The new logos are just a preview of AOL's revamped look and are meant to replace AOL's swoosh triangle for good. The AOL "running man," however, will stick around the brand in some form, although the company isn't saying exactly where he will show up.

But the updated logos are a little off-putting to some. Noted technology blogger Om Malik of GigaOM posted his gut reaction Sunday night, calling them out as "lame," "ambiguous at best," and "as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie WALL-E." Ouch!

But it's easy to see where he's coming from. After all, some of the logos look more like the sorts of doodles you would find gracing high-schoolers' notebooks - like the hand doing the "sign of the horns" hand gesture. Really. "Rock on!," shouts the logo, but it reminds us more of a middle-aged heavy metal fan reminiscing about their youth than the young, hip company AOL desperately hopes to become.

Then there is the pink glob. The best way to describe this logo is a fluffy wad of bubble gum. A green scribble looks like someone had trouble getting their ballpoint ink pen going and a generic blue swirl seems to signify nothing but a lack of imagination. What content sites are these logos even associated with? Your guess is as good as ours.

CNET calls the goldfish logo "cute" (sarcastically?), but AOL isn't trying to build the next LOLcats empire, so maybe they should have forgone "cute" for something a little more meaningful and modern.

But that's just our opinion. What's yours? Let us know in the poll below.

In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

In yesterday's attack, the list of comprised Hotmail accounts were limited to those where the usernames started with the letter "A" or "B." However, that seemed to imply that the posted portion might actually be a part of a bigger list containing even more login/password combinations. At the time, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company determined "this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts." Instead, claimed the spokesperson, those users whose credentials were revealed were likely to be victims of an online phishing attack where a third-party website was involved.

Phishing attacks are typically carried out via email messages where the attacker tricks the recipient into revealing their username and password by pretending to be some sort of trustworthy entity such as the user's bank, IT administrator, a popular website, or an online service. In the case of the stolen Hotmail passwords, it's possible that the attacker sent emails which claimed to be from the end user's email provider. If the user then followed the link contained within the malicious email, they would have ended up not on the actual email provider's site, but on a third-party site whose sole purpose was to capture their username and password when entered.

Beyond Hotmail: More Webmail Providers Affected

According to a story in today's BBC News, the most recent list of compromised accounts, which includes login credentials for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and Comcast users, contains some accounts that appear to be old, unused, or fake. However, many others listed are, in fact, genuine.

There's no way to be sure at this point that the new list is a part of the same phishing attack as yesterday's or if it's a new and separate scam.

The website where the accounts were posted - pastebin.com - is now "down for maintenance." Visitors to the site today will receive a message that reads:

Pastebin.com is getting an unprecedented amount of traffic due to a news story in which some leaked Hotmail passwords have been pasted on this site

Pastebin.com was intended as a tool to aid software developers, not for distributing this sort of material. Filters have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence, but the current traffic level is unsustainable.

Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications

Paul Dixon

Regardless of whether or not you think your account was compromised, today would be a good day to change the password on whichever webmail service you currently use. Better safe than sorry!

AOL's PlaySavvy: PlaySavvy is another site that offers parents a chance to check out age-appropriate kids games. Similar to What They Play, this site lists the ESRB ratings next to games and information is categorized by topic and gaming system. Products for console favorites like Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii are often featured on the site. AOL also offers parents daily articles and a section to view the most popular games.

Parents' Choice: Established in 1978, this site is run by the Parents' Choice Foundation - a nonprofit organization that offers awards to the top children's media and toys. Some of the award categories include websites, video games, DVDs, software, television programming and toys. This site definitely skews towards narrative-based educational materials. If your kid has a shorter attention span, you might want to visit PBS Kids instead.

Common Sense Media: Common Sense media is a nonprofit organizations dedicated to offering parents reviews and suggestions on appropriate content. The group produces movie, website, TV, game, book and music ratings as well as a number of educational tools for classroom use. The site can be personalized for kids between the ages of 2-17 years old and it's available in English and Spanish. This site tends to weigh the benefits of mainstream media sites.

PBS KIDS Island: This site offers parents reading resources, videos and games in English and Spanish. While the majority of the content is best queued up by a parent or teacher, the videos are of particularly high quality and completely commercial free.

National Geographic for Kids: This site offers kid-friendly games, videos, stories and activities for nature lovers. The same photography that has made National Geographic a hit with grownups is likely to please kids. Not surprisingly, the video content is equally compelling. Discovery Kids offers a similar experience and is a great site for visual learners.

