The areas where FastPencil exceeds are online editing, collaboration and distribution. Fast Pencil offers a surprisingly comprehensive online editing suite. While this editor isn't quite as fully-featured as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or Apple's Pages - there is no feature to create headlines or tables of content, for example - it's more than enough to power the service's online collaboration tools.

In it's latest update, which launched earlier this week, FastPencil introduced a number of interesting new features. These include new templates, new roles for collaborators (co-authors, project managers) and forums for prospective authors to meet and discuss their work.

Turn Your Blog Into a Book

If you import your blog feed, FastPencil will turn every blog post into a chapter. The service also imports images from these posts. These images have to be inserted at the beginning or end of a post, however. You can't have your text flow around an image.

Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, E-Book

Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost. These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle.

Don't Need All These Services? Try SmashWords

If you don't need all of these services from Fast Pencil - or if you have already finished your book - another service worth looking at is SmashWords. Smashwords specializes in e-books. Thanks to deals with Barnes & Noble and Sony in the US and Indigo Books & Music's Shortcovers in Canada, self-published authors can get their e-books into traditional distribution channels, or sell their books directly on SmashWords. Smashwords acquired the New Zealand-based e-book self-publishing service BookHabit earlier this week.

But now that the news is out, has Chrome OS lost its shine? People had high expectations for Google's new operating system but the end result doesn't look like the revolutionary, "change the world" product many had hoped for.

Don't get us wrong - Google's OS is different than whatever Windows, Mac, or Linux build you have running on your computer today. The new OS does away with desktop applications entirely - everything you use on Google Chrome OS runs on the web. Of course, the company hopes you'll use a lot of Google products like Gmail and YouTube, but it doesn't limit you to just Google-branded services. In the built-in applications area, there are also links to other web apps like the online TV streaming service Hulu.com and music sites Lala and Pandora. To be fair, Chrome OS even links to Yahoo and Microsoft's webmail offerings right out of the box.

Google's major goal with Chrome OS is to moving computing off our personal hard drives and into the cloud...the Google cloud. To accomplish such a feat, they've made the web browser the OS. Everything you need (in theory) is accessible through the included Google Chrome browser, the same browser the company currently offers to Windows users with Mac and Linux versions expected by the end of this year.

As exciting as that vision is, we have to wonder if people - especially the mainstream netbook users the OS is aimed at - are ready for this big of a switch. And more importantly, is the technology itself ready to make the change a comfortable and seamless experience?

...but is it Better?

After digesting yesterday's news, some lingering questions remain. Was this the OS everyone was hoping for or has Google let us down?

You Can't Just Install Chrome OS - You Have to Buy a New Netbook

To begin with, one of the more surprising reveals that came out of yesterday's news is that the OS cannot be installed on your own computer. Oh sure, there are downloads available that use Google's open-sourced code to create bootable builds tech-savvy users and developers can play with, but the official word from the search giant is that anyone wanting to use the "real" Google Chrome OS will have to purchase a new netbook to do so. You cannot simply download it from the web and install it on any machine.

Part of the reason for this restriction is driver support. Google is working with carefully selected manufacturers to offer a handful of netbooks running the OS in the coming year. By going this route, they don't have to provide an entire ecosystem of drivers for every piece of hardware out there - they can pick and choose which ones to support. They'll likely limit the number of peripherals supported, too. According to what was said yesterday, the company will support "mass storage devices" (think USB flash drives and digital cameras) but were cagey on how they plan on offering printing support. All they would say is that they're planning on an "innovative approach" when it comes to printing, whatever that means. Hopefully, they're planning to do something more than just integrating with Kinko's and FedEx's online document services, for example. Printing, (sorry Google) is not a web app just yet.

No Other Web Browsers Supported

Another big disappointment is the company's decision to limit all web surfing to the one included browser, Google Chrome. Firefox and Safari users are out of luck - no other browsers will be supported. But before you cry out "antitrust!," be warned - Google has this covered. The code base used to build the OS is open-source - that means anyone take the code and create their own version of Chrome OS. As was carefully - and haltingly - explained by Google's VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, other browser makers can take the code and build their own OS if they want to. But let's get real - Firefox Chrome OS? We don't think so. The reality is that fans of other browsers are simply out of luck if they want to use this operating system.

Offline Access is Limited. Your New Netbook is Now a Brick.

