You answered and we culled your responses and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

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.

According to Pew, the research suggests that "the press reflects exuberance about gadgets and a wonder about the corporations behind them, but wariness about effects on our lives, our behavior and the sociology of the digital age."

Beyond general themes, the report finds that Apple dominates tech news, with the company accounting for 15% of stories. Google came in a close second with nearly 12% of all stories. Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft all followed.

The report also stood behind Twitter's claims that it was becoming a news distribution vehicle - especially in the case of technology news. In mainstream media, technology news accounts for 2% of all news, whereas on Twitter a full 51% of the top linked-to news stories each week were related to technology.

Of stories linked on Twitter, Twitter itself was the most popular topic, accounting for 15%, with the iPhone coming second with nearly 8% of stories. According to the report, "more than any other subject, Twitterers posted news from the business side of technology. Almost a third (30%) of the top stories focused on companies or the business aspects of the industries, versus just 9% in the mainstream press."

The full report is available online.

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.

In order to improve the quality of those videos, YouTube announced today that it has acquired an Irish company that makes video enhancement magic technology. Called Green Parrot Pictures, YouTube says the 6 year old company has built "cutting-edge video quality improvement technology that has been used in major studio productions from Lord of the Rings to X-Men to Spider-Man. Their technology helps make videos look better while at the same time using less bandwidth and improving playback speed."

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.

If you're a Facebook employee, then you're well aware of this reality, and today, at Facebook's F8 developer conference, the company is testing out broader uses for this type of technology.

[Image via All Facebook]

According to All Facebook's Nick O'Neill, the new technology is being tested today, with all F8 attendees "receiving special RFID tags that enable them to check-in to various locations throughout the conference venue."

O'Neill says that there is a visualization of people's checkins being displayed at the conference, but that it only shows in terms of places and doesn't show a real-time tracking of people as they physically move about the conference center.

This sort of technology would be a different take on location-based checkin systems, wherein the user has the onus of owning the proper technology. Giving users RFID chips and having the venues bear the burden of expensive technology (in the form of RFID readers in this case) - as long as the incentive to purchase this technology is there - approaches location-based services from the opposite direction and could potentially bring location to a large number of users.

To find out where Facebook plans to go with this technology and more, you can watch live with us or read along on our live blog of the F8 conference.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt just announced on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit that the next version of Android, code-named Ginger Bread, will include native support for what's called Near Field Communication, or NFC. NFC is a short-range, high-frequency wireless technology which lets devices, primarily mobile phones, communicate with other NFC devices in order to exchange data.

As ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez explained in her coverage of Apple's NFC moves this Summer, this allows for a number of applications including mobile ticketing, mobile payment, e-money, electronic keys, smart billboards and more. Apple has filed a number of NFC patents, but the technology is expected to drive growth throughout the mobile market. Native NFC support in Android now is a big deal.

Mobile commerce, "tap to pay," was the primary use-case discussed by Schmidt, but Tim O'Reilly pointed out on stage that the technology is really capable of transmitting any kind of information. "Bump, for everything," he called it. Schmidt concurred.

Hopefully Gingerbread will include a healthy API for access to the NFC technology and developers will see opportunities to build more than just commerce systems. Schmidt said on stage today that the Gingerbread release date will be within the next two weeks.

"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"