Nevertheless, Winer makes the assertion that Google should state the process of invention and apologize if the company is disproved as the inventor and found to have stolen from the RSS community. Given Winer's prominence as a member of the RSS community, it's understandable why he should feel frustrated.

If you've got examples of "reading list" style references that pre-date the Google patent application, let us know in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Mykl Roventine

Twitter's search engine only goes back about a week and a half. Sometimes you want to retrieve a message you saw, or get a feeling for what your circle of friends said about something, from longer ago than that. We wrote yesterday about 10 Ways To Archive Your Tweets. The next step is to archive the Tweets of everyone else you find of interest, and make them searchable.

OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language and in this case it's just a bundle of RSS feeds than can be moved around in bulk. It's a beautiful idea that has a lot more potential than has been realized, but you'll see how it comes in handy here.

It's all about pulling down an OPML file of your Twitter friends' feeds and slapping that file into Google Reader. Then it's archived and searchable. It's very easy to do.

How to Make it Happen

It couldn't be much simpler. Just put your Twitter username into this link, instead of mine, and load it up in your browser: http://tw.opml.org/get?user=marshallk&folder=1

It may take just a minute, but the end result will be an OPML file. You can either go up to your browser's File menu and select "save as" or you can View Source and copy and paste the source of the page into a text document. Save it with a memorable name and either .xml or .opml as the file type. It's really quite easy.

Now if you want to put this puppy into Google Reader just log in, click on "manage subscriptions" and find the import/export button. Import that file into Google Reader and you're ready to rock and roll!

Update: The combination of interest from this post and the limitations of Twitter's API has caused a temporary challenge for this service and Winer says he's had to limit friend extractions to 1,000 per user for now. Give it a go, but bookmark it for later when there's less of a rush and it can be less of a proof of concept.

What Can You Do With This?

Do you want to read Tweets through Google Reader? Probably not. But do you want to archive, retrieve and search that way? It works remarkably well! Especially because of the social nature of Google Reader. If anyone you're following has had their RSS feed read by anyone in Google Reader, ever, the system will have an archive of their tweets that goes far beyond what's immediately available in their RSS feed right now. Thus my ability to pull up tweets from two years ago in a search.

You may want to create a separate Google Reader account for this (I did) so the Tweets don't clutter up other feeds you like to read.

There are certainly other little things you can do with easy OPML files of Twitter followers as well. You can't import them directly into Twitter clients (yet) but you can share and trade them into an RSS reader as a preview mechanism before deciding to subscribe in Twitter proper. (My favorite tech analysts on Twitter, informative LGBT activists on Twitter, etc. in OPML format - collect 'em all!)

These are the kinds of things that make simple protocols for dynamic information delivery, like RSS and OPML, so much fun.

You could create and share OPML files of your favorite twitter users concerning a particular topic. You could build an OPML file of a group of twitter users and have their RSS feeds automatically displayed on a page on your website.

You could assemble different groups of people into different OPML files, saved in different folders in your Google Reader account, and then limit searches to one folder or another in order to get a sampling of what various groups of people have to say about a topic. That would be hot!

The possibilities are endless, but the most basic use cases of archiving and search are already worth doing. We'd love to know how you can imagine using tools like this together.

Caveats

It's not clear how quickly Google Reader is updating its record of tweets and it is definitely missing a lot. We searched for some specific twitter messages from several months ago from people whose Tweets are being subscribed to in Google Reader, but that it didn't retrieve. I hope that won't happen with user feeds I've subscribed to myself now, but take it with a grain of salt. Google Reader isn't really a terribly serious product, anyway. It could come in quite handy, but there is a larger value here in getting your hands on an OPML file of your Twitter friends' messages.

How can you imagine putting an OPML file like this to use?

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team. Please follow: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Jolie Odell, Dana Oshiro, Steven Walling and Lidija Davis.

Years after the untimely demise of Share Your OPML and available now, unlike the super feature rich but frozen in private beta service Toluu, Jonathan Christopher's SuggestRSS is easily worth the minimal effort it will take you to try out.

