ReadWriteWeb

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we report on President Obama's (non)-use of Twitter, take a look at the past decade in the media industry, review the latest statistics about blogging, question if Oxford Dictionary should've chosen "unfriend" as its word of the year, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Once the service for those serious enough to pay for the privilege to post, TypePad recently released a free "Micro" service. The company made the decision to offer a free product realizing the demand for a platform more formal than Twitter and less formal than Wordpress or Typepad's original product. ReadWriteWeb compared TypePad's Micro against 2 other leading light blogging tools. Below are our thoughts:

Roambi announced a pro version of its iPhone application this week that syncs with Salesforce.com and other cloud-based services or on-premsie sales environments. It's a visualization application, providing mobile workers with a pretty cool way to see sales information.

Integration is by far one of the most significant trends we are seeing in the enterprise space. It's a wave, really, marked this week by Salesforce.com and its move to turn the Force.com development platform into a service that makes all of its applications social.

It appears that the time for freemium music services in the US has passed. Earlier this week streaming music site Imeem sold to MySpace for under $10 million dollars while laying off a large number of staff. For a company with all four major record labels signed, more than 15 million uniques a month and well over 5 million tracks in its catalogue, it came as a sobering blow to the industry. While many companies move to a subscription model, 8tracks continues to forge along in what some describe as a convenient loophole. As of this weekend the company is publicly launching its API for Boston's Music Hack Day.

The Web constantly changes and evolves. That, of course, is what makes the Internet so exciting, but it also means that finding older versions of a website is hard. The current push towards the real-time web is making this problem even more apparent. Memento, a project based at Old Dominion University, wants to make it easier to access older versions of a web page without having to go to the Internet Archive. To do this, the project is using a relatively obscure feature of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).

The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation.

However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized.

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil's mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels.

It's the morning after the big Chrome OS event where Google executives and engineers revealed a myriad of details about the company's first attempt at creating their own operating system. The highly anticipated news conference was tracked all over the web, liveblogged by technology sites, and Twittered so much that it's still listed as a "trending topic" as of this morning.

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.

Adobe's online office suite, Acrobat.com, is getting its first major upgrade since the service left beta back in June of this year. The new release, launching tomorrow, is an entirely unified experience thanks to the addition of a much-requested file organization tool, explains the service's Director of Project Management Rick Treitman.

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.

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The concept of personal branding online has become a part of many conversations about social media and social networking recently. The popularity of social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and various smaller niche sites has continued to skyrocket, offering individuals a chance to create a more robust online presence. The age of anonymity online has all but ended, and individuals should seek to gain further control of their online identities.