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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

According to Yahoo!, universities have not had access to the type of hardware and software infrastructure necessary for web-scale distributed computing research. Yahoo! intends for Carnegie Mellon to be first school in a broader academic research partnership program. CMU and Yahoo! also plan to hold a Hadoop Summit in the first half of 2008, to which they say they would invite major Hadoop users such as Facebook and the University of California at Berkeley.

The search and portal company is following in the footsteps of rival, Google, who along with IBM announced in October that it was building a 1,600 processor data center that would be used to help teach cloud computing concepts to students at six American universities.

Google has been very active in the Flu research community. Just a few weeks ago, the company also announced a partnership with the Public Library of Science, which now uses Google Knol to publish data and papers about influenza research.

The last panel I attended on the first day of SXSW was entitled "Web 2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing". The panel was moderated by John Wilbanks from Science Commons. John did an excellent job showing how a number of general internet trends are effecting scientific publishing. Specifically, I was impressed by three major projects the panel touched on:

• Open Access
• Connotea
• SemanticWiki on People at Ontoworld

Open Access

Melissa Hagemann, the Program Manager for Open Access at the Soros Foundation, was one of the panelist. If you aren't familiar with Open Access, it is an initiative trying to get all scholarly research available for free on the Internet. Melissa explained that many supporters are now requiring the research they support via grants, to be provided under Open Access. In fact, the US Congress is considering legislation to require all research supported by the United States Government to be distributed under Open Access. The reason is that the government and other funders are realizing they are paying for the research twice. Firstly, they are paying to have the information created and synthesized for publication. Then they are paying again to allow other researchers to get access to that knowledge.

Timo Hanay, Director of Web Publishing at Nature Publishing Group, discussed the beginning of an evolution in how the impact of scientific research is measured. Historically, the impact of a piece of academic research is measured by the journal that the research is published in. However, that is evolving - the impact increasingly based on how the information is distributed. One of the examples Timo showed was Connotea, which Timo described as a "del.icio.us for scientific publishing". I spent some time exploring the site tonight and it does seem to have all the typical social bookmarking site features, but focused around tags for scientific publications.

SemanticWiki on People at Ontoworld

As journals and other material are shared via Open Access, another key challenge is making it easy for individuals to discover the content they are most interested in. Interestingly, one of the most difficult challenges is understanding which individual wrote certain pieces of research. For example, a common name (John Smith) may be multiple people; or multiple spellings of a name (John Smith, John A. Smith) may be the same person. Proper attribution and understanding of the progress of a research project is very important, when trying to deliver meaningful search results across scientific publications. Many are hoping the 'semantic web' will make that easier. Interestingly, these projects are leveraging the SemanticWiki on People at Ontoworld to help with this.

Conclusion

While I was very familiar with all of the online media trends behind these projects, it was very interesting to hear how this is effecting the publication of scientific research and journals. It honestly was very encouraging! When I think about the productivity improvements that social media has brought to my life, I'm happy to hear that the individuals focused on finding a cure for cancer - and other significant projects - are using the same types of tools to improve their productivity.

This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research. Readers outside of the academic world but aware of the financial future of health information online in the commercial sector can imagine the analogous excitement about this announcement for academic researchers.

The blog Open Access News has a good round up of science blog responses to the news.

Pubmed is the likely home for much of the research, though the law is likely to breathe more life into online sites of scientific activity like the Nature Publishing Group, the science blog search engine PostGenomic and the Public Library of Science.

Data miner Peter Suber from the Unilever Cambridge Centre for Molecular Informatics discusses just one of many reasons this is exciting news.

The hard work continues. But now all fulltext derived from NIH work will be available on PubMed. Other funders will follow suit (if they are not ahead). So our journal-eating-robot OSCAR will have huge amounts of text to mine.

The good news is that we believe that this text-mining will, in itself, uncover new science. How much we don’t know, but we hope it’s significant. And if so, that will be a further argument for freeing the fulltext of every science publication.

In related science news, tech and science lovers (many of whom have libertarian sensibilities) should take note of a new video floating around the interwebs - Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution.

File this under unsurprising, but interesting none the less.

More likely, the research gives reason to believe that online social networking may not be a fad. Beyond its usefulness for communication, personal expression and directory look-ups, the sites are also working in sync with some of the biggest cultural trends at large.

"Social cognitive theory suggests that we are always looking for different ways to behave," primary researcher Michael Stefanone told the U. of Buffalo school paper. "When people on reality TV are rewarded for behaviors such as being the center of attention and gain celebrity from it, it communicates to the audience that these behaviors are good things."

University coverage of the study concludes with the obligatory reminder that your Paris Hilton-style exploits on Facebook today could lose you a job tomorrow. I haven't found that to be true yet myself, but whatever.

The program works by identifying the 12 standard musical notes in a sung melody, and then feeding those notes into an algorithm that has been trained by listening to 300 songs in varying genres and learning how to identify chords and melody fragments that work well together. The result is a series of musical accompaniments that users can adjust via sliders for "happy factor" and "jazz factor."

"I suspect musicians will argue that this is another step towards homogenized elevator music for all," Peter Bentley, a computer scientist at University College London, told New Scientist. "But I see a big market for this, whether it's liked by musicians or not." We agree, and we think the web is the perfect place to find that market.

