ReadWriteWeb

Europe's rich cultural heritage can be found in museums, libraries, galleries, cultural institutes, and archives throughout the continent. And thanks to digitization efforts and Europeana, much of this heritage can also be found online. Europeana is an Internet portal that provides public access to Europe's digital libraries - more than 15 million cultural objects including paintings, drawings, archival papers, books, letters, radio broadcasts, newsreels, films including some of the world's most famous cultural artifacts such as the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton's notes and book about the Laws of Motion. About 1500 institutions have contributed to Europeana, including the British Library in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdamn, and the Louvre in Paris.

Anyone can visit the Europeana website to search through the materials. And now, thanks to its newly released API, other applications and services may soon be on the way.

Until now, there has been no quick and simple way to embed a functional Tweet in a blog post. That is, most of us bloggers simply took a quick screenshot, uploaded the image and used that, meaning that users were left looking at the picture of functionality without any of the benefits - they couldn't follow, retweet, reply or favorite a thing.

Today, Twitter has released a new set of developer tools that will make it easier for bloggers and others alike to embed fully-functional Tweets on the Web, with WordPress leading the pack.

Several years ago, before the Web had become as ever-present as it is now, Wal-Mart was the shining example of a future where inanimate objects communicated, aka the Internet of Things. The company had a plan to implement RFID tags to better optimize its supply chain. The problem? The RFID technology could not be programmed to exchange data.

In the past few years, we've seen the emergence of the application programming interface, or API. APIs have become very popular. It's evident when you look at the directory from Programmable Web, which has 3,000 APIs.

A rather grim story in The New York Times last month posited that our move to digital literature would spell the end of marginalia, the notes and comments that we scribble in the margins of printed books. How would we know what snarky comments Mark Twain left in the margins of his library had he only read books on his Kindle?

I'm not sure that the future of marginalia is quite so dim. Nor do the folks at ReadSocial, who are working on an API that would, as the name suggests, help open up our digital annotations to others and help make e-reading social.

ReadSocial's API aims to provide a social layer that works on top of and across reading systems. In other words, it means that passages from books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and so on can be excerpted, annotated, and pushed to our social networks. The API would serve to free content and discussions from being siloed in a single platform

Since Amazon gave Kindle users the ability to loan their e-books in December, we've seen a number of startups launch in the e-book lending space, creating networks to help readers find someone who is willing to let them borrow an e-book title.

There haven't been any moves to crack down on these exchanges (other than the requirement that the Kindle Lending Club rebrand). But now it appears that Amazon has shut down one such site, Lendle. The company's website went down briefly today, and Lendle tweeted that Amazon has revoked its access to the API.

This week at SXSW and in the weeks prior to the event, we've seen how APis are becoming ways for providers to wield a level of control that causes new concerns about how this technology can create a form of provider monopoly.

It's evident when you begin to explore services and the types of APIs that they use. In a recent post, we wrote about Food and Drink APIs. Of the services classified in this category on Programmable Web, more than 80% use Google's Geolocation API.

Here is the first of a two-part series about the rise of APIs at SXSW this year. It consists of five interviews: Oren Michels of Mashery, Mike Maney of Alcatel-Lucent, John Musser of Programmable Web, Sam Ramji of Apigee and Matt Galligan, chief strategy officer at SimpleGeo.

I fashioned a new video tool with an old fishing rod for the interviews. It helps extend the camera and keeps it steady. I used my bike pant ties to attach the camera to the pole. It gets attention as you will see in the interview with Oren.

Context.IO is an API for email, giving developers the ability to use email as a platform. Context.IO aims to replace complex sequences of IMAP requests with simple API calls.

The first 100 readers to sign-up using the code RWW100 will be admitted to the private beta. The API will be opened to more developers next month.

The numbers of APIs on Programmable Web has shot to 3,000, up from 2,000 one year ago. The numbers show trends in the overall use of APIs, the way they are being applied and the now dominant place that REST and JSON have compared to other APIs and data formats.

The increase is testament to Programmable Web and the excellent service that the group has provided and the increasing popularity of APIs in all kinds of use cases.

The scientific and academic research tool Mendeley has announced a contest aimed at encouraging developers to build apps on top of Mendeley's open database. That database includes over 70 million research papers, usage statistics, reader demographics, social tags and related research recommendations. The winning app will receive a grand prize of $10,001.

Describing itself as a Last.fm of sorts for academic research, Mendeley isn't simply a bibliographic management tool as it is able to glean information from aggregated data to help track trending research topics.