

Image via Inside Facebook.

Facebook's Inbox is still a long way toward being a "Gmail-killer" -- or any other full email option killer, for that matter. Though the site does email full copies of messages -- a practice it began last December -- and though it lets users send messages to email addresses, it still lacks many of the "must have" features of an email client. Message organizing features, for example, are almost non-existent, as is the ability to reply to all recipients of a group message. There's also no way to reply to message sent from Facebook via an outside email client (i.e., the way you can reply to Basecamp message by replying to the notification email), nor is there a way to send messages to Facebook users from outside email clients (the latter is an effective type of spam control, however).

For some younger users, though, messages on sites like Facebook and MySpace have already supplanted email as the defacto method of asynchronous communication on the web. Our own Bernard Lunn argued last week that LinkedIn could do the same thing for him and Outlook by adding more robust messaging features. I've long argued that Facebook could transition into a network suitable for business, and better messaging capabilities is definitely a step in the right direction.

In addition to rating quotes on credibility and relevance to the reader (because relevance is so subjective, that makes it the less useful of the two metrics), users can also post challenging or supporting statements. In that respect, Ameritocracy is something like a crowdsourced version of Annenberg's FactCheck.org. Users can also add context to quotes and discuss and debate quotes via a comment system.

According to the About page on the site, its goal is to "help people cut through the noise and gain quick access to the whole picture." When we asked Kennedy if taking quotes out of context really helped reveal the full picture or just presented an even more limited view, he told us that "whole picture" was probably not the best term to use to describe what the site does. "Our intent is that the short quotes, short user responses (Supporting, Challenging, and Adding Context), and the ratings make it far more efficient for people to get a broader view," he said. "The quote should be enough in-context that it captures the speaker's intent. If not, the community can flag the quote as being Out of Context, and the contributing user will take a reputation hit."

Ameritocracy is attempting to create a non-partisan community that keeps the focus on fact checking and credibility and not on political ideology. We like the idea of Ameritocracy. Giving people a way to rate the credibility of political information or statements and challenge facts publicly helps to level the playing field and keep politicians, organizations, and the media honest.

If you're interested in participating at Ameritocracy, you can sign up with the invite code "readwrite" -- there are 100 invites available on a first come, first serve basis.

What is more interesting are the XML feed calls that Hakia is offering that give access to their underlying NLP engine. Right now, only the "Summarizer" element is available. Summarizer, which Hakia says can be used to suggest tags or abstracts, analyzes and extracts meaning from large blocks of text or the contents of URLs. Other elements that are not yet available are Categorizer, which identifies "categorical phrases" in text, Characterizer, which "identifies and expands descriptive keywords or tags," and Text Meaning Representation.

Hakia has an XML testing form up on their Club Hakia page, and in our testing it seemed a little rough around the edges. Compared to our testing of Open Calais from Reuters (our coverage), the summaries and tags the XML testing form returned using the Summarizer element weren't very impressive. Mostly, it seemed to just return the headline or first sentence as the summary for articles we threw at it. And for RWW articles, Hakia Summarizer would suggest as tags the tags that we entered by hand in MovableType.

Hakia's Syndication Web Services are free for up to 30,000 requests per day for search services (unlimited free queries for Quotes and Cartoons), and free for up to 1,000 requests per day for XML feed calls. Have you had a chance to play with Hakia's new semantic API? If so, what did you think? How does it compare to Calais or Semantic Hacker? Let us know in the comments below.

Full Disclosure: Occasional ReadWriteWeb contributor Emre Sokullu is a technology evangelist at Hakia.

Indeed, the demand for telecommuting is on the rise as a result of rising energy costs. While not all jobs can be done from home, one study found that if every worker in the United States who could telecommute -- 53% of white collar workers -- did so twice per week, 9.7 billion gallons of gas and $38.2 billion would be saved annually. Another recent study found that 37% of IT workers in the US would be willing to take a 10% pay cut if telecommuting were offered as an option -- 22% would take a pay cut to work form home in the UK. A bill requiring federal workers in the US who are eligible to work from home be allowed to at least 20% of the time recently passed in the House of Representatives and a similar bill is making its way through the Senate.