One of the questions that got glossed over during the Q&A session at the end of the event is how Google's OS plans to deal with offline access. The world is not blanketed in Wi-Fi yet, so what can this web-based OS do without the web? Surprisingly, the answer given didn't refer to any subsidized deals with cellular providers regarding deals to offer built-in 3G connectivity for the new netbooks. Instead, Pichai explained that the OS was built for use with Wi-Fi.

Of course, a handful of Google products use Google Gears, a technology that makes websites available offline. For example, Gmail uses Gears to create an offline version of your webmail inbox which you can use to read and respond to email until internet connectivity becomes available again. At that point, all the changes are synced back to Google's servers. Although Google didn't specifically refer to Gears when answering the question, there's no reason to doubt that it will work in Chrome OS's web browser the same as it does now in the standard Chrome browser.

However, Pichai did make note of Chrome OS's support for HTML5, an upcoming revision to the core markup language used to build the web. In the new specification, a key feature is offline support for web apps. However, web application developers will have to rebuild their apps in order to use HTML5, so users will be dependent on each individual company to make this change. While it's believed that one day this spec could make the whole web an offline app, the reality is that most developers have yet to implement this technology in their services yet. Even by Chrome OS's launch next year, there's no reason to believe the landscape will have changed significantly by then.

Do You Really Need an OS or Just the Chrome Web Browser?

Finally, the big question regarding Chrome OS is why? What can the OS do that any operating system running the Chrome browser cannot? Based on what was shown yesterday, the answer is very little. Chrome OS's brand-new features consist of two things: application tabs and panels. The panels are persistent windows that pop-up in front of your web browser's main window. For example, Google Chat, the company's IM service, can live in a panel that stays on top no matter what window you're viewing.

Application tabs, meanwhile, are special tabs that give you easy access to your most frequently used web apps from the browser. Any page tab can be made into an application tab with one click and the resulting "tab" is represented with the colorful icon for that site or service. While that's certainly a cool feature, it alone isn't a major selling point for the OS. That would be like saying you have to buy Mac OS X because of the dock or Windows because of the taskbar. You need a million of these little features combined to add up to a compelling reason to buy an OS.

That's not to say that Chrome OS itself doesn't have worthwhile features of its own - like its built-in security mechanisms or its auto-update system, it's just that these aren't the kinds of things that sell it to an end user. The questions consumers want answers to are what does it do that's special? What does it look like? And for now, the answer is "it's basically just a web browser."

Revolution? Maybe Not Just Yet.

At the end of the day, Chrome OS is an exciting, but not fully realized, vision. Although it has potential, the world may not be ready for a web-based netbook right now. Also, the technology needed to make the Wi-Fi only netbook useful without an internet connection isn't up to full speed either. At the end of the day, the netbook will be marginally more useful than an iPod Touch - when connected, it's amazing. Offline, not so much.

While you might not rush right out to buy a Chrome OS netbook when they first launch, there could come a time - sooner than you think - when it becomes a reasonable choice. When the majority of apps work offline and you've fully transitioned away from desktop apps, a web-connected netbook, especially one that's affordable, could easily become your everyday computer. That day hasn't arrived yet. For now, Chrome OS is an exciting glimpse at the future of computing, but not a practical device for the majority of users.

Disclosure: Sarah Perez freelances for Microsoft's Channel 10 blog, but is not a Microsoft employee. Her primary web browser is, in fact, Google Chrome which she uses exclusively.

Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com's smartphone application, users won't just have access to their files on the go - they can also scan in new documents with their phone's camera.

The one major new feature in this release of Acrobat.com is the file organizer. Before, files could live in three different places on the service. Now all files are accessible through one main interface.

The file organizer itself includes some handy features, too. Instead of using a traditional folder structure like you have on your computer's hard drive, the service introduces something called "collections." These are more like iTunes playlists than file folders (or even labels in Gmail) because files can be assigned to multiple collections instead of having to sit in just one folder.

Another key component to the organizer is a file search tool. Believe it or not, the online service had no way of helping you find your files until now. Although the current search capabilities don't yet offer full text search of your documents, Adobe says that may come further down the road.

Also new is the organizer's "import and edit" feature which lets you open external files directly into the appropriate program so you can begin to work on them online. In the past, you had to first launch the program, then import the file. This time-saving step is more akin to what rival Google Docs offers via their upload feature except that in Acrobat.com, you don't have to click a link to open the uploaded file - it happens automatically.

