I only found out today, so I'll be reading the Jupiter Research report on RSS Readers over the next couple of days. Expect a post from me about it by end of this week.

If you look at that number in terms of Americans who say they're Internet users, that figure rises to 78% who research online before buying.

And it isn't simply the number of Americans doing online research that's grown. It's the frequency with which we're doing it. On any given day, 21% of adults are conducting this sort of research, up from 9% in 2004.

In addition to reading about products and services online, more people are contributing reviews and sharing their opinions about products and services, particularly via social networks. 24% of American adults say they've posted comments about a purchase they've made.

The Pew study also looked at Americans' e-commerce spending habits, in addition to their research habits. It found, not surprisingly, that the percentage of Americans purchasing products online rose from 36% in May 2000 to 52% in this 2010 survey. And the percentage making travel reservations for airline tickets or hotel rooms rose from 22% to 52% over the same time period.

The study found little difference between men and women's online research habits, but did find that those in higher income brackets do more online research than those in lower income brackets. Those in higher income brackets and with more education also post reviews and comments more frequently.

"Many Americans begin their purchasing experience by doing online research to compare prices, quality, and the reviews of other shoppers," says Jim Jansen, Senior Fellow at the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. "Even if they end up making their purchase in a store, they start their fact-finding and decision-making on the internet."

The Amsterdam-based IFMSA represents 1.2 million medical students from 97 countries and provides a substantive boost to open access efforts. Open access is the belief that scholarly research should be widely available instead of being siloed in fantastically expensive, gated journals and otherwise guarded.

"We believe that Open Access to research will positively benefit all aspects of health care; it will improve the knowledge of health care workers, researchers and medical students by making crucial information easy to access. Open Access will also improve and democratize medical education by expanding access to research articles so crucial to students' training, strengthening the IFMSA vision of equity for medical students worldwide."

The Right to Research Coalition is "an international alliance of undergraduate and graduate student organizations that promotes a more open scholarly publishing system through advocacy and education." With the addition of the IFSMA it now represents seven million students globally.

Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of education.

Research.ly uses parent company PeopleBrowsr's proprietary server technology to surface a historical analysis of Tweets, going back three years, thanks to its access to Twitter's full feed, a data stream often referred to as the "Twitter firehose." Not only that, but Research.ly has built custom indexes on top of this database of Tweets, including indexes for things like gender, sentiment, location, degrees of separation and more.

What that means for the service's end users is that you have the ability to parse Twitter analytics in a number of different ways. When you do a keyword search, Research.ly can identify the people talking about that word or phrase, and then you can drill down into the "Interest Graph" to splice the data even further by gender, sentiment, etc. or find related word clouds, hashtags, links, @names and more. It can even pull up related media, like photos from Twitpic or YouTube videos.

In addition, Research.ly has grouped Twitter users into various demographics (think "moms," "CEOs," "engineers," etc.), which means users can now direct the service to return very precise answers to your queries. For example, you could discover things like Mommy bloggers in San Francisco tweeting about human rights or all the good things said about Coke and bad things said about Pepsi.

Account owners, who are presumably accessing the service using a business or brand's Twitter account, can even drill down to see the degrees of separation between themselves and a particular user and how they are connected.

Research.ly's pricing will be $99 per seat per month or $499 per seat per month for its premium features. We've been given an account to try but have had access to it for just a day, so we can't make a final recommendation or endorsement as to its capabilities, but we're definitely excited about the potential.

Google's official mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." While this effort obviously fits right into this, Google is not just financing this research out of the goodness of its heart. The insights the company gathers by tackling hard problems like speech recognition for Zulu - which is not widely represented on the Web and is only spoken by about 10 million people - will also help its researchers to improve other aspects of its services and refine its algorithms for more widely used languages.

One of the major benefits of this technology is its ability to extend a phone's battery life since the phone no longer needs to use its CPU as much as before. It can also be used to scan the phone for security issues even if the phone is turned off.

However, the main advantage of the CloneCloud system is that it can dramatically improve the phone's capabilities. For example, Chun created a test application which performed facial recognition on photos. On the mobile phone, it required 100 seconds to run, but once offloaded to another computer, the same task took just one second.

Still, the CloneCloud service may face some challenges of its own including network latency and bandwidth limitations. The phone's data connection speed, as we all know, varies as you move through different coverage areas. If you stumble into a "dead" zone, there isn't much CloneCloud can do for you.

At present, CloneCloud exists as a prototype that runs on Google's Android mobile OS. It will be demonstrated for the first time publicly at the HotOS XII conference in Switzerland later this month. In the meantime, you can read up on the service's details in the PDF "Augmented Smartphone Applications Through Clone Cloud Execution."

