- Morfik tests browser boundaries - builds Javascript chess app
- WebOS market review
- XIN - a Web OS that wants to be a platform
- Is Google or Microsoft best positioned for Web Office?
- Google Calendar - further progress on Google’s Web Office suite
- Review of Zimbra - a feature-laden Web Office Suite contender
- Embracing and Extending Microsoft: JotSpot’s Joe Kraus on the Web Office

I'm just getting started too, there's more to come! Say Robert, hopefully Ray Ozzie checks these out :-)

In related news, News Corp executive James MacManus (no relation) has accused the BBC of "blatantly commercial ambitions" and of seeking "to create a digital empire". In other words: Hey, we're the digital empire around here - rack off!

"The cause of the outage was a very unfortunate code change that overwrote some key options in the options table for a number of blogs. We brought the site down to prevent damage and have been bringing blogs back after we've verified that they're 100% okay."

Wordpress's hosted service, WordPress.com, was down completely for about an hour, taking blogs like TechCrunch, GigaOm and CNN with it.

WordPress.com is run from three data centers, in Chicago, San Antonio, Dallas, with 1,300 servers between them, up from three servers in 2005.

Read/WriteWeb will be focusing on more media-related web technology in 2006. Enough Web 2.0.

1. No I don't want a friggin' Gmail account.
2. I don't want to read your opinion on Dave Winer closing down 3000 weblogs.com blogs.
3. I don't even care about Firefox 0.9 being released.

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood today. Sigh, I think I'll read a book tonight.

That's what a new service called FeedVis offers. Give it a bundle of blogs (in OPML format) and it will give you a scrollable, searchable tag cloud - a visual representation of the most-used words in a given period of time among a defined group of blogs on any topic.

Users can put FeedVis on their servers, upload a collection of blogs in OPML format and add a list of "stop words" to exclude from those terms from the popularity contest. The end result is a beautiful scrollable and searchable chart of the most popular words being used in one day, a seven day period or throughout the recent history of that collection of blogs. Increases and decreases in usage are displayed and clicking on any word will bring up the recent blog posts where it was found.

The source code to put FeedVis on your own server is quite simple and easy to customize. We think a lot of people could find this service useful.

It's been a huge year for the Web! A time of renewed optimism in Silicon Valley and an incredible number of new web applications. In a sense it all started with Google's IPO in August 2004, the success of which was a positive and affirming lead-in to 2005. We then witnessed a renaissance of startup activity, acquisitions and intense VC interest in the Web throughout the year. Here then is my list of the top ten defining moments for the Web in 2005. [Full story on ZDNet...]

I'm keen to get your feedback on this, either here or at ZDNet. What were your top Web 2.0 moments of 2005?

"What are the advantages of having an online Office Suite? I'd say that the disadvantages include: security issues, slow speed, dependance on internet connection, limited features, harder to program, and probably many others. What is the point?"

It's a very good question and in my latest ZDNet post I try to answer it.

[Full story at ZDNet...]

According to eMarketer, 60% of U.S. Internet users will be reading blogs by 2014. As eMarketer analyst Paul Verna notes, this upward trend will likely continue, but "over time, blogs will continue to become indistinguishable from other media channels." Indeed, we have to wonder how many blog readers aren't even aware that they are reading blogs. Since the early days of blogging, the word "blog" has meant different things to different people. After all, it can refer to both a personal diary and a serious media publication in reverse chronological order. One actually has to wonder whether the 50% of today's Internet users who say they don't read blogs simply aren't aware of the fact that they are reading them.

Edublogs celebrated hosting 100,000 blogs in the Fall of 2007. The growth of blogging in education is an important development.

Edublogs used to offer a video hosting alternative to YouTube called Edublogs.tv as well, but took that site offline a year ago this month. The company said it would return but so far it hasn't.

That blog reading and writing has proliferated throughout the world of education is no doubt a boon to the efforts of educators. By helping teachers supplement classroom instruction, compare notes with peers and communicate online with students learning to express themselves in newly accessible public fora - education blogging is one of the best examples of meaningful application of a technology so often derided as shallow and of little importance just a few short years ago when organizations like Edublogs.org launched.

I can add my own bit of analysis to Allen's. At the end of last week I did a check of which tech publishers were getting the most frontpages.