So how does that help the web? More home workers, means a larger market for applications designed to help remote workers collaborate. Things like Google Docs, Basecamp, Dimdim, and PalBee will all benefit from a larger contingent of home workers.

Do you work from home? Would you be willing to take a pay cut if you were given that option? Do you agree with Cerf, will the high cost of oil will force more people to work via the web rather than face to face? Let us know in the comments below.

That makes sense given that analysts have predicted that local ad spending will jump 48% this year to $12.6 billion. The majority of those ads will be search advertising, but clearly, local information is hot with consumers. We've written about the rise of hyperlocal information on ReadWriteWeb before -- Huffington and company are seeking to take advantage of this trend. They want to turn the Huffington Post into a national, virtual newspaper group -- think Gannett or McClatchy but completely online.

And that makes sense, too. A comScore study that we reported on in March revealed that 38% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 are unlikely to read a physical newspaper during a typical week, but non-news readers are still voracious consumers of news. They just get their news online -- and not just from traditional newspaper sites.

"Non-newspaper readers are a particularly important segment to reach because they are heavier than average news consumers - they just prefer to consume it in a digital format," said comScore executive vice president Jack Flanagan. "That they are receptive to print, TV, and Internet news brands indicates a broad opportunity online, but the brands that will ultimately win over these key news consumers are the ones that successfully integrate cutting edge digital content with high quality journalism." Clearly, that is a message that HuffPo gets -- their tag line is "The Internet Newspaper: News Blogs Video Community," and Arianna Huffington said last night that much of their venture funding will go toward building out a team of reporters. Last year they hired BBC reporter Elinor Shields to become the sites managing editor.

However, the Huffington Post is an edited aggregator -- a team of editors oversees the site and specifically decides what links get space on the sites, writes headlines by hand, selects images, etc. Last year I wrote for a competitor to the Huffington Post in the political news blogosphere, and from first hand experience I can tell you that it is hard work to gather and post news links and manage original and wire content. It will be interesting to see if HuffPo will be able to scale their local strategy to compete with automated local news aggregators like Outsite.in and YourStreet (our coverage).

Image credit: jdlasica

It's not surprising that China's web site ecosystem is seeing such huge growth -- their Internet user population is as well. In February, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information reported that the country had 221 million Internet users, which means that it has effectively passed the United States as the world's largest net population. And there's still a lot of room to grow -- China only has about 16% of its population on the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, compared to 71.4% of Americans who are online.

In our 2008 web predictions, Richard MacManus predicted that this would be a break out year for China on the Internet. "The most interesting innovations on the Web in 2008 won't happen in Silicon Valley, but in Asia (China, Japan, Korea)," wrote MacManus. "At least one startup from China will break through in the US market with Twitter-like success in 2008 - and it will almost certainly be a Mobile Web app."

We haven't had a Twitter-like success come out of China year (it's still early in 2008, though), but China is definitely experiencing a web boom. Doing business in China, however, can be very tricky. Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo!, a company that has had a tough go in China, said that doing business in other countries was difficult because of legal "gray areas." Google has also taken heat for cooperating with Chinese censors.

Net Applications has been tracking the uptake of Firefox 3 since yesterday morning, and it is now at around 4.5% -- not bad for its first 24 hours. Firefox on the whole is closing in on 20% market share and is higher among tech savvy crowds (over 50% on this blog, for example). That 4.5% of Firefox web browser users are already using version 3 indicates that about 25% of its user base has upgraded overnight -- that's very impressive.

If you're still on the fence about upgrading, check out the pair of great overviews of FF3 from Lifehacker here and here.

Are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade? Let us know in the comments and vote in our poll below.

"Since reddit's beginning, we have stood on the shoulders of giants in the open source world. Every library, tool and platform we depend on is open," said the announcement blog post. "Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself. We are proud and excited that we're finally giving back to the community that has given us so much."

