You're likely to see a lot of press about DEMO over the next few days, we've posted a toolkit for tracking the event, but below are some of the arguments for and against the continued relevance of this high-profile event. The live video player below from BitGravity may make you want to turn down your volume but that's what it's like here at the event, too.

After interviewing hundreds of companies interested in launching products here at DEMO, executive producer Chris Shipley chose 77 companies to present. There's a wide variety of products being shown here and this is the 16th year the event has happened.

DEMO's critics

Many people are critical of DEMO and these tend to be the most common critiques.

• The high price of entry is limiting.

It costs more than $15k to present at DEMO once you've been selected. In exchange for that entry fee companies give one six minute demo of their product and a space in the crowded gallery. Critics contend that many of the most exciting startups today wouldn't have been able to pay such a high price to launch in their earliest days. The ability to pay to play does not correspond to the innovation a company offers.
• DEMO is antiquated.

There was a time when the press corps was small and there were limited opportunities for investors to find the most interesting startups coming to market. Neither is true today. Just like creating a company has been democratized beyond the ranks of those who can afford to launch here, so too has media expanded to include far more writers and reviewers than are walking the halls here in Palm Desert.
• It's not just startups.

Though DEMO presents itself as the place for brand new companies to launch, there are always a significant number of big companies presenting. This year well known companies like Symantec, Citrix, Leapfrog and Education.com are coming on stage. Many people are looking to discover the freshest of the fresh, the newest of the new, and cynics contend that big co's are just buying their way on stage.
• A lot of undifferentiated mobile stuff.

GrandCentral launched at DEMO 2007 and was promptly scooped up by Google. Other than that, if you're not interested in the finer points mobile and telephony, a lot of DEMO presenters won't interest you.

DEMO's continued relevance

I've considered the arguments above but am particularly moved today by the following reasons why DEMO is still relevant.

• Large number of diverse companies.
Executive producer Chris Shipley focused in her morning address on the intersection of many different market sectors. New, media rich consumer websites create new demands on hardware. Both software and hardware companies are here at DEMO. The business and consumer software markets are tied together by providing each other with innovation and motivation. Throw in some mobile vendors and you've got a unique and really useful mix of companies here.

Shipley says that the hundreds of companies she talks to each year in order to make her selections are all data points she uses to create her best forecast of where tech and markets are headed. I think she's in a unique position to do that.

• Good international presence.

There are quite a few companies here from Canada, a handful from Europe, some from Asia and a panel of startup entrepreneurs from Africa. There is heavy Silicon Valley representation here as well, but the international participation is important.
• Mix of startups and established companies.

While this is something that some are critical of, the participation of big companies at DEMO means that we get to see some really neat new products built by companies with substantial R&D and marketing budgets. Though the innovation offered by small stealthy startups has proven a game changer in recent years, the big guys are still coming up with some things that are fun to see and could make a big impact on the market.
• High production value.

There's a lot of mediocre conferences in this world, but DEMO isn't one of them. It's worth your time here to sit in the presentation room - not just lurk in the halls. The production values here are high. It's a classy operation. Things are in transition here and some kinks need to be worked out of a new approach for a new era - the new website, for example, is hipper than before but it's not nearly as pretty.
• This is a particular sector of the market.

DEMO is expensive, but so is hardware production. There's no shortage of software companies either for whom nearly $20k in total cost of attendance stings but is doable. Companies that have raised any money at all, including just angel funds, pay multiples of that sum each month in wages. Chris Shipley interviews hundreds of companies each year that are fully prepared to pay the DEMO entry fee.

The rise of the fringe startup as web hero is a really important part of the internet story. It's also just a part of the story of a whole technology industry that's thriving in many different ways. DEMO helps tell another important part of the technology story.

• There is some awesome stuff here

All thinking aside - I am in awe of some of the products being launched here. There's no arguing with that.

Thanks for checking out our coverage of DEMO. I'm going to sit down with some startup founders and talk tech over the next few days, but I hope you find this and our previous DEMO toolkit post interesting and useful.

From Monday through Wednesday you can read our unorthodox coverage of DEMO here, but for now we'd like to offer the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for DEMO08.

If you're already familiar enough with DEMO you may or may not want to skip this part and go to the next section.

The just redesigned DEMO.com website includes a wide variety of media you can check out to get a feel for the event and a good about page. The event schedule is here. There's a lot of good stuff off-site too, though. Believe it or not, there's no Wikipedia entry for DEMO!

For an in-depth peek into the mind of DEMO Executive Producer Chris Shipley, check out our 20 minute podcast interview and transcript at ReadWriteTalk. You can see the RWW coverage of DEMO 2006 here. Our DEMO 2007 preview is here and DEMO Fall 2007 Top 10 Companies to Watch here.

John Cook's Venture Blog has a good series running about one Seattle area company's preparation to go to DEMO. The GigaOm network's blog for startup founders, FoundRead, has an interesting post called Presenting at DEMO: 12 do's and 5 don'ts. That's a fun read just to see how many of the "don'ts" get done on stage.

If you're interested in the Enterprise angle, WindowsITPro ran a good interview with DEMO's Chris Shipley about her thoughts on the Enterprise market and DEMO presenters.

Much of what goes on at DEMO is that startups seek an audience with big companies in the mood for acquisitions. Valleywag's got the names and faces of the three representatives from Google, Cisco and Microsoft who are believed to be headed for DEMO with an appetite for deals.

Blog coverage

We won't be providing a lot of product profiles, but many other top blogs around the web will be. For that type of coverage check out GigaOm, Webware, CenterNetworks, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, SomewhatFrank, the B5 Technology Channel and presumably Mashable.

We've created a spliced RSS feed from those blogs and RWW, filtered for DEMO coverage, that you can subscribe to here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RWWDEMORoundUP. If you'd like to get notification of any of these big blogs writing about DEMO via Twitter, you can follow this user http://twitter.com/RWWBigBlogsDEMO.

