According to a new analysis by Web analytics company Woopra, StumbleUpon drives nearly twice as much traffic than Digg. StatCounter uncovered a similar trend recently, with StumbleUpon second only to Facebook among social media traffic drivers.

How it Works

"Explore the web like never before," declares the StumbleUpon sign up page. And indeed the beauty of StumbleUpon is how easy it makes browsing the Web. It's often called a 'serendipity engine' for its ability to turn up strange and new content.

Here's how StumbleUpon works as a user. You firstly download and install a browser add-on, then select categories that interest you. Now you're ready to explore. Simply click the Stumble button in your browser to be magically transported to an unknown web page. Where you're taken is driven by StumbleUpon's sophisticated recommendation engine, which is fueled by data from its users - who vote on whether they 'like' or 'dislike' web pages across the Web.

What's Popular on StumbleUpon?

It's simple for the users, yet surprisingly difficult for the media industry to get its collective head around. Its randomness and lack of an easily identifiable core audience are two things that make StumbleUpon hard to understand. So what kind of content is popular there?

Much like Digg, another crowd-sourced recommendation engine, the most popular content on StumbleUpon tends to be easily digestable and entertaining. Lists, bizarre things, scientific discoveries, animals, humor, images, and so on. Among the most stumbled content of 2009 were these articles: '99 Things You Should Have Seen On The Internet' (471K Stumbles), 'Life Summarized in 4 Bottles' (439K Stumbles), '14 Rare Color Photos From the FSA-OWI' (341K Stumbles),... you get the idea.

How the ReadWriteWeb Community Uses StumbleUpon

We queried our community via Twitter to find out their main use cases. Here's a representative sample of the replies (you can see them all via Twitoaster):

@brettmorrison: "I use it to share things I find interesting and I use it to find randomly interesting things when I have a few free moments."

@EssenteeWeb: "So's I can share what I think is cool and find content I otherwise wouldn't have."

@andinarvaez: "I do, on occasion. Whenever I'm online, want to stay online, but just feel like browsing. [...] Even though they're [within] my interests, stumble upon helps me burst my usual browsing patterns & online bubble."

@rjanyk: "boredom... killing time a couple minutes at a time... entertainment. Sadly, almost thrilling not knowing what's coming next"

@MicaR: "Been a Stumbler for yrs. Great to get new ideas flowing when stuck, and, of course, great time waster. I've learned a lot, randomly."

@ezy80: "I find its a good source of 'random relevant' that nothing else provides in quite the same way..."

@lauratellsjokes: "i stumble when i am bored and to learn new things. i love stumbling through photos, art and philosophy."

@estateofflux: "I do, great for entertainment and uncovering hidden gems of content when you've exhausted all your usual sources!"

These and other replies often used words like "random" or "new." Also it seems that people tend to use StumbleUpon when they have a bit of spare time, or are bored.

Let us know in the comments whether you currently use StumbleUpon; and if so, how and why?

Our latest update shows that Justin Bieber has made a big impact in 2010 on YouTube, knocking Lady Gaga out of the number 1 spot. Here is the top 10, as of July 2010:

2. Lady Gaga - Bad Romance; 248,408,518 views

3. Charlie bit my finger - again !; 211,569,698 views

4. Evolution of Dance; 147,756,029 views

5. Miley Cyrus - Party In The U.S.A. - Official Music Video; 139,850,232 views

Embedding disabled by YouTube.

6. Pitbull - I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho); 132,599,959 views

7. Hahaha - Small daring boy; 129,397,138 views

8. Miley Cyrus - 7 Things - Official Music Video (HQ); 125,693,801 views

9. Lady Gaga - Just Dance ft. Colby O'Donis; 117,336,205 views

10. Jeff Dunham - Achmed the Dead Terrorist; 115,828,413 views

However, the iPad has gained popularity in the artistic community - in particular thanks to an iPad app called Brushes, which enables you to 'finger paint' a colorful work of art.

Check out how David Kassan did a finger painting of a subject in this video. Note how he used the zoom feature to attend to details. The end result rivals anything done with paints!

Brushes was originally developed for the iPhone, by two ex-Apple employees: Steve Sprang and Kurt Revis. This year Brushes was redesigned by the pair, to take advantage of the iPad's larger screen.