Other New Features

The various online office programs themselves have seen improvements as well in this new release. Buzzword is leaving beta and now it, along with Presentations, lets you import images from online services like Flickr and Google Images in addition to the images found on your computer. One drawback to this feature, though, is that the online image searches don't offer filtering by license type, so a user could easily get into trouble by adding a copyrighted or otherwise licensed photo into their document if they neglect to check permissions first.

The Tables app, still in beta, now has the ability to do more data sorting and filtering. It also adds new views including a print layout view that shows what the document will look like on the printed page.

Acrobat.com Comes to iPhone, Blackberry

One of the more exciting developments is the new Acrobat.com mobile application which will be made available to Blackberry and iPhone users shortly. Built in conjunction with a company called scanR, the mobile application lets users take advantage of their mobile phone's camera to add new files to the service. After taking the photo, the app uses OCR technology to convert the image to text. How well this works is unknown at this time because the app has not yet arrived in the respective app stores.

The app also lets users view their files in a read-only mode, convert them to PDFs, and share them with others via fax or email. There will be two versions of the app made available - a free version and a premium offering which will allow for more PDF conversions and faxes.

According to Adobe, the Acrobat.com service is faring well. They already have 6 million users and add around 100,000 more each week. While a lot of users are students and SMB owners looking for a free alternative to more expensive Microsoft Office software, the company says they're also seeing the service picked up and used in small workgroups at larger companies. However, Adobe admits that they're not an enterprise play yet and they also won't reveal how many people use the premium version of the service - only that they're "happy" with the number thus far.

If you want to try the upgraded online suite, you can do so at www.acrobat.com as of tomorrow (Saturday, November 21st) at 6 AM EST.

"You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kromer of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible.

Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will be cool once other people I know are using it."

With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google's implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it's more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data.

These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field - so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks.

Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see.

"Party Over Here" Bot: Automated Geo-Replies

Want to know when you're near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy's? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It's not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you "check in" at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you're interested in is near that location.

There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered.

These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind.

Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include...

Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who've Tweeted from the same place you're in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what's been on the reading list of each today?

News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool

Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They'd be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on.

Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed-in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm.

Cop Watcher

Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed.

Inventory Forecast

If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it.

Politics & Marketing

People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today's health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable.

How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on.

Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That's only a mater of time.

Flu Trends+

Think Google's use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there's an increase in messages about being sick in your area?

Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset.

What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data?

Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb - we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo's distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com.

In the meantime, YouTube now also offers a new 'automatic caption timing' feature for all new uploads that makes it easier to add captions manually. You simply upload a text file with a transcript of the video and Google's speech recognition technology will figure out when those words are spoken and create captions based on this information.

YouTube's speech recognition technology is based on the same speech-to-text algorithms that transcribe voicemails in Google Voice. You can also translate these captions into 51 languages.

As expected, these captions aren't always perfect, but work surprisingly well on the videos that we have seen so far.

If you want to have a look at how these captions work, have a look at one of the videos in the UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and Google & YouTube channels.

The technology behind this is based on nano-sensing research done by HP Labs. The sensors are similar to RFID chips, but in this case they are tiny accelerometers which detect motion and vibrations.

Use Cases

Peter Hartwell, senior researcher and project team lead, listed some example use cases for these sensing nodes. The nodes could be "stuck to bridges and buildings to warn of structural strains or weather conditions [and] they might be scattered along roadsides to monitor traffic, weather and road conditions." A bridge like the San Francisco Golden Gate might take 10,000 nodes, said Hartwell.

Other uses include embedding the CeNSE nodes in everyday electronics, tracking hospital equipment, sniffing out pesticides and pathogens in food. Ultimately they may even "recognize" the person using them and adapt.

According to HP Labs, CeNSE sensors will enable real-time data collection, analysis and better decision making.

Potential Issues

This is an ambitious project by HP Labs and there are other large IT companies, such as IBM, building out similar platforms for sensor data and services.

HP senior fellow Stan Williams noted that for CeNSE to work, "we have to make sensors that are vastly more sensitive than anything else that have ever existed before, while being absolutely dirt cheap so that we can deploy them in very large numbers."

RFID technology has had numerous cost and technology issues over the past decade, so HP Labs will surely run into similar real-world obstacles in this project. HP Labs admits that existing sensitive detectors are expensive; but it hopes to make them much cheaper.

The Race to Build a Worldwide Sensor Network

HP Labs' ultimate aim is to have a worldwide network of these CeNSE sensors. A trillion of them "should do the trick," says HP. The company is hoping that at that scale, sensor nodes will cost "next to nothing, yet measure everything." HP is also positioning this, boldly, as a technology that could "save the planet" by enabling it to be monitored.