That's still a fair amount of content to keep up with, so if you want only the "best of" coverage from the above top blogs, here's a feed of just the 25% most popular items in that spliced and filtered feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RwwsDemoCoverageRoundUp-BestOf Thanks to the good folks at AideRSS for offering a popularity filtering service that's so useful at times like this.

Search the DEMO presenters' sites

There are 77 companies presenting at DEMO and no one but Chris Shipley is likely capable of keeping track of them all. If you find yourself wondering, "who here does enterprise software?" or "which of these companies are releasing mobile software?" then here's what you can do - just go to the ReadWriteWeb DEMO08 custom search engine and all your questions will be answered. It's a Google CSE that searches just the 77 sites belonging to DEMO08 presenters. I've added that link to my toolbar favorites and to my mobile browser bookmarks. Feel free to do the same.

Twitter

In addition to the above automatic feed of top blogs covering DEMO, I'll be tweeting my little heart out throughout the event and you can search to see who else is doing the same using a search engine like Tweetscan or Terraminds.

Live multi-media

I expect that there will be people at DEMO doing live video and audio reporting. Some may use Mogulus, which despite its otherwise excellent service does not offer an RSS feed for live shows. Other places worth checking out are UStream.tv, QIK and BlogTalkRadio.

If you'd like to sign up for automatic email or IM notification of any live DEMO08 coverage on UStream, click here and for BlogTalkRadio live audio click here. Some Nokia users have been using QIK to do live mobile video broadcasting and though QIK doesn't publish an RSS feed of recent live shows - I scraped one using Dapper that you can sign up for automatic email or IM notification of DEMO coverage on via this link. You'll be told when the words DEMO OR DEMO08 show up in the title of a show and you'll see who the producer of the show is. Notifications are provided via Zaptxt.

In all likelihood you'd probably want to monitor all three of those at once. You can get email or IM notifications for any DEMO media on any of the above services here.

Participating companies

Graeme Thickins of GT&A Strategic Marketing has put up another of his annual posts listing all the DEMO participants, their locations and links to their sites. Graeme also summarizes some of the most interesting looking products on his blog, but I'll leave that for readers to click through and check out. Thanks to Graeme, below is a list of names and links to the 77 presenting companies with links to see who will be there.

See you there!

I'll be at DEMO starting Monday night and look forward to meeting some of you there. In the meantime, if you've got any thoughts about how the above resources could be improved, please let us know.

And now, a list of the companies ready to launch their products next week.

2Win Solutions, Ltd.; Raanana, Israel; www.2win-solutions.com
800 PBX, Inc.; Fremont, CA; www.800genie.800pbx.com
Acesis, Inc.; Mountain View, CA; www.acesis.com
Asankya, Inc.; Atlanta, GA; www.asankya.com
Aternity, Inc.; Westborough, MA; www.aternity.com
atlaspost.com; Taipei City, Taiwan; www.atlaspost.com
Avistar Communications Corp.; San Mateo, CA; www.avistar.com
BitGravity, Inc.; Burlingame, CA; www.bitgravity.com
blist, Inc.; Seattle, WA; www.blist.com
Buzka, Pty Ltd.; Subiaco, Australia; www.buzka.com
Capzles, Inc.; Culver City, CA; www.capzles.com
Catalyst Web Services, LLC; Alexandria, VA; www.catalystweb.com
CellSpinSoft, Inc.; San Jose, CA; www.cellspin.net
Celsias, Ltd.; Wellington, New Zealand; www.celsias.com
CHALEX Corp.; Grasonville, MD; www.chalexcorp.com
Circos.com, Inc.; San Mateo, CA; www.circos.com
Citiport, Inc.; Taipei City, Taiwan; www.citiport.net
Citrix Systems, Inc.; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; www.citrix.com
Cozimo.com, Inc.; Berkeley, CA; www.cozimo.com
Delver, Inc.; Herzliya Pituach, Israel; www.delver.com
Ecrio, Inc.; Cupertino, CA; www.ecrio.com
Education.com; Redwood City, CA; www.education.com
Eyealike, Inc.; Bellevue, WA; www.eyealike.com
Fabrik, Inc.; San Mateo, CA; www.fabrik.com
Flypaper, Inc.; Phoenix, CA; www.freshbrew.com
GoldMail, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; www.goldmail.com
good2gether, Inc.; Melrose, MA; www.good2gether.com
Green Plug, Inc.; San Ramon, CA; www.greenplug.us
HealthPricer Interactive, Ltd.; Vancouver, BC; www.healthpricer.com
Hubdub, Ltd.; Edinburgh, Scotland; www.hubdub.com
Huddle.net; London, England; www.Huddle.net
Iterasi, Inc.; Vancouver, WA; www.iterasi.com
iVideosongs; Alpharetta, GA; www.ivideosongs.com
Jodange, LLP; Yonkers, NY; www.jodange.com
Kaazing Corp.; Mountain View, CA; www.kaazing.com
LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc.; Emeryville, CA; www.leapfrog.com
LegiTime Technologies, Inc.; Westport, CT; www.legitext.com
LiquidPlanner, Inc.; Bellevue, WA; www.liquidplanner.com
LiquidTalk, Inc.; Chicago, IL; www.liquidtalk.com
Liquidus Corp.; Chicago, IL; www.liquidusmedia.com
Livescribe, Inc.; Oakland, CA; www.livescribe.com
MANDIANT; Alexandria, VA; www.mandiant.com
MOLI, LLC; West Palm Beach, FL; www.moli.com
Movial; Helsinki, Finland; www.movial.com
Nirvanix; San Diego, CA; www.nirvanix.com
NotchUp, Inc.; Los Altos Hills, CA; www.notchup.com
Notebookz.com, Inc.; Berkeley, CA; www.ileonardo.com
Pathworks Software Corp.; Mountain View, CA; www.pathworkssoftware.com
Redux, Inc.; Berkeley, CA; www.redux.com
Review2Buy, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; www.review2buy.com
Ribbit Corp.; Stanford, CA; www.goribbit.com
Rove Mobile, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario; www.rovemobile.com
Santrum Networks, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan; www.santrum.com
SceneCaster; Richmond Hill, Ontario; www.scenecaster.com
Seesmic; San Francisco, CA; www.seesmic.com
Silobreaker, Ltd.; London; England; www.silobreaker.com
Skyfire; San Jose, CA; www.dvclabs.com
SpeakLike, LLC; New York, NY; www.speaklike.com
Sprout, Inc.; Honolulu; HI; www.sproutfusion.com
Squidcast; San Francisco, CA; www.squidcast.com
StackSafe, Inc.; Vienna, VA; www.stacksafe.com
Standout Jobs, Inc.; Montreal, Quebec; www.standoutjobs.com
STEP Labs; San Jose, CA; www.steplabs.com
Sterna Technologies, Inc.; San Mateo, CA; www.friend-ltd.com
support.com; Redwood City, CA; www.support.com
SupportSpace, Inc.; Redwood Shores, CA; www.supportspace.com
Symantec Corp.; Cupertino, CA; www.symantec.com
TimeTrade Systems, Inc.; Bedford, MA; www.timetrade.com
Toktumi, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; www.toktumi.com
TubeMogul, Inc.; Berkeley; CA; www.tubemogul.com
Vidyo™, Inc.; Hackensack; NJ; www.vidyo.com
Visible Measures Corp.; Boston, MA; www.visiblemeasures.com
Voyant, Inc.; Austin, TX; www.planwithvoyant.com
xtranormal, Inc.; Montreal, Quebec; www.xtranormal.com
Yoics, Inc.; Palo Alto, CA; www.yoics.com
YouChoose, LLC; Thornton, PA; www.youchoose.net
Zodiac Interactive; Valley Stream NY; www.zodiac.tv