The iPad app features brush controls, layers, an extensive color palette, zooming, high resolution export and a 'stroke by stroke' playback of the art work's creation. A Users's Guide for the iPad app was released just today.

A Flickr group has been set up for Brushes and it includes a lot of very impressive art work. I have to say, this app gives the lie to the commonly spouted iPad criticism that you can't create media with it - a claim that I heard repeated tonight by a "technology expert" interviewed by a local TV news network.

The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

Why a New Internet Protocol is Needed

Currently the Web largely uses IPv4, Internet Protocol version 4. Each IPv4 address is limited to a 32-bit number, which means there are a maximum of just over 4 billion unique addresses. IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol and uses a 128-bit address, so it supports a vastly larger number of unique addresses. Enough, in fact, to give every person on the planet over 4 billion addresses! Update: Dave Evans, Chief Technologist of the Internet Business Solutions Group at Cisco, wrote in to advise that "it's closer to 50 thousand trillion trillion addresses per person." (reference)

John Curran from ARIN, the non-profit responsible for managing the distribution of Internet addresses in the North American region, told ReadWriteWeb that of the approximately 4 billion IPv4 addresses available, all but 6% have already been allocated. Curran expects the final 6% to be allocated over the coming year.

This is largely an issue that ISP (Internet Service Providers) and telecoms carriers need to deal with. However content service providers, including large-scale Internet companies like Google and Facebook, also need to ensure that the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 takes place. Curran explained that a content company like Google (for example its YouTube operation) will need to work with its ISP to transport the content via IPv6 as well as IPv4.

This transition is happening "slowly," says Curran. But he warns that "deployment is where we're behind."

Google, Facebook & Others Making Good Progress

John Curran told us that large carriers like Verizon and Comcast have announced trial IPv6 activity. Curran also noted that new Internet of Things initiatives that use sensor networks, power grids, RFID and similar technologies, are being directed to use IPv6 and not IPv4.

There is also solid support from the big Internet companies. Curran said that Google has already put the majority of its services onto IPv6. Declaring its support for IPv6 on a special webpage, Google states that "IPv6 is essential to the continued health and openness of the Internet [and] will enable innovation and allow the Internet's continued growth."

In June, Google held a Google IPv6 Implementors Conference. At that event, Facebook announced that it had begun to use IPv6.

In his opening remarks to the conference, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf urges ISPs to move to IPv6, so that a "black market" for Internet addresses won't occur.

Another Y2K?

Critics view some of the push for IPv6 as Chicken Little 'the sky is falling' talk. Commented @ajbraun, a self-described technology leader at Sony Ericsson, via Twitter: "We should call this "IPv6: Y2K II." An obvious issue for 10 years, we will panic at the end and finally much ado about nothing."

Others see a technology called NAT (Network Address Translation) as a solution - it maps multiple addresses to a single IP address, thus reducing the amount of unique IP addresses required. However this is at best a temporary solution. Google argued back in 2008 that NAT and similar technologies "complicate the Internet's architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles."

Whether or not there is Y2K-style fear mongering, the bottom line is that IPv6 is a much larger platform for the coming Internet of Things. So one way or another, the move will have to be made.

The acquisition increased the number of pages Yahoo! has on the Web by over 10% and brought Yahoo! back into the original content game, albeit in a largely unbranded way at this point. Let's look at how Yahoo! has been using its new farm...

Yahoo! has begun to integrate Associated Content into its network of sites. A post this week on the Associated Content blog notes that content from contributors has appeared on Yahoo! News, Y! Finance, Y! Sports, and other purple properties.

However, the bulk of Associated Content's content and value continues to reside on associatedcontent.com and is surfaced through search engines. According to an EConsultancy interview with Associated Content CEO Patrick Keane back in March, 80-90% of its estimated 16 million monthly visitors arrive at the site through a search engine. This high percentage has been normal in the content farming industry for a long time - when we interviewed About.com's CEO in 2006, 80% of About.com's traffic was from search.

Is Yahoo! Getting The Quality it Expects?

Quality - or lack thereof - is the number one complaint about content farms. In this respect, Associated Content appears to be at odds with what Yahoo! wants.