To use SuggestRSS, export your reading list from your feed reader and you'll get an OPML file on your desktop. Upload that file to the SuggestRSS website and it will do a simple comparison. People who like what you like also like these things you don't have. Simple as that. Amit Agarwal found and blogged about it first, among people we know.

You'll get some duplicates with the system, the sample size is small, it's dominated by tech feeds and not good for much yet with other niches. But you can come back to the URL of your recommendations later and find new suggestions!

That's it. There's nothing more to it. Now if you'll excuse me, I can't believe I had never thought to subscribe to the feed for Boston.com's Big Picture. It's really incredible photography and I appreciate SuggestRSS prodding me to subscribe.

Today, we realized that the most popular posts from those blogs may be useful resources for many folk, so we created our own OPML file. Ah, the beauty of the Web.

Chris liked the list; didn't like that it wasn't offered as an OPML file, so he added the feeds and removed those he didn't like - a gift to himself he says, and a gift for you to download and share.

Using AideRSS PostRank, ReadWriteWeb has created an OPML file of the greatest hits from each of those 150 blogs; the top 20 percent of the most popular posts from each site. You can grab it here.

If you're not familiar with OPML, take a look at this OPML primer or read Marshall's how (and why) to create an OPML file.

Earlier this year we compiled a list of ReadWriteWeb OPML resources; take a look if you're interested in what we are reading, or come join us on FriendFeed, where incidentally we first noticed this story, and we can discuss other cool things we find on the Web.

Popular playlist sharing site Muxtape got taken down by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in mid-August and it is unfortunately still non-operational. The fact is that Muxtape didn't pay its internet radio licensing fees. In our recent RWW Live podcast on online music, Lucas Gonze (creator of similar playlist service Webjay, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2006) said that Muxtape was "trying to become a big service, i.e. get too big to fail and so cut a deal [with labels]." Unfortunately Muxtape failed to escape the notice of the RIAA.

NetShare (iPhone app)

Nullriver's NetShare was an iPhone app that, according to Gizmodo, allowed you to tether your laptop to your iPhone using the handset's 3G modem as your laptop's own. Basically this let you have full Internet access on your laptop without Wi-Fi, for free. There was talk that this violates AT&T's terms of service, but whatever the reason the app has been pulled from Apple's App Store. The last message on the site is dated 4 August and states: "We're working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore." But we're not holding our breath.

Image courtesy of Gizmodo

The CLQ

Adam Steinberg of EventVue wrote in to tell us that he misses The CLQ (the acronym stands for Champions League for Quake style games). It's an app that kept track of "millions of game players (Quake, Unreal, Half-life, Tribes, etc.) on thousands of online game servers." It was a very popular app in its niche, however it was stopped. The developers claim that this was due to "incredible amounts of e-mail, GameSpy monopolizing access to game servers, constant upgrading of hardware and software to process increased traffic, games getting their own statistics, etc."

The good news for CLQ fans is that one of the developers, Nico de Vries, is currently working on a version 2.0.

PubSub

PubSub was one of our favorite 'future search' products back in the early days of web 2.0 - you could enter keywords and the product would deliver search results to you automatically. This feature is now common place in news sites, for example Google News has it, but back in '03-'05 PubSub was an innovator.

So it was a great product, but PubSub spectacularly imploded in mid-2006 after founder Bob Wyman blogged about "internal political issues". Wyman left the company shortly after and the product sunk along with its creator. Perhaps PubSub will rise again, because apparently it still exists today. Here is the message on its frontpage currently:

Others have risen since to take over the reins in future search. A few of our favorites are ZapTXT, FeedRinse and BlastFeed. We discussed those and other services here. But we'll always have a soft spot for PubSub...

AllPeers

In March we heard that P2P browser plug-in AllPeers had shut down, a blow to a market that seemed very promising back in 2006. AllPeers set out to add "file sharing to the web browser". Technically the service seemed fine, however the reason for the closure according to the company was that "we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service."