iLovePhotos is desktop software for the Mac only (Windows version coming...well...maybe one day). Designed to compete primarily with iPhoto , iLovePhotos aims to make it easier to organize and share your photos with family and friends.

According to the company, the software "automatically detects the faces of individuals in each picture." That's true to a point, but that statement implies that the software is recognizing faces and associating names to go along with them after an initial bit of training. At least, that's what we think "facial recognition" should mean. But that is not the case with iLovePhotos.

Instead, iLovePhotos recognizes the faces of various people in a photo and draws a box around them. Then, in a special view (the "tagger" view) which displays just the faces, you can identify a face as belonging to a name and then quickly tag the rest of the faces that are of that same person. But get this straight - it's you that's doing the tagging, not iLovePhotos. The software just has an interface that makes that process less painful than before.

Facial Recognition in iLovePhotos

Besides people's names, photos can be tagged with other words, too, like "vacation," "beach," "dogs," "party," "wedding," etc., just as you would any photo on flickr. Tagged collections of photos are represented with an image of your choosing and display in the right sidebar of the app. After you've tagged your photos, you can easily pull up all the photos associated with that tag by dragging and dropping the photo representing that tag into the toolbar at the top of the app. Drag other tags alongside it to narrow your results. For example, drag a tag for a person and a tag for an event into the toolbar and the app displays all the photos of that person at the event.

But Sharing Is Automatic!

The tagging aspect to iLovePhotos is easier than in some other applications, but it's not ideal. Automatic facial recognition would be so much better. They tell us that they hope to include that in a later release, though.

Something that is automatic about the app is its sharing feature. You can specify that all photos with a particular tag are automatically emailed - you don't have to do anything beyond the initial configuration. Now that's an automated feature we like.

Setting Up Sharing

Slideshows Are Automatic, Too...And Smart

Finally, the software creates personalized "intelligent" slideshows which can be embedded on any site or watched on your iPhone, iPod, or AppleTV. These slideshows use an algorithm to determine what photos you haven't seen lately and displays them for you. If you have just uploaded new photos, you may see those in the slideshow, but even if your collection has been static for a while, the app knows to show you those photos you haven't seen for some time.

Would You Use It?

Because your computer is often the midway point between camera and cloud, desktop software for organizing your photos can still be a useful tool. But does iLovePhotos offer enough features to make it something you would want to try? Let us know what you think.

Plastic Logic's Reader

The first product on our list is Plastic Logic's upcoming e-book reader. A demonstration of this device at the past DEMO08 conference left many people amazed at how incredibly thin this potential "Kindle-killer" is. The company says they've perfected a way of printing polymer transistors onto flexible plastic displays. This particular revolution won't be just a transition to lighter and "bendier" touchscreens, it will also lead to lower power consumption and longer battery life.

But perhaps what's best about Plastic Logic's technology is the cost. The polymer-based circuitry will be able to bring new products into market where silicon microchips were simply too expensive. Since the displays are flexible enough to be rolled up like paper, the potential for this new type of computing is nearly limitless. Is this the future of the newspaper? Perhaps, but it could also be used in smart electronic tags that track merchandise and large flat-panel displays.

Plastic Logic will begin their entry into the market in the second half of 2009 with pilots and trials with key partners and will prepare for further sales by 2010.

Pressure-Sensitive Computing: Impress

For an inventive, "out-there" product that could make the cold, stiff computer a thing of the past, look no further than this touch screen flexible display called "Impress" (PDF). Made of foam and force sensors, Impress works with both touch and the intensity of pressure. This computing technology lets the user squeeze out information or put objects in motion by deforming the surface of the computer.