It makes sense for Reddit, which has grown because of very passionate and technically savvy community, might go this route. Open sourcing Reddit's code will very likely lead to a stronger product and tighter community, and not to the birth of strong competitors. Anyone who wants to create niche Reddits on topics that the site doesn't adequately cover is now free to do so, however.

Reddit is written in Python. An explanatory video from the company is below.

"So, we had an idea. We had been sponsoring Kiva.org for the past few months as an organization we really admire and believe in - they're the online micro-lending site that helps entrepreneurs in the developing world. And, we wanted to figure out a way to funnel the dollars we were sending to Google ads over to Kiva loans," wrote Jama's Director of Customer Outreach & Marketing, John Simpson in a blog post today.

The idea is the same as the original "You try. We give." program. Jama is hoping that press coverage of their unusual marketing plan (such as this), as well as word of mouth, will send as much traffic -- perhaps higher quality traffic -- as Google AdWords. And because Kiva loans are theoretically repaid (currently 97.97% of the time), any traffic Jama receives via this experiment is bound to end up being a lot cheaper, and perhaps even free.

"In the pursuit of growing our own business, we decided we'd much rather help a small store owner in Uganda feed her village than support the Google billionaires' hobby of flying to space," said Eric Winquist, CEO and founder of Jama Software in an emailed press release. Simpson told us he's excited to see if innovative social marketing tactics can out perform traditional search marketing.

"This program just gives people an added incentive to try our product versus the traditional enterprise tools from IBM and Telelogic, or to pass it along to a colleague or friend," Simpson told ReadWriteWeb in an email. "We're going up against 'the institutional big blue' so we differentiate ourselves by being a company with personality and more of a personal touch - we could never outspend them. The Kiva programs serves as a positive first impression and it illustrates our commitment as a company to giving back, whether big or small."

According to Simpson, eventually Jama might supplement their social public relations strategy with more traditional ad buys from Google or elsewhere. Once loans start being repaid, Jama could theoretically put last month's ad budget toward traditional advertising while this month's ad budget is being used to fund a microloan in the developing world.

Kiva co-founder and chief marketing officer Jessica Jackley Flannery was overjoyed by Jama's decision to choose Kiva over AdWords. "We're thrilled when a company like Jama Software develops an innovative program that supports both our global mission at Kiva and their own goals. It's such a simple concept, but that's the beauty of it," she said. We tend to agree, and we wish Jama the best in their efforts, and luck to anyone who receives loans via Kiva.

However, blogs are still big business. While most "regular" people might not be avid blog readers, they still read them passively when encountering blog content via links from mainstream sources, links in emails, or search results. All that adds up to a lot of monetizable, niche traffic. That's where Technorati is hoping to score big. The company says that it "collects, organizes, highlights, and distributes the online global conversation," which is short hand for, "we have a lot of data on who's saying what about what."

This morning I talked to Alan Levy, CEO of BlogTalkRadio, which has been an early beta tester of the new Technorati Media ad network. Levy had nothing but nice things to say about Technorati. "There's no doubt that major brands want to be part of the conversation with the blogosphere," Levy told me, and Technorati has a reputation as a company that understands that conversation. Blogs are conversational in nature, Levy said, and the long tail network that Technorati is assembling will allow brands to be part of that via very targeted advertising.

Appealing to the long tail is a smart play for Technorati. As we wrote last November, there's no money in the long tail, but there is plenty to be made on the long tail because there is volume there. That's essentially how AdSense works -- sell targeted ads to specific niches across a huge inventory assembled from low traffic sites. If Technorati, which sells on a CPM basis and is willing to negotiate the revenue split with blogs -- something Google won't do except with its largest publishers -- can out perform AdSense for long tail bloggers, they'll have a real winner on their hands.

With mobile usage on the rise one major US bank launched a suite of mobile banking services last year. A year later, Bank of America's mobile site has a million unique active user accounts. On peak days, Bank of America sees 100,000 users sign into its mobile services, with more use coming from mobile-savvy city dwellers (where cellular data and wifi coverage are generally better). 80% of the bank's mobile users are under the age of 45, and Bank of America reports that 2/3rds of users are under the age of 35.