Totlol: Totlol is a parent-moderated version of YouTube. The site offers video options specifically designed for children and even offers "age optimized interfaces" to ensure that kids of different ages get the most appropriate content. In 2008, ReadWriteWeb covered Totlol's beta launch. As of today the site charges a $3 per month subscription fee or $54 until your child grows up.

Photo Credit:Swaminathan

Now, with the introduction of Socialthing for Websites, a service that made a quiet debut last week on AOL's country music destination "The Boot," AOL is transforming all their media properties into social media properties.

How it Works

With Socialthing, web site visitors can sign in to the various web sites using their AOL screenname and password, and soon their Bebo, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, or OpenID, instead of having to create a new account on the site. This ability puts it up against other single sign-in heavyweights like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. The authentication is made possible by the AOL Open Authentication (OpenAuth) Platform which allows sites to authenticate users using AOL and AIM usernames and passwords and is now being expanded to support the other services as well.

In addition, visitors can also chat with each other over AIM and ICQ while on the site itself, a feature that allows for real-time interactions between those who share common interests.

And then there is, of course, the social syndication aspect. Site visitors will be able to share messages and experiences across the social web including sites like Bebo, AIM, ICQ, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

Socialthing Differentiates Itself from FriendFeed & Competes with Facebook Connect

The authentication aspect, the active social sharing, and the online chat now set the new Socialthing for Websites apart from its one-time competitor FriendFeed. Today's Socialthing service is much more than a simple lifestream aggregator - it's a tool that can transform closed sites into social web portals. But will Socialthing pick up any traction outside of AOL's own properties? It could since the platform is open for developers to build services on top of it or integrate it into their own sites. That may actually have some appeal over, say, Facebook Connect for example, since it won't limit you to sharing your content with just one social networking site.

However, now that Facebook has opened up their data streams to developers, it's clear that the battle for conversation control is just getting started. Despite Socialthing's open nature, it's possible they'll still have a tough time competing considering the Facebook revolution that's currently underway.

AOL says Socialthing will launch on their blog for movie enthusiasts, Cinematical, in the "coming weeks" before rolling out the technology to the rest of their sites.

I'll admit to clinging tenaciously to my free AIM account that I've had for many years. Even though I access AIM through such various third-party interfaces as Gmail and Meebo (and even have a hard time thinking of those applications as third-party) I have long since stopped worrying about the service as anything but always there and available, like the air I breathe. However, somebody runs those servers with close to 100% uptime, and it's worthwhile to reflect a moment and realize that AOL has made a commitment for the simple reason of maintaining their online reputation at a very high level.

Sure, we have all heard stories about AOL ISP customer service, and of course seen pictures of AOL CD art, but the numbers tell a different story - that AOL is committed to making sure people who choose them are pleased and have the best possible experience online.

Photo CD Reflections courtesy of Artnow314 on Flickr.

As of now, LifeStory only displays your updates from within Bebo. While LifeStory features an interesting user interface, it would be nice if it could also (optionally) pull in updates from your activity stream.

In the long run, Bebo is also planning to allow its users to subscribe to updates from brands, bands, and celebrities, whose updates will then appear in their LifeStory timelines.

Lifestream

The new lifestreaming feature was built on top of SocialThing, a small startup that AOL acquired last year while it was still in private beta testing. The new Lifestream looks like a very basic version of FriendFeed, though it doesn't feature too many functions besides the straightforward aggregation of updates from you and your friends. The simple fact that it also aggregates your friends' updates, though, does give it an edge over Facebook's newsfeed.

New Layout

In addition, Bebo also introduced a new layout for its user profiles, though Bebo's users seem to be rather unhappy about this change.

Differentiation through Aggregation

According to the Guardian, Bebo argues that it is different from Facebook, because "Facebook is a closed, proprietary network that brings friends together through one website."

Clearly, Bebo is trying to differentiate itself from other social networks by becoming more of an aggregator. Thanks to Bebo's SocialInbox, you could already aggregate your friends' updates on other services, even if they aren't Bebo members. Bebo also allows you to check your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail accounts from within the service.

These shuttered sites will be relaunched "magazine style," highly edited, presumably long-form and no longer written by the rag-tag bunch of aspiring journalists that Weblogs has long paid dollars per article.

Update: AOL's Stephanie Dolgins has responded to our request for comment, saying that "There is absolutely no truth to this rumor. In fact, it's quite the opposite...We are so enthusiastic about the growth potential of our Living blogs that we need people to spend MORE time on them, and we are asking for more of a commitment from our lead bloggers than has been needed in the past so that we can provide consumers with more engaging and interactive experiences across our sites..." Take that for what it's worth, for now we believe our original source on this.