The end result is pretty amazing, though it may not end up being as practical as the flexible polymer displays. However, it's easy to imagine how it could be put to use in entertainment-based computing at the very least. (Or maybe huggable, touch-enabled teddy bears? We can only hope!)

The Touch OS: Windows 7

While its easy to see the usefulness of touchable handheld devices, others have questioned how exactly touchscreen computers - such as the upcoming Windows 7 OS - would be useful to consumers. Suggestions have included everything from control panels for the smart home to kitchen PCs for touch-based recipe look up to touchscreen Media Centers. However, the answer as to what could really impact touchscreen PC adoption may be as simple as this: games.

At this year's CES, a demo of a Windows 7 air hockey game demonstrated the potential for a new type of human-computer interaction...like an iPhone but much, much bigger.

In addition, Microsoft also introduced two new Surface applications for Windows 7 at CES as well. One that allowed for photo manipulation and another for interacting with maps.

Yet there still is a question as to whether the iPhone-like multi-touch capabilities of a touchscreen OS will become as big of a hit in traditional computing as they were on the smartphone.

These above examples of touchscreen-based computing demonstrate the new ways we may interact with technology - and therefore the web - in coming years. It's a glimpse into the future of a world where our interactions with technology come more easily and more naturally than ever before. This trend will continue to move computing away from being an activity for technophiles alone and will make it an activity that everyone - even mainstream users - will enjoy.

Disclosure: Sarah Perez also blogs for Microsoft's Channel 10.

About UsableLogin

UsableLogin is a new application from Usable Security Systems which allows you to choose one simple code word and use it to log into any web site. That codeword can be as simple as your dog's name ("fido") or your favorite color ("pink"). Why is this possible? Because the code word is just one layer of security - behind the scenes, the software creates another password for you for the actual web site. The password it creates is strong, complex, and highly secure, just as we know passwords should be.

How It Works

To use UsableLogin, you simply download the browser plugin. After you pick a background image and your easy-to-recall pass code, the login box will appear consistently across every web site you access, whether that's Facebook or your bank.

Web sites can also choose to support UsableLogin by putting a small bit of JavaScript code on their site.

Here's what UsableLogin sign-in boxes look like:

When you log in to a web site, UsableLogin cryptographically combines your simple code word with secret data pulled from separate sources: your computer and Usable Security's servers. This data is combined to create a secure verifier which is used as your complex password. Your code word is never stored and web sites never see it.

UsableLogin can be used on any web site that accepts passwords. It will also work on any operating system and browser.

UsableLogin on Gmail

The Usable Login Dashboard

From the UsableLogin homepage, you can manage all your accounts and view your history - when you last logged on and from which computer. You can also authorize and deauthorize computers from this dashboard, so for example, if your laptop was lost or stolen, you could make sure that no one who got a hold of it could log in to your accounts.

Security Made Easy

Ask any I.T. professional about "multi-factor authentication" and they'll tell you how much more secure it is against attacks. Think of it this way: on your front door you have a doorknob with a lock - that's the extent of protection you have today. Add a deadbolt to the mix, and even though your door's lock is so much easier to pick, the extra lock (the deadbolt) makes it much harder to get into your house. That's multi-factor authentication. (OK, it's actually much more complicated than that, but that's the easiest way I could think to explain it.)

If you want to learn more about UsableLogin, you can watch their entire presentation from DEMO08 here:

UsableLogin will become available in early 2009. You can sign up on their homepage to be notified when it's released.

Reminder to PR people and startups: If you would like ReadWriteWeb to consider covering your product, you should email us at tips@readwriteweb.com. This address is monitored daily by all our main bloggers. Pitch emails sent to my personal email address almost always get forwarded to the tips address, so skip the middleman by emailing tips! Due to volume, we cannot respond to every email - but be assured that they are being read and considered by our writing team.

The top story this week came right at the end: Microsoft's $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo!. It's a huge story and Marshall Kirkpatrick had RWW's analysis:

It's going to validate a lot of innovation at Yahoo! Many people, including Microsoft on the conference call early this morning about the news, are focusing on what this means for advertising and for search. Since when is Yahoo! particularly good at either of those things, though? Yahoo! has created a web presence with more traffic than almost anyone else on earth. That's what they are good at and the issue is that they haven't been able to make money off of it.

Yahoo! is great at content and online innovation, though. That's what Microsoft needs right now. Google is posing a threat to Microsoft not just because it is winning in advertising, where Microsoft is a relative beginner, but because Google is shifting the software world to online.

Read the whole post here

In other news, this week Google announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application. See also: Plaxo Pulse First to Use Google's Social Graph

DEMO Coverage

This week the venerable DEMO conference was held and Marshall Kirkpatrick was at the show for ReadWriteWeb. Here is his coverage during the week:

• Seesmic Transcends Comparisons With Twitter
• Capturing Structured Data With an AIR App: Acesis Goes to DEMO
• SproutBuilder: You've Got to See This Drag and Drop Widget Maker
• The Pros and Cons of DEMO
• The RWW Toolkit for DEMO08

Web Trends

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) last week released their latest report, summing up the digital music landscape at the start of 2008. The IFPI claims in the report that for every legal music download, there are 20 illegal downloads taking place. Or in other words, illegal downloading is happening at a rate that is 20 times that of legal downloading. This, says the IFPI, lead to US$3.7 billion in industry losses. But there are some big holes in that claim.

As part of MTV's coverage of the 2008 presidential elections in the US, the media network assembled a "street team" of 51 amateur journalists -- one in each state and the District of Columbia -- to file blog reports, photos, videos, and audio podcasts about election issues during the course of the campaign season. The videos are being syndicated to MTV's mobile web site, social network, and to the Associate Press Online Video Network. Members of the street team have been outfitted with laptops, video phones, and other popular tools of the citizen journalist via funding from a $700,000 grant from the John L. and James S. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge.