In the EConsultancy interview (which was before Yahoo! acquired the company), CEO Patrick Keane admitted that "quality is often irrelevant to consumers." Instead, he said at the time, consumers are wondering "was it useful? Did it satisfy my needs? If the user gets value, then that works for them."

Quality may be irrelevant to Associated Content's users, but it isn't for Yahoo!. In its Q2 results announcement, Yahoo! states that Associated Content was acquired in order to extend its ability "to provide high quality, personally relevant content for the benefit of its users and advertisers."

Opportunities for Writers, But Low Pay

It's easy to be cynical about the quality of content from Associated Content (after all, its CEO is). However the content is undoubtedly proving useful to Yahoo! and its network of content properties, which are still viewed by a massive audience.

The articles that make it onto Yahoo! News, Sports and other properties, come from the cream of the Associated Content crop of writers. Clearly some of them will turn out to be talented writers who can write compelling news-style content. Associated Content honors "rising stars" every month, which is good recognition and encouragement. So there are opportunities for contributors. Plus, as a freelance writer who has written for Demand Media argued in ReadWriteWeb back in December, there is a certain freedom in writing for such sites.

On the other side of the coin, it is very low pay. John Reinan of the blog MinnPost.com recently did a trial as an Associated Content writer, penning an article on accessible home design for aging baby boomers. It seems that the trial was unsuccessful. Reinan wrote that his article had been viewed 24 times. "At Associated Content's going rate of $1.50 per 1,000 views," Reinan complained, "I've made 4 cents so far."

Yahoo! Brand

All things considered, the acquisition has been a successful one for Yahoo! - despite concerns over quality of content. It gave Yahoo! access to 380,000 contributors and it was important strategically for Yahoo! to produce original content to complement its syndicated news sources.

Yahoo! also immediately increased its content base by over 10%, with this acquisition. Associated Content currently has 20.3 million pages indexed in Google and Yahoo! has 166 million. Over time we may see more Associated Content pages branded as Yahoo! content. Or perhaps it will continue to just be the 'quality' content that makes that transition.

That seems the biggest risk of this acquisition, that Yahoo! will eventually sully its image as a media portal with poor quality content.

Suite101 is a relatively low profile site compared to the others mentioned above. Yet it produces 500 new pieces of content per day. I spoke to Suite101 CEO Peter Berger to discuss why it produces so much content, how it compares to Demand Media, and what Google is doing about content farms.

Suite101 is a publishing platform that hosts articles about niche topics. As its name implies, Suite101 focuses on '101' style writing - beginners articles on thousands of topics. Berger described Suite101 as "a service to help writers be successful online." It currently has 5,000 active writers and four different language sites. The biggest of these is the english language .com site, which he said currently has 24 million unique visitors a month.

In a search on Google, Suite101 came up with 6.5 million pages on the Web. That isn't far behind About.com, with 8.29 million. It isn't on the same level though (in terms of quantity) as Demand Media - which at last estimate pumps out 7,000 new articles every day (it was 4,000 back in November). At that rate, Demand Media is probably producing upwards of 2.5 million new pieces of content per year.

Eating The Lunch of Traditional Publishers

Berger said that the name of the game in this space is SEO: writing content "that search engines want to present their users." Like the Demand Media CEO when I questioned him about their business model, Berger claimed that his company's model is not competing with traditional journalism. Rather, Berger said that Suite101 and others compete with "non-fiction publishing."

For example, he said, in the past if you were re-modeling your house you'd go buy a book on that subject. But now, people just Google it. He claimed that traditional publishers have "not woken up [to this] at all."

I asked what traditional publishers could do to 'wake up'? Berger replied that there has been "no response from publishing houses" to topic-based sites like Suite101. The best that traditional publishers have come up with, said Berger, is ebooks. However "the questions of the users are so much more specific" than what ebooks can address, he continued. "What rules in this space is topic expertise" - which he noted is what Suite101 is a platform for.

Demand Media vs. Google

So is Suite101 worried about the sheer scale that Demand Media is working at and that they may dominate this space? Berger thinks that Demand Media is only interested in the "commercially lucrative space" and not the "more niche subjects" that Suite101 covers.