Not surprisingly, the most popular devices are smart phones like the iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile-based phones. With some analysts expecting iPhone sales to triple this holiday season, we're likely to see the up trend in online banking continue. Where do you do your banking? Let us know in the comments.

That the Red Cross is using social media sharing sites like Utterz, Flickr, and YouTube (they even have a Twitter account) is not surprising. We reported in April on a study that appeared in New Scientist magazine that found that social media sites, blogs, and instant messaging services are better at connecting people and providing warnings during emergencies than traditional sources of such information.

During last fall's California wildfires, for example, the best source of breaking information was a combination of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, and other tools of citizen journalists. As the fires continued to rage out of control, media poured into CNN's i-Report section, which collects user submitted news photos and videos, and the value of citizen journalism became so apparent that the company eventually spun i-Report off as a standalone web site.

"The real contribution of citizen journalists in a story like this, where whole areas of land are closed off and the fields of greatest danger keep shifting, is in having more eyes on the ground," Thomas Hollihan, a professor of media at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, told the Baltimore Sun. "Citizen journalists are swapping information back and forth - reporting where the flames are now headed or showing images on their cell phones of the fire. And with so much happening so quickly, that kind of information can be really powerful - if it is accurate."

Last spring, when tragedy struck Virginia Tech University, the "I'm ok at VT" group on Facebook famously connected students with families and friends. Hundreds of other support groups, blogs, and web site sprung up on social networking sites and around the web as a way to connect students and help them through troubling times. The Red Cross operates a similar site for connecting disaster survivors with friends and family.

From disaster relief and other non-governmental organizations to citizen journalists and the mainstream media, web 2.0 and mobile technology is being used to connect, inform, and mobilize people during disasters.

Having read some of the stories on Quillpill my initial assessment may have been a bit harsh. While Pulitzer material they are not, many of these are not as bad as the images that the term "cell phone novel" evokes. Quillpill writers have so far found a way to embrace the 140 character constraint without resorting to emoticons and chat acronyms, even if punctuation and grammar in some of the stories leaves something to be desired.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about a competition that challenged people to write an entire story in just 140 characters. "Being constrained to exactly 140 characters will spark your creative juices and force you to focus stringently on word choice, sentence structure, and even punctuation," said Copyblogger's Brian Clark in introducing the contest, and the results were quite awesome. Quillpill expands on the idea that constraints have the potential to lead to more creative and innovative output. While I still cringe at calling anything written in this manner a novel -- even if it is of novel length -- and I'd certainly not care to read a novel on my phone, I have changed my mind on the potential for the cell phone as a creative writing medium.

That young votes are more likely to be involved with politics online is an advantage for Democrats, because young voters tend to lean toward presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama, according to Pew. Obama's supporters are more web savvy than those of his competitors, and even though the study found that just 6% of American's have given to a presidential campaign via the web, Barack Obama's record haul owes a far greater percentage to online contributions. Just 2% of Americans gave online during the last presidential election. Given the increased web involvement of the millennial generation, we can probably expect 2012 to be another record setting cycle in terms of online involvement and fundraising.

However, is all this information gathering shifting online a good thing? Americans aren't so sure. While 22% of Americans say that they wouldn't even be involved with a campaign in any way if not for the Internet, 35% feel that the web magnifies the most extreme voices, which can "drown out average people's views." And a majority of Americans surveyed feel that the web is full of propaganda and misinformation that too many people believe.

We noted last week that the echo chamber effect of the blogosphere has a way of making rumors go wild and have far-reaching consequences outside of the web. That said, it is exciting that such a large percentage of Americans are now using the web to seek primary sources that were previously unavailable or hard to attain. Whereas in the past people had to rely on information filtered by reporters, now voters are able to use the web to find videos, transcripts and position papers to see the quotes in context, so to speak -- and then offer their own opinions back to fellow voters. That has to be a net positive.