How YOU Can Make the Web More Structured

We have written a lot here about the the vision of building a structured layer on top of the current web. Annotating billions of HTML documents in a bottom-up way or building top-down tools that can automagically interpret the existing information are the two approaches that we discussed. Together these approaches would result in a global database which will make the web even more connected. The ability to correlate content and concepts accross web sites would reduce the time necessary for searching and would enable the discovery of related information.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Web Products

For 2007, our Best Web LittleCo was Twitter, the microblogging/status application that captured the collective attention of Silicon Valley at SXSW last winter and has been on a meteoric rise ever since. We picked Twitter because it "has captured the imagination and become a new hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging." But, unlike 2006's Best LittleCo YouTube, which has become firmly entrenched in the mainstream consciousness, Twitter still exists outside of most mainstream circles.

There appears to be evidence that Facebook users are beginning to suffer from app fatigue, and there is growing discontent about how applications are being distributed and about the amount of noise that the application platform has introduced into the Facebook ecosystem. As Mark Glaser writes on the PBS MediaShift blog, Facebook has a growing trust problem. Further, new numbers suggest that fed up users might have had enough of some of the most popular Facebook apps. This, however, could be a good thing for users and for the health of the platform in the long run.

Last October, Mozilla announced that they were working on a mobile version of the Firefox browser. As it turns out, they were working on two versions: one designed for touchscreen devices like the iPhone and another for traditional phones. Now Mozilla has finally given us a glimpse of their designs by posting the plans, mockups, and details of these two upcoming mobile browsers on the Mozilla wiki.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Imagine a system for delivering only high-value information via Twitter. That's what PostRank has built with its new PostRank Twitter Newsroom. The system finds the most engaging blogs on various topics, then automatically pulls the most talked-about posts from those blogs and now delivers those links to you via Twitter.

We're big fans of PostRank here at ReadWriteWeb. The service takes inbound RSS feeds and scores each item in those feeds by number of comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter, saves in Delicious, votes on Digg and other feedback metrics. It then allows you to subscribe to the 10% of the items in any feed that are most popular with that blog's own community of readers. It's an awesome way to keep track of the break-out hits on any topic, from any source.

Now PostRank has taken the next step and discovered the blogs about various topics that are most "engaging" with their own readers. For 50 topics at launch and more in the future, the PostRank Newsroom now aggregates the most talked about posts on the most engaging topical blogs and delivers them to subscribers on Twitter.

Want to get the hottest posts from the top blogs in law, marketing, music, nonprofits or programming in Ruby sent to you by Twitter? Now you can. That's a valuable service.

The editorial selection to determine which blogs are in which categories is open to question. We're not sure why we're in Entrepreneurship, for example, and not startups or tech. And we're not sure that the full Digg front page feed is suitable for the Mac category - but hopefully these things will get worked out with reader feedback.

It's similar to something we did last year for the DEMO event, where instead of racing a bunch of other blogs to cover all the startups at DEMO we grabbed their RSS feeds, filtered for the word DEMO, ran them through PostRank and then put that feed into a Twitter account that people could subscribe to. It worked pretty well, so we expect this new implementation from the company will work as well or better.

In this case the links are published from well explained Twitter accounts, with hashtags. We expect people will retweet them and it will be a great way to spread the word about PostRank.

Twitter for high-value information? It might be hard for some people to believe - but this kind of machine processing to add value to people-published content is exactly the kind of development we expect to define the next phase of the web.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.

Many of today's web sites for seeking employment seem like they haven't been updated in years - many don't even offer RSS feeds! It's as if the whole shift to a more social web has completely passed them by. It's about time those static sites received a little competition...and now they have it. Compared to the others, PaidInterviews is more innovative, but, like most new sites, it will only be disruptive if they can build a large enough network of users.

What makes PaidInterviews different is that it's more of a social network than a job search web site. And before the LinkedIn comparisons start up, remember that this site is designed solely to connect potential employees with employers - a feature that's only one aspect of what LinkedIn offers. PaidInterviews is more focused on "careers" than "contacts."

Using PaidInterviews

On the site, users create profiles and fill them out with the expected info like education, work history, skill set, etc. But there are also Web 2.0 aspects to these profiles - things like profile photos and tags, for example. Also, one of the big differences is that on PaidInterviews, potential employees have the option to upload video resumes along with their other information. Several spots are provided where you have the option to upload any sort of videos you want. The site does offer some suggestions, though, based on traditional interview questions ("What are some of your strengths and weaknesses?", "Why should you be hired?" etc.)

Video resumes may be the next big thing for job seekers, but few sites have implemented them so far. (We looked at few of those sites earlier this year on the post "The Resume, Rebooted" available here).

Optimatch Technology

Another difference between PaidInterviews and the current crop of job sites is the way they match candidates to jobs. Instead of simple keyword-based matching (which leads to spammy invites from recruiters who just scour the database for a particular word), PaidInterviews uses a patented "Optimatch" technology. Like "eHarmony for jobs," optimatch works by having candidates fill out and rate various aspects about their ideal career (pay, lifestyle, benefits, commute, skills, etc.). On the other end, employers then see matches ranked by percentage of the best (highest %) matches to the worst (lowest %) .

Optimatch in Action

Business Model

Employers don't get to see a candidate's personal info unless they're ready to interview, at which point they need to make arrangements to pay. However, the business model for PaidInterviews is very different - commission fees aren't paid to recruiters, but to the candidates themselves - sort of a "sign on" bonus thanks to using the site.

Candidates name their asking fee which is then matched to an employer's bid fee and this fee is paid by the employers on top of the employee's salary. If a candidate and employer are a good match but the asking fee and bid don't match up, they can both negotiate to reach an agreed ask fee. PaidInterviews believes this will lead to higher-quality candidates - it may or may not, but it's an interesting experiment. Considering that the youngest crop of workers (Gen Y) sees their skill set as a commodity available to whichever employer makes it most worth their while, this creative model might just gain traction.