What's more, Berger believes that Google is a threat to Demand Media's business model: "Google is best at solving problems algorithmically."

"Finding niche requirements is becoming a commodity," he continued, "and Google - not Demand Media - is best placed to master that space."

What he means by that is that Demand Media has sophisticated software for identifying what content is 'in demand' on the Web (hence its name). But Google owns the dominant search engine, where millions of people go to search for content. So Google is in a position of power over Demand Media - its options include open sourcing the mechanism for identifying what content is needed on the Web (thus denying Demand Media its main competitive advantage), or it could change its PageRank algorithm to better account for quality over quantity (which based on what I've heard, is already happening).

The New New Agriculture

Suite101 doesn't seem concerned with Demand Media vs Google. Berger says that Suite101 is focused instead on writers. He sees his company eventually moving beyond "professionalised niche writing" and becoming a "personal brand builder for qualified individuals." In other words, a place where subject matter experts can come to share their expertise.

Multiply this over hundreds of thousands of niche topics, and it's a potentially valuable business. But highly competitive - because others like Mahalo, About.com and Associated Content are also farming the Web for the big bucks.

It would be easy to say that the 'social' element is still the primary part of today's Web, since the popular products of this era enable you to say what's on your mind (Facebook), what's happening (Twitter), or where you are (Foursquare). All of these are mostly social activities. But more significantly, these and other products output data that will increasingly be used to build personalized services for you.

How We Went Beyond Social

So how did we arrive at a Web that is less about social and more about you?

After the peak of Web 2.0, we (meaning all of us) began to get overwhelmed with the choice of content available. We thought we had to actually 'read' as much of that content as possible. So we watched YouTube, chatted on MySpace and Facebook, read blogs, followed lots of people on this new thing called Twitter, and so on. By the end of 2008, we were exhausted by all of this CONTENT. How could we possibly keep up?!

In 2010, we're still struggling to digest all of what social media throws at us. However, a shift has been happening since 2009 which alleviates the problem. We've begun to realize that it's not how much content we consume that is important: it's what we do with all of the social and other data available to us. The social is still important, but the resulting data is - slowly - becoming more important because it can be analyzed, filtered, mashed up and personalized.

Structured Data & Internet of Things

Two relatively new trends are driving this change.

The first is the increasing amount of data being uploaded to the Web by governments, organizations and people. Much of this data is being structured using Semantic Web technologies like RDFa or microformats. In other words, it is categorized and encoded with meaning that machines can process. Recent examples include U.S. and U.K. government data, Best Buy's store and product data and Facebook's Open Graph.

And then we have the Internet of Things: an evolving trend where real-world objects and 'things' are connected to the Internet via technologies such as sensors and RFID tags - everything from cars to houses to roads and more. The upshot is that the Web is about to experience a data explosion, as billions of sensors and other data input and output devices upload exabytes of new data to the Web.

How do We Use This Data?

If we add together social data from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, data from governments and businesses, and data from sensors and RFID, this is a huge amount of data. Most of it isn't for "consuming." Rather, the value of all of this new Web data will be in how it's filtered, mixed together ("mashed up") and personalized in new Web services - most of which haven't yet been built.

Adam Greenfield is one of the leading thinkers of the Internet of Things; I interviewed him earlier this year about his book called Everyware. Greenfield recently wrote a post describing a near future scenario for non-technical people using the Web. He posited a use case where his mother would be able to plan a train trip to see her son, by creating an "ad-hoc service" that tapped into the Web and utilized real-time data sources.

In 2010, his mother would have to find and "read" several different applications in order to plot her travel schedule, and some of that information isn't even currently on the Web. Greenfield envisions a near future where his mother can essentially "write" her requirements into her mobile or other device, and the Web will deliver a personalized schedule to "read." You can view a diagram of Adam's concept here (PDF).

Don't Think Social, Think Data

Successful products in the Web 2.0 era had a strong social element: YouTube, MySpace and Flickr were a few relatively early examples. In the current era of the Web, which began to form in early 2009, the focus has shifted from social to data-driven software. Successful products of this era of the Web will be ones that filter, structure and personalize this vast amount of data coming onto the Web.