Six months ago AOL told an angry mob of Weblogs writers that despite cutbacks and work slowdown orders, everything was actually better than ever for the network. Several requests for comments on this story haven't been responded to yet.

Weblogs Inc. has long been a great place for new bloggers to find part time work writing on topics they love for between $5 and $15 per post. This author started there, for example, before getting a job at TechCrunch and then here at ReadWriteWeb.

There used to be a strong sense of camaraderie at Weblogs. In the early days every blog in the then sprawling network would put up one post each week linking out to the most popular posts on other blogs, as if the differences in content were less important than the blogging format readers were believed to love.

The egalitarian ethos suffered some turbulence with the rise of electronics blog Engadget as one of the very strongest blogs on the entire internet and presumably worth far more than the estimated $25 million that AOL paid for the entire network in 2005. There have been a handful of other standouts, but the majority of the Weblogs blogs have failed to deliver like AOL would have liked. Why, no one may ever know. Travel blog Gadling, for example, has only had 4 stories hit the front page of major traffic driver Digg in the past year, despite frequent pleas for promotion on its internal email list and an affinity for "boobs around the world" schlock content. If that formula doesn't work then maybe nothing will. Update: AOL wrote again to tell us that Gadling is no longer considered a Life Style blog. Lucky them.

Over the years, tensions never got resolved between the more corporate AOL and the scrappy Webloggers. Network co-founders left after their contractual requirements were up, Jason Calacanis now runs human search and Q&A site Mahalo and Brian Alvey runs another blog network called Crowd Fusion, focused on particularly high quality content and sophisticated publishing technology. Meanwhile the market for remainder content has grown more crowded by the expansion of Canada's B5 Media and MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan's acquisition-happy web of crap called LiveUniverse.

What's AOL to do with Weblogs Inc.? Maybe turn it into what AOL knows and trusts more than blogs, a collection of mainstream-feeling magazine sites run by more traditional journalists.

The web won't be better for it. The loss of opportunities for aspiring pro-writers is a real tragedy. The failure of this landmark network of blogs calls the financial viability of blogging in general into question. We and others believe that an "anyone can do it" media economy is emerging, but if only a handful of blogs are truly able to effectively monetize then one has to wonder.

Check out some of the young year's first highlights in tech hiring as reported by our site Jobwire below. Jobwire is sponsored by VisualCV, which is a service for job seekers. Jobwire reports on 10 to 15 completed new hires in tech and new media every weekday.

Head on over to Jobwire to find out about other new hires at RedHat, MindTouch, Stack Overflow and more.

We're reporting on 10 to 15 new hires in tech and new media every day at Jobwire. From executives to engineers, if you've got a new job or your company has made a new hire - let us know!

Customization and Widgets for Social Networks

AOL users can now see updates from AIM, Facebook, and MySpace right on the homepage. Support for Bebo and Twitter is coming soon. This move comes just a few weeks after AOL also allowed its users to check mail from third-party email services right from the homepage.

The most interesting update is probably the inclusion of a prominent RSS reader widget at the bottom of the homepage.

The new AOL homepage also allows users to customize the main navigation bar with bookmarks, local news, and RSS feeds. AOL Mail has also been updated to match the look and feel of the new homepage.

AOL also announced that it will now give advertisers the option to offer customized wallpapers for the homepage and more rich media content through AOL's Platform A.

Is Traffic to AOL.com Growing?

According to AOL, year-over-years visits to AOL.com grew 15%, while total minutes were up 40%. It should be noted, however, that both Compete and Google Trends show a downwards trend over the last year.

While it might be hard to get excited about new features on AOL, it is good to see that the company is bringing more social networking and customization features to its user base.

YourMinis was a start-page service like no other, but its feature richness and happy users fall victim to the cold business logic that so many cool startups face after being acquired. YourMinis is now primarily used to power advertising widgets for AOL, a practice that will continue but pales in comparison to the beautiful topical pages its users built with the full service over the last several years.

As several upset users pointed out in the blog post announcing the service's closure, though, none of these services are quite like YourMinis. The Flash interface, while disliked by some critics as all things Flash are, allowed fans greater flexibility in visual design.

Few if any of the many start-page startups have succeeded in their vision of becoming mini-publishing houses for users building content aggregation pages that are then shared with the world. See our interview last year with Dan Cohen, who has lead the team at Pageflakes, iGoogle and MyYahoo, for a great look into the start-page world.