Watercooler

The other big feature of this site is an area called the "Watercooler," which is a place where you can ask and answer questions about what a particular company is like. Here you can talk about what you liked/didn't like about the company. Since your username will display here, you may not want to go with your traditional web handle when signing up for PaidInterviews. Let the site instead generate a user ID for you so you can anonymously share your real thoughts.

Conclusion

Will PaidInterviews take off? It's too soon tell, but they have a lot of great features that make it a more appealing career search web site than what we currently have available today. There is certainly a lack of social media-infused innovation in this market, so it's nice to see they are doing something unique.

Qtask Overview

Like SharePoint, Qtask offers a number of features for team collaboration including discussion boards, wikis, file sharing, form creation tools, RSS, calendaring, and full contextual search. With its comprehensive tool set, projects can be created, managed, maintained, and tracked. Because all the information relating to various tasks is online, new team members can get up-to-date quickly on the status of various projects just by signing into Qtask.

Getting Started

When you first sign into Qtask, you're presented with a global dashboard from which you can see an overview of all the most important items, including tasks and their status, meetings you've been invited to and those you're scheduled to attend, recently updated wikis and files, your schedule, team members and other important top-level items. The layout of these items is similar to that of iGoogle and its widgets, which makes it easy to see at a glance everything that you need to focus on.

Global Dashboard

At the top of this dashboard is navigation that can take you deeper into the site - to discussion boards, team calendars, project homepages, and more. Like the global dashboard, each project's homepage focuses on just the key items (meetings, tasks, files, etc.) for that specific project.

It's All In The Details

Although there are many portals for team collaboration like this available today, it's the little details in Qtask that make it worth a look. For example, in the discussion threads, discussions can be set to public or private, unread items appear in a different color, and you can flag items as "hot" to draw attention to them. Team calendars feature thumbnails of the members faces and discussion areas where members can work out details, discuss agendas, etc.

Editing the Meeting Deatails

Other great features include version control for uploaded files and syndication (via RSS) of file shares and wikis - and both of which can even be shared with those outside the company. A site-wide search box lets you perform searches and also offers a number of advanced options to help you find just what you need:

Other Features

Built-in tools for form creation are also included with Qtask as is a mail feature which can be used for internal communications. Outside email like that from Gmail or Yahoo can be integrated with Qtask via IMAP support.

However, one of the most useful features in Qtask is its ability to track changes. File history can be tracked as to who uploaded, downloaded, or accessed a file and when. Tasks, meetings, wikis, and discussions can be tracked as well. This feature has made Qtask so popular with lawyers, that the company will soon be releasing a customized version just for them. (Out of Qtask's initial crop of 2000 users, many are lawyers).

Keeping Track of Changes

Finally, Qtask is available via a mobile browser - a must have for today's on-the-go workforce and remote workers. Whether you use a Blackberry, iPhone, or a standard mobile of some sort, you have access to everything on the site.

On The Horizon

In addition to the upcoming version of Qtask customized for lawyers offices, the company also hopes to create more customized versions for several different types of companies, including perhaps doctors or real estate offices, as those are other popular users of their program.

They also plan to release an enterprise version later on which can be implemented on a company's own servers as an alternative to the SaaS solution they have today.

Affordable And Feature-Rich

Qtask offers plenty of features which will appeal to the SMB market looking for a project-focused web-based tool for team collaboration. The service is very affordable, too: free for 5 users for the first year and comes with 5 hours of free training. Additional users are $50/each per month. Prices include the ability to create unlimited projects, access to online training and online technical support.

At launch time, Qtask is offering a special: charter accounts will only be charged $25/year for additional users.

You can learn more about Qtask from visiting their web site, available at www.qtask.com.

In the meantime, they have provided an opportunity for countless other freaks and geeks to use the magical tool they've built to grow our stature wherever we work; to cut through information overload, to shine a bright light on opportunities and to augment our minds with the snap of a finger. Read on for my advice about how to use Blekko and we'll use it well - for as long as it lasts.

What is Blekko?

Blekko was the name of company CEO Rich Skrenta's first networked computer. Skrenta was 15 years old when he wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines in 1982; it is believed to have been the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer virus ever created. Skrenta went on to work on the Amiga at Commodore, then at Sun Microsystems, then co-founded the Netscape-acquired Dmoz and the Tribune/Gannett/Knight Ridder-acquired local news search engine Topix.

Now he's raised funding from a group of investors that include Marc Andreesen, to build Blekko. His band of freaky geeks include CTO and Society for Creative Anachronisms member Greg Lindahl and community manager Cheralyn Watson, who prioritized being ready for the WoW and ballet communities in the days leading up to Blekko's launch. (I found that quite charming.) The entire Blekko team includes more than 20 people.

What have these people built?

Blekko, simply put, is a social Custom Search Engine creation service with RSS feeds. It lets users curate and subscribe to mini-search engines that return results only from selected websites, thus increasing the signal to noise ratio and tightly controlling the context of search results.

If you've used Google Custom Search, really used it, that very powerful tool has been improved upon in Blekko because the latter was built to search large groups of sites and to have those groups shared and edited.

I used Google Custom Search all day, every day, to query my defined sets of blogs from technology analysts, geolocation specialists, semantic web scientists, youth marketing bloggers, English-language Asian tech bloggers and more, about whatever topics we're writing about here at ReadWriteWeb.

These Custom Search Engines are like dynamic reference books, populated by the blog archives of topical experts. They are things of magic - but Google CSE has never caught on beyond its widespread use as an embedded search box for a single website. That's tragic, if inevitable: the most powerful magic on the web will never be appreciated in its making, only in its results. Those of us who appreciate its making get to make some it ourselves. But more on that in a minute.