Last year we reviewed a startup backed by Pete Townsend of "The Who," Method Music, that created personalized theme music based on user input (specifically: a voice sample, a picture, and a recording of a rhythm). The results were... not unimpressive, but neither were they very compelling. MySong, on the other hand, produces some very impressive (to my musically untrained ear) output and has a much more compelling set of use cases.

Though Microsoft hasn't decided how or if to market the MySong technology, Morris told the New Scientist that it wasn't very computationally demanding. "It could even run on a cellphone," he said.

Check out this sample of voice-only input, the MySong output, and a full musical arrangement after being fed through Band-in-a-Box. You can draw your own conclusions, but we were very impressed and hope that someone brings the MySong technology to a web browser in the future. We have a feeling this thing would kill as a Facebook or OpenSocial application. There are many more samples on the MySong page.

Earlier this year, Zotero, which is based at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, opened up the online components to its service when it released the first beta of version 1.5 of its plugin, including the ability to access a backup of libraries online and sync between different computers, as well as some very rudimentary social networking features.

Today's update represents a major step forward from Zotero's first online offerings. Now, users who are working on collaborative projects can finally share their research in an easy, straightforward manner. If you are working on a research project in a group, for example, you can now easily create a new group and all the members of the group can just add the papers and books they found to this new group, including notes and other remarks they added to the new entry.

Sadly, though, Zotero doesn't offer a storage solution yet, so every group member still has to track down the actual documents (the team is looking into adding this function, though).

Groups Make Zotero a Great Tool for Users Outside of Academia as Well

This update will also make Zotero more interesting for users outside of academia. While the service's focus is obviously on making it easy for academic users to manage their research and to create bibliographies, Zotero can also function as a general bookmarking tool for any kind of purpose.

Coming Soon: Recommendations, Storage, Feeds

Some of the most exciting changes to Zotero are still ahead. The team also announced that it expects to roll out a recommendation engine in the near future, as well as a storage solution for sharing attached files (PDFs of academic papers, for example), as well as the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds from public groups and libraries.

Make a Backup!

If you are already using Zotero, we recommend that you back your library up before you update. In our own experience, Zotero updates have never been a problem, but the data you have saved in Zotero so far is probably something you don't want to lose due to a freak accident.

As a website or blog publisher, you've likely often wondered, "Who is visiting my website?" Traffic stats are readily available, so you already know that your unique visitors are up this week, and average time on-site is holding steady, and you're slowly beating down that ugly bounce rate, but what you don't know is who these people are. Are they social media geeks? Are they stay-at-home moms? Are they 20-something males with an interest in extreme sports?

We're often asked why site-centric demographic data is better than direct-traffic measurement (like Omniture, WebTrends, and Google's) or syndicated panel measurement (like comScore and Nielsen's). The truth is that all three have a place in the audience-measurement landscape. But the site-centric approach has some advantages that deserve special attention.

Site-centric research has two major advantages:

1. Access to the entire site audience,
2. Customized measurement of audience attributes.

Site-centric research is the demographic equivalent of direct-traffic measurement. Publishers simply tag each page of their site with the survey instrument. This means that the sample is selected based on the entire audience, from which a small percentage is invited to participate. This is unlike a panel survey, which does not have access to the entire audience and which can sample among only the small subset of the audience that happens to belong to the panel. With site-centric research, you get a more representative sample of your audience, the ability to conduct research on very small, targeted audiences, and, because of the potential for a greater volume of collected data, the ability to dive deep into particular parts of your site and audience segments.

Complementing greater access to audiences across different websites is site-centric research that executes customized questionnaires. Instead of a "one survey fits all" approach, each survey can be driven based on the category of the site and the context of particular visitors. So, your audience is asked relevant questions, and the data collected is far more valuable to publishers and advertisers alike. Compared with the sophisticated mathematical models that behavioral tracking companies use to infer the demographics and psychographics of Internet users, site-centric research can seem very simplistic. And in some sense, it is, though there is a tremendous amount of value in "just asking," and a lot of theory behind why it works.

Based on this, there are seven reasons why everyone should be thinking about site-centric demographics.

1. Know your audience. These are the folks actually on your site: you need to know them inside and out. Beyond basic demographics are visitor psychographics.
2. Profile who is visiting your site. Traffic stats are only part of the picture. Detailed and accurate portraits of online visitors are worth their weight in gold.
3. Tailor your content and offers. Detailed profiles allow you to customize offers based on who is visiting your site at any given time. Or, you could allocate ad space based on categories, interests, and behaviors.
4. React faster to emerging trends. Because you're getting real-time info, you can spot key indicators early and adjust your messaging and offers accordingly.
5. Ensure your advertising spend is hitting the right target. Whether you're a publisher or advertiser, profiles ensure that you are delivering the right message to the right audience.
6. Increase the impact of your research dollars. Site-centric research is very cost-effective. More importantly, the data is richer and allows you to do more.
7. Develop relevant partnerships. Partners are a great way to broaden your reach, as long as you can show them what you've got.

If any of these reasons strike a chord, maybe it's time to consider what site-centric demographics can do for you: all you need to do is ask.

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