These are big claims and the proof will be in the pudding. One thing is for certain: sensor technology will become as pervasive as HP Labs says it will, in due course. The questions that remain unanswered though are: how long will it take, and which company (or companies) will gain the biggest footholds in this network?

Little is known yet about Peer News, Omidyar's next project, but an editor is being sought for hire. The project will begin in Hawaii, where Omidyar lives, but is intended to rock the journalist world.

We're a small, fast-moving entrepreneurial team dedicated to bringing civic affairs journalism and analysis to our community in a commercially sustainable way. We combine our social media and online community experience with a passion for journalism in the public interest.

It's sad to see a project be closed, but there's a lot to be said for failing fast and moving on to other ideas. We look forward to seeing what form this next idea takes.

Media innovator Dan Gillmor says he doesn't know any of the details about the new project but thinks this is a particularly important project to follow because of its emphasis on making local news commercially sustainable instead of operating as a non-profit.

Omidyar has already invested in a variety of news-related companies, including Digg, FM Publishing, Seesmic and Wikia.

JavaScript Performance

Today's presentation of IE9 was refreshing, as Sinofsky noted that IE8's JavaScript performance was clearly slower than that of its competitors. The current build of IE9, however, has already closed this gap significantly and the difference in performance compared to the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox were only minor. As Microsoft notes, given how fast modern JavaScript engines have become over the last year, improvements in the JavaScript engine don't influence real-world performance at this point and other browser sub-systems become the bottlenecks that impede improvements.

Hardware Acceleration and Font Smoothing

Microsoft also plans to make use of DirectX-based hardware accelerated graphics and text in IE9. In his demo, Sinofsky showed that Bing maps can render about 14 frames per second in IE8. With hardware acceleration in IE9 turned on, he got 60 frames per second. In addition, this technology will also increase font quality and readability in IE9.

Videos

Microsoft already published a number of videos with the engineers working on IE9 on Channel 9 (sorry, these are Silverlight only).

A vulgar comment was made by a reader of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website on Friday on an article about the strangest things you've ever eaten. The headline was practically asking for a juvenile response and, thanks to the anonymity of the internet, that's exactly what happened. In the comments section of the article, one user posted a single word response referring to a part of a woman's anatomy. Of course, the site's moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared - obviously this juvenile was intent on having their say.

But this time, instead of just deleting the comment in question, the site's director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum, did a little sleuthing too. He found that the commenter's IP address was coming from a local school...and that's where this story starts to get interesting.

Greenbaum contacted the school and made them aware of the situation. In his defense, he probably thought he was simply tattle-telling on a naughty student who would learn a valuable lesson about internet anonymity and would have to sit through a week's detention or something of the like. Instead, he cost a school employee his job.

Yes, as it turns out, the commenter in question wasn't a juvenile after all, just someone with a juvenile mind. Greenbaum learned of the firing when the school phoned him back six hours later to report their findings. They had confronted the employee and he had resigned.

Crossing the Line? Or Justice Served?

The question being hotly debated now is did Greenbaum go too far? Or did the commenter get what they deserved?

Mathew Ingram, the blogger and communities editor for Toronto's The Globe and Mail, writes on his personal blog that his paper's site has seen hundreds or even thousands of comments, most of which are much worse than the one Greenbaum saw, but he would never - and has never - contacted someone's workplace about them. He calls Greenbaum's actions "over-the-top" and apparently, many commenters on STLtoday.com's website agree, calling out Greenbaum over this incident.

And yet Greenbaum seems to show no remorse, responding to one commenter who accused him of hating moderating so much that he decided to get someone fired by saying: "Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com's Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the 'submit' key."

Sixteen pages of comments now follow that initial interaction, and the majority of them seem to agree that Greenbaum crossed a line, save for the occasional concerned parent who didn't like the idea of this vulgarity-posting person hanging around their children instead of doing his job.

Lesson to Be Learned: Watch What You Say!

We can't blame Greenbaum for the sleuthing bit - any blogger will tell you they've been tempted to hunt down the identities of nasty commenters from time to time. But calling someone's work? That's just wrong.

Yet while Greenbaum may have been seriously misguided to do what he did, this should be another sobering reminder to anyone trolling the net that what you type may come back and haunt you one day. There's no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered. In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their "real" name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome. "With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior," he writes.