Blekko launched this week to big write-ups in the Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, TechCrunch and a flood of other outlets all over Techmeme. Frankly, I think it got all that press because it's backed by Andreeson, makes big claims about improving on Google, talks smack about red-hot content farm Demand Media as part of its pitch, has founders with very credible pedigrees and has good PR. But the general response to the company's product has been confusion and doubt.

As a regular and heavy user of Custom Search Engines, I've got some ideas about why most people are unlikely to appreciate the beauty and power of Blekko. But cynicism is cheap. Strategic advice on how to most effectively use a good tool is far more valuable and interesting.

How to Be a Blekko Power User, For Fun and Profit

I'd like to share a few thoughts about how I'm planning on using Blekko, based on the strengths and weaknesses of Google Custom Search. But first some assumptions:

• I'm going to assume that you work in a field where high-quality information is valuable.


• I'm going to assume that you can imagine the value of first mover's advantage, when it comes to information.

I believe that everyone works in a field like that, most people just don't know it.

First step, compile yourself a magic collection.

A searchable collection of your industry's top blogs and websites allows you to quickly put any topic in context, based on what the most knowledgeable people in your field have written about that topic in the past.

I've built scores of Custom Search Engines, but the first one I put into production is something I call my Magic Search. It's a collection of 25 of the top Web 2.0 news and review blogs on the web - all our competitors here at ReadWriteWeb.

I do a Magic Search whenever I see a new company or website, to see if and what our competitors have written about it. Last week, for example, someone sent us a link to the incredible website MapCrunch (like StumbleUpon for world-wide Google Street View views, try it!) and I was impressed. I did a Magic Search for it and with a snap of my fingers found that two of our biggest competitors had already written about it 3 weeks prior. (I hate to tell you how the sausage is made, readers, but if any of the leading tech blogs finds out that something has been written about by a competitor 3 weeks ago, then that would mean that we are 3 weeks behind if we write about it afterwords. There is nothing a leading tech blogger hates more than being considered behind the times. So I tweeted about it, and I'm telling you about that wonderful site now.)

If I'm writing about a company and I am being a good blogger who wants to mention competitors in providing the same type of search, I Magic Search it. For example, this week Nick Bilton wrote about the new email snooze-button service Nudgemail at The New York Times and got slammed in comments for failing to mention another service that had been providing the same kind of service for years. I reviewed Nudgemail after Bilton, and I made sure not to make the same mistake. I Magic Searched the neglected competing company and found that it had been written about by my competitors a number of times, along with still other companies providing the same type of service. So I included links to all of them in my write-up and I think it made for a pretty snazzy article.

If I want to know what startups provide a particular kind of service, I Magic Search it. If I want to know what my competitors have written about a person in our sector, I Magic Search them. If I want background on anyone or anything I'm looking at, background drawn from the archives of specialists in my field, I Magic Search it.

It's awesome. I've got it on my phone, I've got it on my browser toolbar and I've got it a couple of other places I won't mention here.

I've built that and my other Custom Search Engines with Google CSE, but Blekko is a very nice alternative. It provides a clean, sharable URL. It can be collaboratively edited. It handles search across hundreds of domains in one collection very nicely. It offers date-based search in a click. Blekko is a better service than Google CSE and I plan on moving all my engines there, as soon as the company offers a way for me to share them privately with my co-workers and no one else. Blekko's management says that's on the development road-map but not available yet.

Quick tips:

• Build a collection of top blogs on any topic using any of these methods, or others - or just Google for "top blogs in X" and grab someone else's list to turn into a custom search engine.


• If you find a list on a page - try putting that page through LinkLeecher or some other way to quickly scrape the URLs off the page and into your Custom Search Engine creation tool. Sometimes I'll open a text editor next to a browser page, drag the URLs onto the text editor, then find and replace all instances of "http" with "[linebreak] http".


• If you've got a collection of the top blogs on any topic built, there are any number of things you can do with that, if you're creative.

Next step: Building Collections on the fly.
Content on the public web is searchable and the savvy searcher will manipulate that content to search it the way they want it.

Both Blekko and Google CSE are well-suited for carefully curated collections. Blekko in particular encourages the creation and maintenance of high-quality custom search engines with its easy collaborative editing, subscription to updates and more.

Sometimes you've got to do it quick and dirty, though.

Here's a story. This Spring I was hired to be one of the official event bloggers at a crazy conference called Techonomy. Bizarrely creative and accomplished people from all around the world came to speak at the event about how to use technology to solve the world's great problems (water, food, poverty, pollution, etc.)

The night before the event, a co-worker and I scraped the names and associated URLs from the pages listing the speakers at the event. I then threw those URLs into a Custom Search Engine that I used to do super-fast research while blogging on the conference floor. "Speaker X says A,B and C. That's something that Organization Y, also participating at the event today, has posted the following white papers about in their website archives." That worked really well.

While I was at it, I also put the names and URLs into a .csv file, uploaded them into Amazon's Mechanical Turk and paid $50 to have people around the world collect the Twitter handles, country-of origin and gender for each of the several hundred event participants. It took them about 90 minutes. I then created Twitter lists of all the participants, the women participants and the international participants, in part so I could put all three lists into Tweetdeck and make sure that as I was covering the event, I could track what people with different backgrounds were saying about the day. I also envisioned those lists being loaded into Flipboard, so you could have an iPad magazine made up of all the links shared by women who had attended the Techonomy conference, for example.

A few years prior, I did the same thing (and more) with companies launching at the DEMO conference, so whenever I was thinking about one, I could quickly search the websites of all the others and determine who else was working in the same sector.

Last week my mother emailed me to ask if I knew the educational technology speaker visiting her school that day. I didn't, but it took about 5 minutes to create an EdTech CSE and find what some of the most respected edtech bloggers online had said about the man. He and my mom ended up having lunch together and talking about the internet, which was pretty cool.