The idea behind Gazelle is to create a browser that is more secure for the now typical dynamic pages we find on the Web. According to Microsoft, Gazelle is different as no existing browsers, including new architectures, have a multi-principal operating system constructed in such a way that provides the browser-based OS exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources.

The research team claims it has successfully browsed 19 of the 20 most popular sites as reported by Alexa with its prototype, but admits the performance of the prototype was only "acceptable." The paper also includes an in-depth comparison of Gazelle's architecture and security with Google Chrome, OP and IE8.

But before you go and read it, make sure you realize that it was written by the research team and in no way states it will be developed by the IE team; there is however a glimmer of hope for those who think it would be a good idea, and it can be found in the conclusion when the team points out that 'the implementation and evaluation of our IE-based prototype shows promise of a practical multiprincipal OS-based browser in the real world."

Still, it's an interesting read for those who are interested in the technology.

The research is being undertaken by the Cybernorms group at Sweden's Lund University. The sociologists are interested in how the Internet shapes norms - both social and legal - and this study looks more closely on how those norms play out vis-a-vis file-sharing. "With your help," reads the survey's introduction, "we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the Internet."

The Cybernorms group made headlines with its research several years ago that analyzed users' behavioral changes when file-sharing became illegal. That research found that there were no social norms that inhibited people from file-sharing.

Moreover, it also found that making file-sharing illegal would do little to stop the practice: "There are strong indications that neither the law in itself nor new legal attempts at enforcing copyright will change the social norm on illegal file sharing. To the opposite, there is a documented willingness of paying for anonymity, keeping the internet flow of content, rather than return to a system of payment for each product."

As one of the most popular BitTorrent sites in the world, The Pirate Bay has a clear interest in supporting this research. And in turn, by collaborating with The Pirate Bay, researchers now have access to a sizable population of active file-sharers. We'll keep you posted on the results.

Full Internet browsers will be on all smartphones and a "growing number of enhanced (or feature) phones," says Senior Analyst Mark Beccue in the release. The other type of browser - the proxy-based browser - requires very little memory and processing power and "can be used on even the lowest-cost phones." The most well-known example of a proxy-based browser is Opera Mini, which downloads highly-compressed versions of Web pages from a proxy server to increase speed and performance.

While the release states that "the installed base of full Internet browsers will exceed that of proxy-based browsers sometime in 2012," the continued explosion of the mobile Web is good news for companies like Opera. The browser company reported last week that the mobile Web ub Africa was continuing to see triple-digit growth and much of it was based on low cost phones.

The U.S. House of Representatives has announced a public hearing to explore making publicly-funded research open to the public. Legislators in both the House and the Senate have already introduced bills calling for this. If they pass, the implications could be significant and might result in an economic jump.

Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act into the House on April 15. An identical Senate version of the bill was introduced by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). Bi-partisan support for public access to federal research has been growing.

The bills propose specifically that the 11 federal agencies with research budgets of $100 million or greater make the published results of their research free to the public.

Knowledge is (Economic) Power

If these 11 massive agencies suddenly were required to make their research public (with a governmental value of suddenly), it could possibly act as a shot of adrenaline to the private sector. Who knows what products and services might be launched, or improved, on the back of this research? It could result in a significant leap forward for an economy that seems at times terminally stalled.

Presumably, the government already has the research that they've paid for. (Presumably.) But a public in possession of that information might make for a much less patient public. If a government agency, for instance, knows something that could improve its services, but allows bureaucratic foot-dragging or inter-agency squabbling to slow its implementation, that agency would find itself in, let's say, a compromised position politically when an informed public realized what it was doing.

Having been in a position to listen and talk to career bureaucrats facing change, we are not as sanguine as we could be at the news. It would be surprising indeed if half the people responsible for sharing this information with the pubic didn't go limp at the first approach of torch-wielding villagers at their castle door. To work, this bill will require that the chief executive make it known in no uncertain terms that any agency head with a hitch in his gitalong will shortly thereafter find himself on the street in the company of all his closest advisors.

But what if you actually have talent? Songsmith could be of potential use to you, too.

"Songwriters can use Songsmith as an 'intelligent scratchpad' to work with new melodies, quickly turning your scratch recordings of new ideas into richer, deeper explorations. Musicians can also play instruments right into Songsmith, instead of singing."

No doubt a great deal of research went into the development of the product, and it probably has some very interesting potential applications. But, I must admit, after watching the promo video, I'm having a hard time clearing my head enough to figure out what those uses might be.