That may be true, but the fact of the matter is that the STLtoday website allows anonymous comments. When you make that choice, then you have to expect that some of them will need moderation - it's just part of the job. Regardless of the site's policies about vulgarity, phoning the employer seems like an over-reaction to the incident. But that's just our opinion. What do you think?

Standardized legal documents for technical specifications may not seem like the sexiest thing in the the world - but this is actually pretty exciting news. Developments like this could be a key part of the foundation that online service providers need to move forward on a long list of great ideas for ways to serve their users.

People come up with crazy ideas for making the web work better all the time. This agreement aims to provide an easy way to make it safe to implement those ideas. The companies participating have spent large amounts of time and money negotiating the agreement, now anyone can take advantage of the fruits of that labor at no cost.

Existing specifications that will be placed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement, per the announcement today, include:

• Syndicated media delivery spec Media RSS (currently controlled by Yahoo!)


• Secure 3rd party authentication spec OAuth Core and Wrap (from Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft)


• Real-time feed protocol PubSubHubbub (Google)


• Comment aggregation protocol Salmon (Google)


• Web Slice Format (Microsoft)


• And several others.

Superfeedr offers services to both publishers and subscribers. Current marque users include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed and Posterous. Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux first met Betaworks CEO John Borthwick at our event last month, the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit.

These services offer developers plug-and-play real-time publishing and subscription, allowing them to instead focus on building the features they can offer the most unique value from. "We do something stupid so you don't have to," is a slogan used on the Superfeedr website.

If there's a downside to using the service it's reliance on a third party for critical syndication functionality. Superfeedr experienced an outage for several hours earlier this month. Genestoux blogged about the problem and eventual solution on the company blog.

Genestoux says he plans to build out hardware and personnel with the backing. These relationships will also facilitate important introductions to potential customers and offer big validation of the Superfeedr service.

Superfeedr is one of ten companies profiled in the case studies section of the forthcoming ReadWriteWeb research report on the state of the real-time web market, which will be published later this month and can be pre-ordered here.

Le Meur told us that a native Windows client was something that Seesmic's users had been requesting for quite a while. The Seesmic team worked on this new client for the last few months, though the company managed to keep this development under wraps and today's release comes as a surprise. While there are quite a few good native Twitter clients for OSX, the most popular Twitter clients on Windows are currently AIR apps.

Features

Being a native client, Seesmic can now also make use of some of Windows' built-in features like a system-wide spellchecker or Windows 7's location services. While Twitter hasn't launched it's location API yet, Seesmic will now be able to tab into this data quickly.

The new client will also allow users to drag and drop their friends' avatars into user lists.

Just like the current beta version of its AIR app, Seesmic for Windows will support Twitter's userlists and while the look and feel is similar to the AIR app, the Windows client also features vertical tabs in the sidebar that allow users to quickly switch between different views (all, accounts, userlists and searches).

Plugins for Seesmic

For developers, of course, the new plugin infrastructure also means that they can now offer their services directly in a Twitter client. The current version already showcases plugins from TweetMeme and MrTweet. According to Le Meur, this will also allow other Twitter-like services to build their own plugins and build their own columns in Seesmic without having to establish a formal relationship with the company. In a few weeks, Seesmic will launch a plugin gallery to showcase these extensions.

What About the AIR App?

Seesmic will continue to develop its Adobe AIR client for the time being, though chances are that the company is also looking at developing a native Mac client.

You give Factery a list of links and a keyword and it will build an index of all the facts asserted in those links about your topic of interest, delivered in XML or JSON format. The service can run on top of a search engine but could also be used in any number of other ways. I've been feeling unsatisfied with other search engines all day since seeing a Factery demo Monday morning.

Compare that with the Factery results page - I don't even need to click through if I don't want to, I feel like I got a great overview of the story just from my search page. Perhaps that's a problem - for a publishing industry that already says it's scared of search engines - but as a reader it sure isn't my problem, it's great. Why would I want Google News to tell me where I can go to find information if someone else will just give me the information?

The company's test demo searches Twitter and Yahoo Boss - neither search is as exciting as I'd hoped 100% of the time, but it's often remarkably good. Factery is also testing an interesting integration with Silverlight stream reader Sobees, in which linked pages from Twitter or Facebook are annotated with automatically extracted highlights via Factery.

I expect a whole lot of companies are going to at least try this API out and I'm excited to see the results.