All too often, this is how it goes in startup land. You fall in love with an innovative little service, you give it your attention, then it gets scooped up by a big player and everyone is happy until the acquiring company turns it into an ad network for crappy pop music and 3rd rate movies and then shuts down the original service you loved.

If you're addicted to the fringe startup start-page experience, check out recent sites bookmarked "startpage" in Del.icio.us. In between the big guys, you'll find some innovative little players there. The nice thing about RSS services like this is that it's not hard to move at least your reading list from one service to another. The user experience though, as YourMinis users no doubt are aware, is much harder to reproduce.

Update: AOL emailed the following response.

Goowy is not shutting down
yourminis, but has made a decision to close the startpage and remove
some of the functionality of the gallery. Goowy's core focus is creating
widgets and working with developers to create widgets that can live and
work on sites across the Web, including startpages such as iGoogle,
myAOL and Netvibes. By shutting down the yourminis startpage and some
of the functionality of the gallery, Goowy can continue to focus on its
core business -- developing new widgets.

I thought there might be some confusion about yourminis/Goowy shutting
down completely based on the headline of your post, and want to make
sure it's clear that it is just the startpage and gallery functionality.

The company's first site launched this week and we got a look at the blog software powering it - both are beautiful.

Called Obsessable, Crowd Fusion's first site focuses on personal electronics. Features Editor (and former Producer at AOL's Engadget) Barb Dybwad says the site "covers personal technology and consumer electronics from the point of view of experts writing for people who may not be. This is consumer tech without the snark, where you don't have to be a member of the techier-than-thou club to be a part of the community."

Obsessable is just the first of a large number of big sites the company aims at launching. November will see a TreeHugger competitor in the eco market and as many as 7 other verticals will be tackled in the next year. All the sites will have a heavy database component to them, as Obsessable does with its product Comparator. The company's aim is to be bigger than existing blog market leaders by being more accessible and leveraging super-efficient blogging software to publish more content faster.

The Blogging Platform

The Crowd Fusion blogging platform was built by CEO Brian Alvey and CTO Craig Wood. It is the foundation of the company. Alvey was Jason Calacanis's less obnoxious co-founder at Weblogs. He built the BlogSmith platform that now powers AOL properties including gossip mega-site TMZ, Engadget and many others. With Crowd Fusion, Alvey and team have tried to take the lessons they've learned as some of the most experienced high-scale blog publishers on the web and build an even better publishing system.

What's so special about it? The system has a built-in RSS reader that team leaders seed with subscriptions (writers can add more at will), it's easy to push related links from other blogs out onto the published site and the system allows for the management of multiple responsibilities for posts like finding and sizing images, copy editing and more. Obsessable says it is aggregating about 1,000 topical links each day from around the web. It's all pretty involved but we couldn't help but be jealous of the publishing interface.

The company has 12 people working in Corporate and Tech departments and so far has around 10 freelance writers covering gadget news on Obsessable. It describes itself as "a new web publishing platform, built to solve the pain points of publishers at scale." That platform will not be available for licensing for some time.

Will a heavy duty publishing system help this new company challenge some of the biggest blogs on the web? The team involved certainly improves the odds.

Images of the Crowd Fusion publishing tool, click for full-size versions and continue below for more.

The Team

In addition to successful and well connected backers, Crowd Fusion is made up of a real dream-team of blogging industry trailblazers. Joining founding CEO Alvey, the Chief Operating Officer from Weblogs Inc. Judith Meskill is COO of the new company after under a year at Johnson&Johnson's site BabyCenter. Meskill knows how to build up blogs fast and orchestrate a large number of freelance writers. She's been working on Crowd Fusion since the beginning of the year.

CTO Craig Wood is a Search Engine Optimization specialist from fast-growing firm Did-it, a friend of Alvey's for 20 years and a former member of the BlogSmith team. CMO Steve Friedman worked on advertising at Weblogs Inc. and will be an essential asset to the team as good ad sales is much easier said than done.

The team member that really raised our eyebrows the most was Barb Dybwad, Obsessable's Features Editor, past Producer at Engadget and key player in the launch of several of AOL's biggest gaming sites. Dybwad's departure from AOL was a major loss for the company. A widely admired, long-term member of the tech blogosphere, Dybwad was highly sought after by top blogs for years. That she didn't leave AOL until the old team could get back together again is telling.