Scrabulous (Facebook app)

We reported in April that Scrabulous, the extremely popular but unauthorized Scrabble Facebook app, was under fire from Hasbro and Mattel. Those two companies own the rights to Scrabble - Hasbro in North America, and Mattel in the rest of the world. In July the bigcos had their way and Scrabulous was taken offline.

After more legal ducking and weaving, in which the app was first pulled in North America and then internationally too, the app got re-born under the name Wordscraper. It uses circles instead of Scrabble-like square tiles. Unfortunately the change isn't proving too popular. This comment by a Facebook user is an example of the reaction:

"I loved Scrabulous !
Wordscraper is kinda the same but I do not like the round tiles , it makes it difficult to play , kinda messes everything together, change it to SQUARES and it would be alot better."

The old version, with squares

Pandora

OK you can still use Pandora in the US, despite concerns that it might be on the verge of closing. But those of us who live outside the US haven't been able to access this lovely music discovery service for too long a time.

Qumana

Tris Hussey tweeted to tell us that Qumana was a great java-based blog editor, "easy and light." Unfortunately it is not being updated anymore and the homepage isn't accessible.

Crgslst

Back in March we reported on a very slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist, called crgslst. As we noted, Craigslist itself doesn't offer a multi-search service. By combining the publicly available RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX, crgslst fills this need "so fast, we left the vowels behind." We noted at the time that crgslst may be in violation of the Craigslist terms of use and could face the same shutdown that other similar projects have in the past.

Indeed this has turned out to be the case. Currently when you visit crglst, you are greeted with this despairing pop-up message:

ShareYourOPML

This site for sharing OPML files was "retired" by creator Dave Winer in January. He wrote at the time that "now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn't."

The good news for OPML fans is that Toluu has risen to fill the void. We reviewed it in March, noting that it lets you share your OPML with others in order to discover new feeds, see what your friends are reading, and even discover new people who share your same interests. We were impressed by the service, even more so in May when enhancements were announced.

So perhaps, sometimes, there is a silver lining in the dark cloud of web apps that close or get shut down!

Have Your Say

Tell us in the comments which web apps have disappeared in recent times that you used to love. Also let us know if anything has come along since that you perhaps like even better.

For those of us who missed this boat during our college days, maybe because we majored in some other area, or because people still took notes with pen and paper during our university years (cough, cough), or maybe some of us didn't go the college route, there are some interesting things going on in universities today when it comes to learning the ins and outs of social media.

Today, you will find Communications and Marketing majors heavily involved in learning to use new media to their advantage. The end result of these classes is going to be a wide range of young professionals entering the business world with tricks up their sleeve that some of the the old pros have no idea (or only a vague idea) about.

So, what's on the curriculum? To get a feel for what students are studying in Social Media U, you only need to do a web search because many of the students aren't just learning how to, they're blogging about it too.

Of course, the entirety of social media can't be summed up in one blog post, so these are just a handful of subjects listed below. 

Lesson # 1 Personal Branding

Dan Schawbel, EMC's first social media specialist, returned to Bentley College to do a presentation about personal branding and social media. This is a concept that is a direct result of the internet age we live in today. Among other things, personal branding involves an understanding that you have a public image (whether you want to or not). If you're googleable, you have a brand, so you should learn to control it.

Branding is a result of many things including your blog, your social network profile, your online resume, and  how good you are at reputation management, to name a few.

Advice for students: buy yourname.com to secure your brand, make a video resume, start a Wordpress blog, use Google Reader, participate (comment on blogs and link to them), get on Facebook and LinkedIn, network, and more (see slideshow below):

| View | Upload your own

Lesson # 2 Know What Web 2.0 Is And How To Use It

Dean Whitney, an executive with global digital marketing agency Digitas, also taught a class at Bentley (a hip school?) on the subject of understanding Web 2.0. One of the interesting things they did in this lesson was to learn about tagging and how other people's opinion can shape our perception of both individuals and brands. In the PowerPoint shown during the class, Whitney also took on the big task of defining Web 2.0:

Lesson # 3 : Learn To Use YouTube To Convey a Message

Michael Wesch, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University is best known on the net for that video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, which is a great example of how to use the medium to convey a message that's more than just scripted rhetoric, but that has meaning. (Side note: great interview with Wesch here).