So if I was an entrepreneur or developer wondering what to build for this era of the Web, I wouldn't be thinking social. I'd be thinking: How can I use all of this data and build on top of it? There are incredible opportunities out there for you.

This current era of the Web doesn't have a name, which is probably a good sign! One thing is for sure though: It's still a read/write Web - only now you're reading and writing data from much more than just social services. You're increasingly interacting with "things," organizations, governments - virtually anything that can connect to the Web.

The latest version of social news site Digg is currently in restricted beta, with an additional 20,000 users added at the beginning of July. The new version adds the ability to "follow" people or publishers via a feature called "My News." This will be the default Digg home page, and it's prompted many to compare the new Digg to Twitter and Facebook. Another big change is that publishers may now automatically submit their content. This changes the game for both power users and publishers, because previously the secret to getting onto the Digg front page was for a power user to submit the story. That's no longer the case.

Up till now, the definition of a "power user" on Digg has been someone with the ability to make stories popular simply by submitting content or "digging" it up. There was also a lot of back-scratching that happened behind the scenes among both power users and publishers: 'You digg my content, I'll digg yours.' Digg has attracted a lot of criticism in the past for these practices inside its community.

Simply put, Digg's power users wielded a lot of power because they dictated which publishers got pushed onto the Digg homepage. Digg is a large source of traffic for publishers, particularly tech news publications. In the past, tech sites like Ars Technica and Engadget have received a hugely disproportionate number of Digg frontpages, compared to other tech sites, since they were favored by power users.

With the new Digg, publishers may opt in to having their articles auto-submitted to Digg via RSS feed. But will this stop the gaming?

How The New Digg Affects Power Users

We spoke to Digg power user JD Rucker, a.k.a. oboy on Digg, to discuss the impact of Digg's changes on his community.

Rucker recently wrote a post entitled The New Digg: A Shift in the Balance of Power, which argued that "the new Digg will make many current 'power users' impotent" but also create opportunities for new types of power users.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, JD Rucker explained that "rather than submit [articles], current long-time power users will be able to expose content that they like through their Diggs."

This list of diggs is similar to a list of daily tweets, since people follow what the power user diggs. It's also similar to Facebook, because other users may 'like' what they digg by digging it too.

The idea, said Rucker, is that the power users who succeed at attracting followers will become "tastemakers" - which is the term Digg founder Kevin Rose used when he announced the new Digg in May.

What Happens Behind The Scenes

Many people aren't aware of the amount of "gaming the system" which goes on in the social Web. I consider myself fairly naive about a lot of it. But I know this much: despite the altruistic front of many successful people in the social Web, many of them have gamed their way to the top.

The following is how JD Rucker explained how Digg's power users will (or won't) adjust to the new Digg. It also reveals the power games that are played on the site:

"They [power users] can still network via IM and control publisher accounts to keep themselves relevant, but the vast majority will fail miserably because they won't be able to adjust to the new algo[rithm]. They'll spam, spam, and spam some more until they either give up and move on to other sites or abort operations altogether.

Others are already planning on leaving.

The "savvy" ones who have built-up networks not reliant on IM, [and] who will also have access to multiple and/or strong publisher accounts, will soar."

I asked Rucker what he meant by "control publisher accounts." He replied with this generic example: "Bob Power User, who is getting paid by RandomDiggDependentSite.com, is currently using his and his team's power user accounts to submit." Rucker described this as "a small cottage industry."

That's right, some power users control publisher Digg accounts. This practice will continue on the new Digg.

A Whole New Ballgame: Let The Games Begin...

We like to write about how wonderful the social Web is and how it has improved society and business. That's certainly true, but the Web is also big business, and it is ruthlessly gamed by many social media 'pundits' and publishers alike. The new Digg is partly an attempt to clean up some of that on its site by preventing its power users from controlling the submission of content.

JD Rucker stated in his post that the new Digg showed "guts" because it is such a big change. I agree. The new Digg cleverly mimics Twitter and Facebook, becoming a place where you can 'follow' influencers and publishers to get your daily news fix. What's more, power users now have the opportunity to attract large followings, which is a chance for some of them to become influential personalities.

