We're honored to be nominated for Best Technology Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards. Voting closes November 8, 2007 and you may vote once every 24 hours, determined by IP address.

R/WW is up against some very strong competition: Engadget, Gizmodo, Lifehacker and The Apple Blog are all a long way ahead of us at this time. So if you are a fan of our humble Web Technology blog, then feel free to vote for Read/WriteWeb. We definitely need it at this point ;-).

President-elect Obama has always made technology in the classroom a central focus when discussing education policy, and there is clearly a pressing need for bringing more technology to the classroom to train students for a job market where these skills are now mandatory. It should be noted, though, that technology is often the least pressing of all the problems faced by some of these disadvantaged schools.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Extra Ketchup.

We're asking: Which Web technology do you think will have the most impact over the next 10 years? In some ways it's a follow-on to a poll we ran at the end of 2006, asking about 2007 Web Trends. But this one is a longer view.

It is of course very difficult to predict what will happen in 10 years time, given how fast technology moves. Who would've predicted in 1997 that a search engine company would rule the Web tech world in 2007. Probably not many people, given that Google wasn't formed until September 1998. It's possible that the dominant web technology of 2017 doesn't even exist yet, or is a twinkle in a Stanford Uni student's eye (or maybe a Shanghai Uni student).

According to hakia, this is what their OntoSem technology does:

• information retrieval, analysis, and distribution
• text summarization
• information assurance and security
• machine translation
• ontology support
• terminology standardization
• supply chain automation

Essentially, it will enable third parties to find and use "the meaning of language" in their applications. Hakia's definition of 'semantic search' by the way differs from the traditional Semantic Web definition, in that hakia search aims to automatically determine meaning from search queries using its algorithms - whereas Semantic Web is all about adding metadata to information to enable connections between data.

At this early stage there aren't any visuals from RiverGlass showing how they're using hakia technology, but the company told us that "we will see the biggest boon in increased relevancy of results".

Disclosure: hakia is a RWW sponsor

He enters an IRS that the General Accounting Office said last week suffers from technology so outdated it leaves the agency with inadequate integrity, reliability and security for sensitive taxpayer information. Check out our coverage of the first IRS CTO and the daunting problems he'll face on our new blog the RWW Jobwire, sponsored by VisualCV.

Note: click here and then click 'full' (bottom right) to view full screen and enable the links inside the presentation.

UPDATE: There is an newer version of this presentation here.

Think the scientific genius behind Q, the fictional gadgetmeister that keeps James Bond ahead of the bad guys, combined with the technological expertise our own recently named CTO Aneesh Chopra has, and you might just see the perfect applicant.

"It will involve a sort of future-gazing to see where technology will be taking us in a year or so," Prof Beddington said.

Beddington adds that the successful applicant will not need to develop a weapons system for the latest Aston Martin.

Candidates will need to have "world-class scientific expertise and credibility in relevant scientific and technology disciplines." If you want to apply, you've got until April 24.

Do crashing computers and busted Blackberries completely freak you out? Does a cryptic error message on your screen leave you feeling defeated or discouraged? According to a new study from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, your age might have something to do with your attitudes and emotions surrounding technology.

Researcher John B. Horrigan points out: electricity was once new too. But now we flip on light switches without a second thought. And when the telephone was taking off in the early 1900's, people were given specific instructions on how to make a phone call - something we now do every day. Over the passage of time, each new generation of users becomes more savvy and more adept at using the new technology until it no longer exists as some odd new-fangled invention, but simply part of the world as we know it.

The same holds true for our computers, our internet connections, our gadgets and our cell phones. When these things fail, it's the younger users that are generally much more optimistic about the situation. Although young adults age 18-29 years old are no more likely to be able fix devices on their own, they were significantly more likely to be confident that they were on the right path to fixing it, and they were significantly less likely than older adults to feel discouraged or confused about fixing devices, says the study.

In fact, 85% of 18-29 year olds reported being confident about solving their device problem, while only about a third of them said they were discouraged or confused. Meanwhile, over half (52%) of adults age 30 and older reported being discouraged, 44% said they were confused, and about two out of three (67%) said they were confident. Adults age 30-49 were somewhat less likely than older adults to be confused, as just 39% said they were.

There was some variation among gender lines, too, with men being more likely than women to be confident about problem solving (76% vs. 68%), but they were just as confused, discouraged or impatient during the course of trying to solve the problem.

What this means is that, given time, our idea of a "mainstream user" will have to change. No longer will they be the slightly fearful, easily frustrated, computer novices. Instead, they will be much more at ease with technology. They may never be as tech-obsessed as we are, but they will have no problem adopting a new technology if it delivers value.

"Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language."

Also an interesting rumor is swirling around that Google either partnered with, or licensed technology from, WebOS company Morfik. Am digging to see what if any truth there is to this...

Update, May 18: Bret Taylor, Product Manager of Google Web Toolkit, has dispelled the rumor:

"Morfik seems like great technology, but Google Web Toolkit is in no way associated with Morfik or based on its technology. There have been some rumors circulating on this list that have been causing some confusion, and I wanted to clarify.
Thanks,
Bret Taylor Product Manager, Google Web Toolkit"

"We started confab.yahoo because we want to push the web and its applications up to the next level. After slightly more than a decade, we as an industry have only scratched the surface of the web’s potential. The opportunities are virtually infinite, and we aim to bring together the people that can inspire the next generation web."