These on-the-fly CSEs are particularly well-suited to Blekko because anyone can then suggest revisions later. More importantly: it's a social community where you may find that someone else has already built the engine you're looking for and you can just grab it and go.

Quick Tips:

• I've trained myself to see a list of anything and think CSE. If you've got, or want to create, folders in an RSS reader - it's relatively simple to export your subscriptions, open the OPML file in a text editor, see how simple it is and delete all the subscriptions except for the topic folder in question. Resave it, then you can upload the new .OPML file into Blekko. That's a very nice feature, OPML import.


• The more you think in terms of URLs, the content they hold, the other URLs they are linked-to and the feeds that are associated with them - the more permutations for searching you can think of. The sky is the limit and it's a very rational system.

Finally, CSEs plus RSS equals a key to any inner sanctum. RSS feeds have been my bread and butter since becoming a professional blogger, and they are really what captured my interest more than anything when I first discovered social media. When I was just getting started (ok, sometimes I still do this), I would take the RSS feed of one or more blogs I really admired and I'd run them through an RSS to Instant Messaging service. These days, my favorite is Notify.me.

I'd get an IM within minutes of any post going up on a blog I really admired, and if I could make a meaningful value-add to the conversation, I'd jump right over and be the first person to leave a comment on the post. I'd do that just often enough to get their attention but not often enough to be annoying. (But where do you find interesting things to add to the conversation? If only there was some way to quickly search for keywords and tidbits in the archives of a collection of topical experts in any field!)

I used to do a whole lot of hitch-hiking and developed the ability to listen and converse with just about anyone, regarding just about anything. Participating in blog conversations is a much safer way to do that.

So - let's say you've got a good collection of topical expert blogs built up and you've got it put into Blekko so you can search against their archives. Guess what? Blekko offers RSS feeds for your search queries! That's awesome.

Take what parts of this you will, but I'll tell you what I'm going to do: I'm going to make sure that all the hundreds of geolocation experts who blog online know that I'm interested in geofencing and history because I'm going to subscribe to a feed for those two search terms in my big Blekko search engine of geolocation blogs. I'm going to read everything they write on the topic and I'll probably leave a comment whenever I can do so appropriately. Thank you, Blekko.

Google Custom Search does not offer RSS feeds. It has to be given a cookie and told to roll over just to get it to try to show you something close to the most recent search results inside your collection.

What Does it Mean?

These are just the ways that I intend to use Blekko, based on my experience using Google Custom Search and the ways that the two services are different. Maybe you've got other strategies in mind.

But here's how I see the three strategies above:

This is how I will assemble a magic reference book, a Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Atlas of the Past, Present and Future of...any topic I want.

This is how I will see a field, or a group of people and companies described online, and with a quick scrape be able to query deep into their online histories. Imagine looking at a set of people's names online, using find and replace to build a set of Google Social Graph query URLs to discover their blogs, bookmarks, Twitter accounts and more, then putting those URLs into Blekko. If that works, that's like 5 minutes of set-up to enable yourself to ask "who in this room has ever bookmarked or tweeted a web page about topics X, Y or Z?" Hello dreamy social search engine!

This is how I will hone in on conversations in the future, among any set of experts, on any topics of interest to me. That's going to be very high signal and very low noise. That's like pulling a sliver of knowledge from the future and putting it straight into your brain - then sliding down it to arrive exactly where the conversations emerge, so that you can participate in them.

Will Blekko Succeed?

Clearly, only the ten people still reading this article and I are ever going to do the above - and we're going to have to click on a whole lot of ads to keep this puppy in business!

The rest of the world is unlikely to build Blekko-collections of their own because the cognitive overhead of curation is of a fundamentally different quantity and quality than the simpler requirements of consumption. People have compared Blekko to the recently launched Cuil because of the hype, but better comparisons could be made to the valiant but failed roll-your-own search engines like Rollyo, Swicki and Hittery. Not enough people with good intentions (not spammers) were willing to put the time in to use these tools well.

Blekko will attempt to compensate for this by automatically serving up search results from hand-curated custom search engines on big popular topics. That will help direct searchers to the Mayo Clinic's webpage for "cure for the common cold" instead of Demand Media's eHow page on the subject, which is of clear commercial intent and questionable worth if you ask the Blekko team. Mayo Clinic doesn't have SEO people on staff, but Demand Media does, Blekko points out - so they built a health "slashtag" that includes Mayo's site but excludes Demand sites. Health search queries are performed inside that slashtag by default.

Will that matter, though? Will millions of people rush with open arms into the unfamiliar, even if it's clearly superior upon the slightest investigation? Will people choose what's best for them? Will they choose what's most powerful and beautiful, instead of that which is easy and must remind itself constantly to "Not be Evil?"

I would submit that if people were likely to make such choices, the world would be a very different place than it is today.

But in the meantime, fellow benevolent hackers, fellow dreamers of antiquity who find ourselves on the web, fellow fans of ballet, acupuncture and other romantic, unorthodox pursuits --- when we find ourselves with a need to search, in a cruel and banal world, may we use tools like Blekko. May we use them to dive deep into the archival knowledge of the finest writers and thinkers in our respective fields. To survey quickly what any set of people online have said before. And to track what our most trusted sources say regarding any topic, anytime in the future.

Even if no one else understands. They don't all need to understand, because in the hyper-linked, flash-curated, streaming social world of the future - those of us who know how to dance among the links and the fleeting, beautiful startups that overestimate most of humanity's capacity for intellectual engagement before crumbling into craven ad networks just to keep the lights on - those of us who can do the power user's dance in those circumstances will know that our positions are secure and that the web will be ours to create on. And we'll treasure beautiful things like Blekko, whether the rest of the world does or not.