However, the new Digg won't stop the games of power users and the publishers who glom onto them. There's too much (online) power and money at stake. It's game on again!

Follow ReadWriteWeb on the new Digg

It's an impressive demonstration of how a large, mainstream website can have added meaning and structure.

1. Semantic Web Adoption by Facebook, Best Buy & Others
2. It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web
3. The State of Linked Data in 2010
4. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009
5. ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee

The BBC World Cup site featured over 700 webpages and was powered by a semantic publishing framework. The site boasted a comprehensive ontology (a map of concepts), that output "automated metadata-driven web pages" created on-the-fly.

Jem Rayfield, Senior Technical Architect, BBC News and Knowledge, explained further:

"The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content - metadata. The published metadata describes the world cup content at a fairly low-level of granularity, providing rich content relationships and semantic navigation. By querying this published metadata we are able to create dynamic page aggregations for teams, groups and players."

The basis of this system was an ontology that described how World Cup facts related to each other. For example, "Frank Lampard" was part of the "England Squad" and the "England Squad" competed in "Group C" of the "FIFA World Cup 2010". The ontology also included "journalist-authored assets" such as stories, blogs, profiles, images, video and statistics.

The publishing platform had both manual and automated tagging features. BBC journalists could, for example, tag Frank Lampard in a story about the disallowed goal from England's last-16 loss against Germany. This is a normal part of most modern-day publishing systems (we tag content in this manner here at ReadWriteWeb). But the BBC World Cup site also automatically analyzed journalist content and matched it "against the World Cup ontology." It did this by using what it describes as a "natural language and ontological determiner process." [Update: IBM wrote in to inform us that the technology behind this was IBM LanguageWare.] This is similar to software such as Thomson Reuters' Calais or the new Extractiv product that we reviewed yesterday. In the BBC's case, the resulting tags were moderated before being published.

The BBC used Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and SPARQL to build their World Cup site. The stated goal was to achieve "intelligent mapping of journalist assets to concepts and queries."

The site reportedly served millions of page requests a day throughout the World Cup. The BBC may use this semantic publishing platform for other parts of the BBC sports site; and it will certainly deploy it again for the the London 2012 Olympics.

The official explanatory post has the technical details, should you wish to follow up. Let us know in the comments about other large scale Semantic Web deployments that you know of.

Update: See also The World Cup and a call to action around Linked Data, by the BBC's John O'Donovan. Thanks Georgi Kobilarov for the pointer.

I sat down with Extractiv CEO Shion Deysarkar at the recent Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco, to find out how Extractiv intends to compete with the more well-known and big media backed Calais.

Extractiv is a joint venture between Houston-based web crawling service 80legs and natural language processing company LCC (which created Swingly, a Q&A service).

Deysarkar explained that Extractiv uses technology from both of its parent companies, to crawl the Web for content on a particular topic and then - using natural language processing - transform it into structured data. This video, produced by Extractiv, explains how the service might be used to crawl the Web for stories about smart phones over the past month.

The output of the crawl and analysis can be JSON or XML, two formats commonly used for structured data. Support for RDFa, a popular Semantic Web standard, will be available "soon" according to the company. Extractive also offers an API, allowing customers to bypass the web site.

Extractiv is free to try, but if you'll be a moderate or heavy user of the service then you'll have to pay (the pricing is as yet unavailable on the web site).

Extractiv vs Calais

Deysarkar told ReadWriteWeb that Extractiv is targeting "mid-market Calais customers" - such as media companies or those developing search applications, monitoring services, recommendation engines or aggregators. He also claimed that Extractiv goes beyond what Calais offers, because it can mine sentiment data (which is data about how people feel about products and services).

Extractiv also wants to "provide access to more types of semantic information than any other provider." As CEO of partner company LCC, Andrew Hickl, put it, "if you're interested in baseball pitchers, a generic type like PERSON just won't cut it."

At launch, Extractiv offers about 250 different types of named entities, but it aims to have more than 3000 different entity types by the end of the U.S. summer.

Preparing For the Future of the Web

The product is not aimed at the consumer market, so it's not for the faint hearted and you need to know what to do with all of that XML or JSON data! It also remains to be seen how competitive it is with Calais, which is a proven performer and has many reputable companies as its customers. Some startups have taken on Calais before, but fallen short.