Number of digg frontpages in last 30 days:
Ars Technica = 87
Gizmodo = 84
Engadget = 67
Torrentfreak = 36
Techcrunch = 12
Valleywag = 9
ReadWriteWeb = 6
Mashable = 4
Gigaom = 4
VentureBeat = 2
CenterNetworks = 1

As you can see, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and Engadget get far more frontpages than other top tech blogs like Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and Allen's own CenterNetworks. Ars gets on average 3 frontpages a day - in other words, they get as many frontpages in 2 days as we get in a month. Yet on Technorati's list of top blogs, only 7 places separates Ars (#7) from RWW (#14). I'm not complaining (much), it's just the way this business works. But it is interesting that digg, which is a social news site and famously runs without using editors, is dominated by such a small collection of top blogs. And that select group appears to be getting smaller and more exclusive by the day.

Don't get me wrong, Slashdot has its own biases - it almost always chooses to link to stories from a traditional 'old media' source, rather than blogs. So it too no doubt has a small collection of sources that dominate its frontpage.

My point (other than indulging myself in 'shop talk') is that at the same time that Digg is becoming more mainstream, the variety of its sources for top news has dropped. Is this a good thing? Obviously not for some of us tech blogs. But I'd argue it's also not good for digg readers, who are not getting the diversity of tech stories they used to get.

Today, we realized that the most popular posts from those blogs may be useful resources for many folk, so we created our own OPML file. Ah, the beauty of the Web.

Chris liked the list; didn't like that it wasn't offered as an OPML file, so he added the feeds and removed those he didn't like - a gift to himself he says, and a gift for you to download and share.

Using AideRSS PostRank, ReadWriteWeb has created an OPML file of the greatest hits from each of those 150 blogs; the top 20 percent of the most popular posts from each site. You can grab it here.

If you're not familiar with OPML, take a look at this OPML primer or read Marshall's how (and why) to create an OPML file.

Earlier this year we compiled a list of ReadWriteWeb OPML resources; take a look if you're interested in what we are reading, or come join us on FriendFeed, where incidentally we first noticed this story, and we can discuss other cool things we find on the Web.

Our blogs are all complementary - Mike blogs on new products; Fred blogs on usability, design and dev; I blog about Web 2.0 trends and developments. It's likely that a subscriber to any one of our feeds would also be interested in reading the other 2 feeds. So we thought why not promote that. We'll probably expand this and invite other bloggers to join too, because there are many other quality Web 2.0 blogs out there.

If you look on the right-hand side of my site, you'll see a Web 2.0 Workgroup logo. This links through to a landing page.

On a personal note, I've become good friends with Mike, Fred and Gabe while I've been staying here. Mike has been very generous in giving us all a place to stay. I'll stop being sappy now. Check out the Web 2.0 Workgroup and let us know what you think.

Microsoft is leaping into hosted applications big time. InformationWeek reports that Microsoft plans to offer hosted implementations of SharePoint, CRM and ERP applications. But the best quote in that article was left till last. A "Microsoft insider" was asked which other products and services Microsoft would host and the reply was: "Everything. Hosted Office. Everything hosted."

Ahem, can anyone say Web 2.0 Office? Exactly a month ago I wrote what turned out to be a very popular post entitled The Web-based Office will have its day. My main focus in that post was all of the small start-ups that are currently building web-based office apps. I forgot to mention that of course there's nothing stopping Microsoft from building their own Web 2.0 Office! Perhaps that's their only option to head off Google, because Google Office has been rumored to be around the corner for 1-2 years now... [Full Story at ZDNet]

While the company has been working on this new infrastructure for over six months and the larger blog platforms have been using the new crawler for some time, Technorati expects to see all blogs utilizing the new crawler by the end of next week.

Over the past year Technorati has been getting a lot of attention for its inability to crawl and index blogs efficiently, so this may be great news for bloggers who have for a long time bemoaned having to manually ping Technorati each time they publish a new post.

And it's not only the smaller blogs that have experienced this. Only yesterday, while looking at the top 100 blogs in Technorati, we noticed that ReadWriteWeb had not been crawled in 23 hours. That's a long time considering we had published ten posts and therefore pinged the service ten times in that period of time.

While we can't be certain that this new crawler will make indexing faster, we're pleased to see Technorati striving to become more relevant and useful at a time when really great, really fast blog search is essential.