Crowd Fusion brings together a powerful cast with the publishing technology they've long made plans for. A time of looming economic crisis may not be ideal to launch a blog network, but incumbent leaders in topical online publishing certainly have some new competition to watch out for.

Apple Introduces iTunes 8 and New iPods

At Apple's "Let's Rock" special event this week, Steve Jobs introduced a new version of iTunes, the availability of HD TV shows for the American market, a new design for the iPod Nano and iPod touch, as well as a major update for the iPhone/iPod touch firmware. According to Jobs, Apple has sold 160 million iPods worldwide and now holds 73.4% of the market in the US. Check our post for more data points.

ITunes 8: The Genius in the Box

Music discovery services are definitely a hot topic right now, with Pandora, Last.fm, imeem, and others vying for users. This week, Apple joined the fray when it released iTunes 8 and its 'Genius' recommendation engine. After examining your iTunes library, iTunes uploads data about your library to Apple's servers and returns back a set of information about how the songs in your library correlate to each other. Based on this, iTunes can now build playlists of similar songs and display shopping recommendations.

AOL May Try to Bring RSS and Lifestreaming Mainstream

RSS and centralized integration of activity data from multiple social networks are the kinds of technologies that only early adopters are interested in, right? AOL has the exact opposite kind of audience, does it not? Those assumptions appear to be facing serious challenge, because AOL is planning to put an RSS reader and a window for participating in multiple 3rd party social networks right onto its front page. This could change the lives of millions of people, so check out our analysis.

Also this week Yahoo! told the press that its home page will soon be home to far more content from outside the Yahoo! network than ever before. Could the era of the walled garden is over? See our post for more details.

DEMOfall 08 Coverage

Not too long ago, there were some grumblings about the state of the tech blogosphere and the industry in general. By spending so much time reading Techmeme, Twitter, FriendFeed, and the like it's easy to get the impression that some of the most influential people in our industry today were less interested in the technology they were reviewing than they were in making a name for themselves as some sort of navel-gazing superstar. Not only that, the apps that people were fawning over were often not the kind of apps that had mainstream appeal or were solving real problems. It was as if the whole crowd was shouting at each other, trying to be heard over the noise and patting each other on the back for being so hip with all our shiny, social media-flavored toys.

Was this what the tech industry had come to, we wondered? No, that was just what the tech blogosphere had come to. This year's DEMO conference proved to our reporter Sarah Perez that technology innovation is still alive and well.

Here is our full coverage from DEMO:

• Giftag: Social Wishlists Using Open Standards
• SpinSpotter, A New Browser Plugin To Help Spot Media Bias
• Have The News Come To You With Alerts.com
• FFWD: A Remote Control For Internet Video
• iKnow! Launches Adaptive Learning System
• SkyData Integrates Everything, Puts It On Your Smartphone
• HeyCosmo: Automate Your Life Via Your Mobile
• Invision.tv: Like A TV Guide For Internet Video
• Web 1.0 Job Sites Have New Competition: PaidInterviews
• Better Photo Management for Mac? iLovePhotos Hopes So
• Talk To Your iPhone With New Voice-Recognition App, Say Where
• Qtask: Web-Based Team Collaboration

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

User Experience: Learning from the Pros

There are more startup tech companies launching this week than almost anyone can keep track of, but any time a new service launches - one thing is key to its survival. The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line.

What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. In this post are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

RWW Live: Chrome & Its Impact on The Browser Market

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, was on the topic of Google's new open source browser Chrome and its potential impact in the browser market. We had 3 very special guests on the show to discuss this: Aaron Boodman from Google, a Software Engineer on the Chrome team; Chris Messina from Vidoop (formally of Firefox and Flock); and Alex Russell from The Dojo Toolkit.

Download MP3

RWW Predictions: Browser Wars 2.0

This week we ran a prediction challenge, on the topic of browsers. Google's new browser, Chrome (our coverage), is sure to take market share from the existing players. So we asked: which of the following browsers will lose the most share (in percentage terms) between August 2008 and December 2008? Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or a tie or other? The results are on RWW Predictions and IE was most peoples pick to suffer, although many voted for Firefox too:

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

What do CIOs Think About Social Media?

The internal IT department, headed by the CIO, no longer acts as the gatekeeper for all new technology coming into the enterprise. IT may stand at the gate to the castle, but SaaS and social media startups are swimming across the moat. Internal IT can still set fire to the moat and otherwise make life difficult. But how do you make this a win/win relationship, so that they welcome your entry? Start by understanding how IT is thinking about social media.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.