The next generation web is what R/WW is all about, of course :-) The feature panel is one entitled 'Prediction Markets: Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds' and is being moderated by author James Surowiecki (whose book 'The Wisdom of Crowds' is oft-cited by web 2 fans). The other panels feature an impressive line-up of speakers - including from the Big 3 Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Prediction markets are, according to Wikipedia, speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. The idea is a great one to apply to web technology, because it is such an exciting and fast changing environment. On a related note, check out the blog for The Institute for the Future. It's a non-profit research organization located in Palo Alto, California and has some excellent background material about predictive marketing and technology.

The event is on Wed Dec 13, 5:30-8:00pm. Unfortunately I'm unable to attend - so if anyone wants to volunteer to be a R/WW guest blogger for this, send me an email :-)

Instead, it peers under the hood to see what sort of technology is being used in the creation and delivery of the web site. "BuiltWith.com's goal is to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using which may help them to decide what technologies to implement themselves," says founder Gary Brewer.

The site also keep tracks of how many other sites use each technology. As more web sites are profiled using BuiltWith.com, those stats might become more useful. For example, the profile of Read/WriteWeb reveals that 37.73% sites use PHP as well, while just 6.2% of sites looked at so far include Digg buttons.

BuiltWith.com plans to make money via donations and from "featured" technologies, sold ad spots that would allow a widget provider, for example, to be featured on the page. Because the site is collecting stats on how many pages use each technology, it would be great to see pages for each with metrics over time (including the total number of sites in the database) and links to top sites using that tech.

Let us know your feedback / suggestions in the comments - I will continue to add to and tweak this presentation as these Web trends evolve. Alert readers will notice one new slide, page 9 about The Social Networking Arms Race.

Note: click here and then click 'full' (bottom right) to view full screen and enable the links inside the presentation.

Internet Use and Social Media

That's not to say that there aren't some technology addicts that aren't social isolated - around 6% of the adult online population would fit in this category, having no one with whom they can talk about those important matters and who say they don't have anyone "especially significant" in their life. However, this figure (the 6%) has not grown as access to technology has grown over the years - it has remained virtually unchanged since 1985. This points to the fact that perhaps those who are socially isolated individuals would be so anyway, regardless of what sorts of tools are provided to them, be those mobile phones, PCs with internet access, etc.

For the majority of the online population, technology - and especially social media - has led to more diverse networks than we've ever had before. The report notes that those who participate in social networking services such as Facebook for example, are more likely to interact with people from different backgrounds, different races, different political parties, etc. Specifically, blogging and general internet use was tied to having more racially diverse networks while online photo sharing was tied to having more diverse political discussion partners.

Those who use the internet tend to have 15% more network ties who aren't family members and those who use instant messaging services have 19% more non-kin members in their core networks.

Mobile Phone Use

Along these same lines, the ubiquity of mobile phones hasn't led to decreased face time with family and friends, but just the opposite. On average, a person spends 195 days of the year having mobile phone contact with others, but face-to-face interactions occur on about 210 days per year. In addition, mobile users have around 15% more family members with whom they can discuss important matters and tend to have 25% more core network members who are not family members. Overall, those who use mobile phones have core networks that are 12% larger than those who don't.

Despite all this good news about how technology leads to having larger, more diverse networks, the researchers also found that our networks' size has actually shrunk over the years. Since 1985, there has been a decrease of about 1/3 in their size. The researchers don't suggest any specific reasons for this shrinkage, but they do point out that they can now rule out one possibility for sure: technology.

According to the statement, the partnership stems from the Open Screen Project, Adobe's industry-wide initiative set to address challenges of Web browsing on a broad range of screens.

ARM believes that the resulting technology will run on "billions of devices from our partners, such as pocket-sized mobile devices, mobile computing platforms, set-top boxes, digital TVs and automotive infotainment," said vice president of marketing, Ian Drew in the statement. "The combination of Adobe Flash and ARM's low-power processor IP and Mali GPU will ensure a fantastic Internet experience for consumers on the world's leading 32-bit architecture."

Getting Flash on mobiles in an efficient manner has been a goal of Adobe for some time. The majority of mobile phones that can use Flash at the moment use Flash Lite, the cut down version of the technology, and one that is limited in what it can play.

Although the technology is not expected to be available until the second half of 2009, Adobe will demonstrate Flash Player 10 during the Adobe MAX developer conference this week in San Francisco.

Mobile technology is most likely to be used in Asia or Africa, where wired infrastructure is less common. Indeed, seven of the eleven case studies included with the report detailed mobile use among organizations working in African nations.

"Well over 3.5 billion mobile phones are in use around the world and organizations are harnessing this technology to help overcome humanitarian challenges," said Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation in a press release. "Modern telecommunications, and the creative use of it, has the power to change lives and help the UN solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. It can connect families separated by disaster, help emergency relief workers respond more quickly, empower health workers with data to help combat disease and epidemics, track the impacts of climate change, and even help in the resolution of civil conflicts."

By far the most common use of technology is voice, followed by text messages. But more sophisticated uses such as photo and video messaging, mapping, data collection and analysis, and inventory management are on the rise. NGOs said that the use of mobile devices has allowed them to save time, transmit data more quickly and accurately, more quickly mobilize individuals, gather data, and reach audiences that were previously unreachable.

The case studies cover the areas of public health (such as connecting health workers to one another in Uganda), humanitarian assistance (such as alerting Iraqi refugees to food aid drop offs in Syria), and environmental conservation (such as using text messages to raise awareness about deforestation in Argentina). The entire report is available for download in PDF format from the UN Foundation web site.