However, there is undoubtedly a need for products like Extractiv and Calais that turn the Web's unstructured data into meaningful, organized content. This is the future of the Web, because there is going to be a large increase in the quantity of data online over the next 5-10 years - and all of that data will need to be structured if we're going to be make the best use of it.

Second was the Nexus One, an iPhone challenger that runs Google's mobile OS, Android. This shows another significant trend of 2010: the increasing market penetration of Android as a smart phone platform competing with the iPhone. Full poll results below...

What all four of the top place getters have in common is that they're all mobile technologies. It's perhaps arguable that the iPad is a mobile device, however it has been mostly used away from people's desks.

The poll listed 10 products or platforms and you were asked to select up to 3. Below is a screenshot of how the poll finished up. Let us know in the comments what other trends you gleaned from these results.

See also: 5 Key Trends of 2010: Half-Year Report for The Web

ReadWriteWeb is privileged to have an engaged community of decision makers and thought-leaders. The community manager's job is to engage with our community, to provide support and help develop it. Read on for more details...

We are looking for someone who is an active user of social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, Digg and StumbleUpon to name just some of the ones important to our site). We're also looking for someone with experience managing online communities, strong writing skills and an analytical mind set. This may suit someone with an online marketing or PR background. But we're open-minded about that, as we're mostly interested in your current use of social media.

This job is a great opportunity to work at the cutting edge of social media. So if you'd like to be a part of one of the leading technology blogs on the Internet, email richard AT readwriteweb.com with the words "Community Manager" in your subject line. If you know someone who may be a good fit for this position, please send them our way.

We'd now like to poll you on which of these - or other - products or platforms has impressed you the most over 2010. You may cast up to 3 votes in the poll below.

Mobile and Real-Time Web have been particularly eventful in 2010, as you'll see below. Augmented Reality and Internet of Things are both early stage trends, but have continued to edge towards the mainstream this year. The movement towards Structured Data has made significant progress in 2010, primarily thanks to RDFa and the adoption of that Semantic Web format by Facebook, Google and other big companies.

The next generation of the iPhone operating system, iPhone OS 4, was launched in April - it included long-awaited support for multitasking. That was followed by the June release of iPhone 4, the new handset.

However, it hasn't all been about the iPhone this year. Perhaps even more notable (although less hyped) has been the continued growth and expansion of Google's Android competitor. It started in January, when Google announced the new Nexus One. Google described it as "Where Web Meets Phone" and called it a "super phone" (ok, so there was hype there too...). Android, Google's mobile OS, has also experienced strong market share growth this year.

The biggest news of the year, though, has undoubtedly been Apple announcing the iPad in late January. This led to a flurry of new apps and a revival of interest in digital magazines.

In terms of non-device innovation, much of the attention has been on location-based social networking services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite.

While all three were popular during the annual geekfest in Austin, SXSW Interactive, by the half-year mark Foursquare appears to have the most momentum.

Real-Time Web

Twitter and Facebook have dominated the Real-Time Web landscape so far in 2010. Facebook has been under pressure for its controversial privacy changes (that is, more and more of Facebook is being made public), yet it continues to grow market share. Meanwhile Twitter has become more well-known in the mainstream, on the back of news such as Michael Jackson's passing and huge events like the World Cup.

Google tried to get in on the real-time action in February, with the launch of a media sharing service called Google Buzz. Buzz was mostly a damp squib, however. More successful for Google was its integration of Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and other real-time results into its core search product.

There have been some interesting startups to emerge in this space over 2010. For example, Quora - a real-time enabled Q&A site created by Facebook's first CTO Adam D'Angelo. Other products to have caught our eye this year include Collecta, OneRiot, My6Sense and SuperFeedr.

Internet of Things

Internet of Things is when real-world objects are connected to the Internet, often via sensors, barcodes and RFID tags. This was a trend we began exploring in earnest in 2009, when much of the applications were experimental.

In 2010 we've seen commercial applications begin to arise, starting at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. The main trend we noticed from this CES was web applications being ported to consumer electronics - everything from the technology inside cars to Web-enabled TVs.