Who knows? This might be another one of those Seinfeld things.

Scoble has just posted an interview and demo with two researchers from Microsoft - who coincidentally also star in the promo video. They provide additional insight on the product and highlight some of its potential applications.

Interested users can download a trial version from Microsoft Research. The product is available for purchase for $29.95 US.

Something tells me that the American Idol tryouts just got a lot more interesting.

About one billion computers, laptops and modems were included in the first wave of Internet-connected devices, according to the company, which tracks installed Internet-capable equipment. But the growth of new Internet-connected devices is accelerating due to the networks of intelligent objects known as the Internet of Things.

And wireless connectivity is coming to more and more of our everyday devices. IMS Research is forecasting that the 22 billion devices in 2020 will include 1.1 billion cars, 2.5 billion televisions, 6 billion cell phones.

Objects are becoming social, too. The greatest potential for growth of the Internet of Things is in machine-to-machine systems such as smart grids, networked security cameras, sensors that detect global warming, household appliances that track their electricity usage, and so on, IMS Research says.

But the Internet of Things may not be just things. Last month we posted musings from the chief futurist at Cisco, a company likely to be manufacturing some of the infrastructure for this thing-dominated Internet (Cisco Bets on the Internet of Things). He predicts livestock and pets will be major adopters, via Internet-enabled tags.

Although iBreadCrumbs says its designed for anyone, when you go to sign up for the social network, you're prompted to enter in your school's information - a step that should really be removed if they want to reach a wider audience. You can easily forge this information though - no .edu email address is required. Once you're logged in, you simply download the iBreadCrumbs add-on for Firefox which installs a browser toolbar.

On the toolbar, there's a "Start" you use when you're ready to begin recording your clickstream at the start of your web research. While you're surfing from web site to web site, iBreadCrumbs is saving the URLs of the sites you visit. When you find a useful page, you can add notes to the page to help you remember why it was important. When you come across pages that aren't relevant, you can delete them as you go or you can delete them later on when you finish recording. When you're finished researching, you just click the "Stop" button and iBreadCrumbs ceases its recording.

Viewing Your Breadcrumbs

At this point, you'll now have access to a page where all the web sites you visited have been saved for you in a list. Here, you can further edit the links by giving the pages titles, adding more notes, removing unnecessary pages, and categorizing the links to better organize your findings.

Breadcrumbs About I.T. Security

If this is an ongoing research project, this saved clickstream can be added to a previous clickstream (these clickstreams are called "breadcrumbs"). By doing this, you can keep building upon your prior research.

You can choose to share your breadcrumbs publicly with others via the iBreadcrumbs network where they can be commented on and rated or you can privately share your items with a colleague or friend. Breadcrumbs can also be exported out of the web browser and into Excel.

When you're ready to review your breadcrumbs and incorporate them into whatever project you're working on, you can use the "Breadcrumb Viewer," which lets you flip through each saved web page as if you were viewing a slideshow.

Not Just For Students

On the iBreadcrumbs network, you can socialize with others - adding friends and joining groups with whom you can share your breadcrumbs. This could be especially useful for student groups who are working on a project together, but it could also be useful to business teams researching a particular subject. Hopefully, iBreadcrumbs will see their greater potential and do away with the required "school" field you must fill in during the sign up process. If you want to try iBreadcrumbs for yourself, you can access it here.

How do computers
Remember? By disc and RAM,
And now by "racetrack"!

Discs spin, cheap but slow;
RAM is quicker but costly;
Racetrack's fast and cheap.

Who developed it?
IBM (old dog, new tricks).
They are on a roll.

They manipulate
Magnetic states of regions
At the speed of jets.

To seek, to find, to
Yield up a datum:
A second's billionth part.

Spintronic currents
Shoot domain walls down the track;
Distance equals pulse.

There are no plans yet
To monetize this breakthrough,
Just imagine, though.

All movies released
In a year on your cell phone
Off one triple-A.

***

We welcome comments,
As long as they're in haiku,
If longer, tanka.

Sources: Linus for Devices, IBM Research, Science, Basho

Overall, we think this is a great project. Knol is a good, easy-to-use platform for these kinds of publications, and given that the articles are also archived on other servers, this project also doesn't rely on Google to keep Knol's servers running indefinitely.

PLoS, being a non-profit, is also the right organization to give this project a try. Commercial publishers are still wary of the Internet, and while the open access movement has been gathering some support over the last few years, a lot of research in most scientific fields will still be hidden behind paywalls for a long time.