How This is Unlike Other Real-Time Search Services

Factery is talking a lot about its ability to analyze links shared over Twitter, but that's probably just because Twitter is easy for people to understand. The fact is, the service can perform on-demand analysis of text behind any set of links. That's what differentiates it from other real-time search engines like OneRiot, which also analyzes the text of pages linked to on networks like Twitter and offers an API to display real-time search results on other sites. Competitor Collecta analyzes Twitter streams in real time and offers an XMPP API to push new search results live to any page.

Factery is a different kind of animal, though. It's more like a smart search inside any other search. It doesn't even have to be search, though. The company talks a lot about how they make mobile reading more efficient by pulling the salient information up to the surface of a page, instead of requiring mobile readers to load multiple pages.

I thought of five or six different ways I'd like to use it just while talking to the company on the phone. (I'm not going to share those here, either. I think some could offer an important competitive advantage.)

I'd Love to See This Work Everywhere

Yesterday I was testing a new Android app from the Sunlight Foundation that lets you track members of congress. One tab in the app is a search for your congressperson in the news. Unfortunately, the page excerpts give no indication why the politician you searched for appeared in that news story - just that their name did, somewhere. That search is powered by a Yahoo API, probably BOSS, but it's not any fun to use at all. How unsatisfying, I thought, when I could have a list of key facts concerning my search query in the list of links that the search brought back. But that was yesterday, and Factery is just launching today.

The possibilities are truly endless. That's probably why Ron Conway, one of the leading investors in the real-time economy, joined others in investing in the company. With $1.2 million in the bank, Factery is a modest developer play with a whole lot of potential.

Give Factery's API a try and let us know what you think. It's free to use; the company says it may start inserting "sponsored facts" (isn't that an interesting phrase) into results later but things like business model and to a lesser degree de-duplication are still works in progress. I sure do love this idea.

Who Is Willing to Pay?

Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps took a closer look at the demographic profile of those users who said that they would be willing to pay. Gender and marital status had no influence on a consumer's willingness to pay. Those who are willing to pay for magazine content are slightly younger that those who won't (43 years vs. 47). For newspaper content, however, there was no difference. Income, too, only makes a small difference. Those with a higher income are slightly more likely to pay for newspaper content than for magazines.

The report concludes that there is no consensus among consumers about how they want content delivered to them. The fact that 10% still prefer PDFs clearly shows that we are still in a transitional period. What is clear, though, is that consumers aren't very willing to pay for content online.

According to Forrester, publishers have two options: continue to offer a free, ad-supported product or offer consumers "a choice of multichannel subscriptions, single-channel subscriptions, and micropayments for premium product access."

As Rotman Epps also notes, there is a third solution: have a third party subsidize the cost of the content. This could be a device manufacturer who wants to offer exclusive content, for example.

A Slightly More Optimistic View

According to a report in the New York Times, about 48% of all Internet users in the US said that they would pay to read news online. This study by the Boston Consulting Group also looked at online news in general and found that a larger number of users was willing to pay. On average, though, these users were only willing to pay about $3.

The Web Foundation exists to bridge the 'digital divide' in Internet usage. Only about 25% of the world population uses the Web today, however more than 70% of people have access to mobile or fixed communication devices capable of displaying Web content. According to the W3C, "the gap in Web usage is partly attributable to the lack of accessible or relatable content, and the lack of available training on how to use the Web to its full potential."

The Web Foundation was founded in 2008 by Tim Berners-Lee, with the aim of studying the Web and expanding access to the billions of people worldwide who aren't currently online. Today, the Web Foundation launched a fundraising campaign and announced two partnerships.

On the former, Web Foundation CEO Steve Bratt hopes to raise $10-20 million per year, much of which will be put towards programs that train people to use the Web.

One of the partnerships is with the University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which aims to expedite "re-greening" initiatives throughout the African continent. The other partnership is with the CDI (Center for Digital Inclusion), a social enterprise based in Brazil dedicated to educating disadvantaged youth about information technologies. The Web Foundation and CDI plan to develop training programs to teach young people how to create accessible Web content.

It's interesting to note that many of the Web Foundation initiatives have a big Mobile Web component. In the CDI partnership, Web-based applications are being created that will be "mobile ready." Accessibility is also a key aspect of these projects. The CDI web apps will integrate voice and graphical elements.

In a previous trip to Africa in September, Tim Berners-Lee visited Ghana to meet with officials and educators. He's currently at the 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt - where he made today's announcements. Starting next week, Berners-Lee will travel to Kenya and Uganda.

Below is a video of Berners-Lee in Ghana, courtesy of BBC's Digital Revolution program, talking with a Ghanaian about why he values the Web. You can see more of these videos here.