Many of our posts on Internet of Things this year have been explanatory, to help you prepare for the expected increase in commercial applications over the next few years. Check out our post on sensors and mobile phones for an example. Also find out why HP thinks sensors will lead to the next big wave of computing.

Augmented Reality

The field of AR has been similarly experimental up till now, so we have again spent a lot of time explaining this trend and putting it in context. An example is Austrian company Wikitude bringing augmented "Worlds" to the iPhone, in February. A wider audience saw AR in April, when the Discovery Channel promoted its docu-drama hit Deadliest Catch with a desktop-based AR ad campaign.

Augmented Reality was a hot topic at the RWW Mobile Summit, in May in Mountain View, CA. Photo: Chris Cameron

Structured Data

If 2009 was the year of "open data" (when previously offline data is uploaded to the Web), then 2010 so far has been the year of RDFa. RDFa is a lightweight way to add extra meaning to HTML web pages. Facebook is using it in their Open Graph platform, which was announced in April. The stated goal of the Open Graph protocol is to enable publishers to "integrate [their] Web pages into the social graph."

Others that have climbed on board the structured data train include Google and retailers like Best Buy and Tesco. Twitter hasn't yet supported RDFa, but its Twitter Annotations project comes close.

The open data movement also continues to expand. In January, Data.gov.uk, a new web site dedicated to making non-personal data held by the U.K. government available for software developers, launched with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

You can see that 2010 has been very active with innovation! The iPad, new mobile devices, the increasing market penetration of Facebook and Twitter, the rise of the Semantic Web - it's been a fascinating year so far! In the comments, let us know your personal highlight of 2010 so far.

Lead image: Steve Rhodes

At the recent Semantic Technology conference, I sat down with Evri CEO Will Hunsinger. He called Evri the "topical equivalent of a Facebook stream."

In a nutshell, Evri allows you to explore and track topics. Its homepage displays a current hot topic (at time of writing, it was Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France), with other trending topics offered in the menu (for example 'Gulf Oil Spill' is a featured trend and 'LeBron James' is listed as "Trending in US & World'). You may also enter your own topic into the search bar. Evri is like a mix between Google Trends and Google News, with liberal sprinklings of Twitter and Facebook.

Whither Twine...

Evri made the news earlier this year when it acquired failed semantic web bookmarking application, Twine. Curiously, Hunsinger described Evri as "the inverse of Twine" - because Evri does all the work, rather than the user. Twine is an application that relies on its users to actively bookmark pages, a la the much more successful Delicious. Evri automatically collates topical information and presents it the user.

Update: Twine founder Nova Spivack wrote in and stated: "Twine was in fact highly automated as well, but in a different way than Evri - Twine used NLP [Natural language processing] to auto-tag every entry, generate summaries, and used graph algorithms to make recommendations."

Where Evri shares similarities with Twine is in the ability for users to track a topic. Hunsinger said that Evri users may "follow a story as it evolves over time, and tune it." He described this as being like a "mini blog" for its users.

Twine appears to have been of most use to Evri for its underlying technology. Hunsinger told us that Evri is using technology it acquired from Twine to extend Evri's categories and for advanced filtering.

What's Next

Evri is not short on ideas and innovation - for example it announced a Sentiment API last August. However some of these ideas are slow to eventuate. Hunsinger said that the Sentiment API is not in commercial deployment yet, because it requires much more media in order to calculate sentiment and it tends to work best with well-known people (like Barack Obama). However, Evri is working on incorporating data about shares, tweets, and more in order to beef up its Sentiment analysis engine.

The company is also currently working on what Hunsinger described as "Pandora-like recommendations," referring to the geographically-limited online music service Pandora.

Other expansion plans include launching one new channel per week, to extend Evri's topical coverage.

Can Evri Compete as a Consumer App?

Evri is an interesting product and is currently being used by media partners like Hearst and Canwest.

However, Evri will likely continue to struggle as a consumer offering. It's competing against a plethora of real-time news apps - everything from TweetDeck, Google News, Topix, Techmeme, and more. I wouldn't be surprised if Evri is eventually acquired by a big media company for its technology, much as Evri snapped up the struggling Twine for the same reason.