What you may not have seen, though, is the video his students made: A Vision of Students Today, a video which summarizes how students learn today. (I think they've got it!)

Lesson #4: Learn to Blog

What better way to learn to blog than to begin with blogs in the classroom? You can find numerous examples of this on the net, like the What is Fair Use? blog, maintained by Peter Friedman and the students in his Legal Analysis & Writing classes at Case Western Reserve University of Law.

Soon-to-be sophomore and official Yale blogger, Sam Jackson, puts this concept to work on his own site, where he blogs about higher education marketing trends. He points us to a useful resource called The College Blog Network, where college students can blog. Think of it as Facebook for bloggers (well, before Facebook was for everyone.) Speaking of Facebook, the site makes it easy to be private - you must have a .edu email address to blog here. And they mean it, too, saying "At TCBN we respect your privacy. No jumping through hoops to keep your information private. Thanks Facebook." Another resource for finding student blogs is at StudentBloggers.org.

Lesson # 5 Use Social Networks

Be it MySpace or Facebook or whatever network works for your target demographic, companies and individuals interested in maintaining their personal brand need to establish and maintain a presence on social networks - especially if you're looking to connect with the younger crowd. For old-school businesses, this may seem like a mysterious world, but not learning to navigate it will be at their own expense.

In fact, social network use is so ubiquitous these days that students are even using them to apply to colleges via a Facebook app called The College Planner. Talk about College 2.0.

Lesson #6 Master Wikis

Bentley is just all over the web when it comes to social media tools because they're not shy to put their knowledge into action for their own use. Take for example, their WetPaint wiki for marketing students looking for career guidance.

Like Marshall recently mentioned in his post Wikis Are Now Serious Business, Wikis are not just for internal use, but can be used for many things...things like teaching, for example. He pointed to Liz B. Davis's wiki called Integrating 21st Century Tools into Your Teaching, which shows you how to use Del.icio.us, GMail, Ning, Google Docs and more.

Lesson #7 Learn to Twitter

For the Twitter holdouts, take heed: As far away as Singapore, where Daryl Tay attends Singapore Management University, social media classes are being held. Here they learn about social media tools like RSS, Delicious, podcasting, videocasting, blogs, wikis, and yes, even Twitter.

He recently told me that every week they have a mini-presentation on one aspect of social media (past topics included ethics, social networks, and social bookmarking). One of the topics was microblogging, and Twitter was discussed. Since then, the students have formed their own vibrant community on Twitter. (Now if it could only stay up, we would be in business).

Lesson # 8 Learn To Podcast

Panela Seiple, about to graduate from Boston University this month, learned how to make a podcast in her New Media and PR class. Her tools? Audacity and Utterz. Her subject? The Social Media Release.

Conclusion

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, one blog post can't possibly cover all that is social media. Other topics (or "lessons") could include the following: RSS, flickr, Wikipedia, social bookmarking, search engines/blog search engines, virtual worlds, VoIP/Skype, mobile media, interactive gaming, and other tools that can be found on this nice list on the Teaching PR blog.

Extra Credit: OPML for Social Media U

For those of you interested in continuing to follow the subject of "Social Media U," we've compiled an OPML file that contains most of the sites mentioned in this post.

You can download it from here. Alternately, you can just subscribe to a "best of" RSS feed here.

Congratulations! You graduated!

Since that time, Toluu's creator has not been idle, having added new features like RSS feeds for you and your contacts' activity on the site, feed reader integration, a personalized daily digest, an extended Activity page, the addition of a feedback page, hCard-enabled profiles, and more. Additionally, last week, 60,000 duplicate feeds were removed from the service and measures were put into place to make sure that duplicate feed issues would now be handled during the feed importation processes.

Today, Toluu gets more updates which include an improved UI for the Activity page, an easy way for non-Toluu members to get invited to the service, Twitter integration, and a new tab and feed for "Everyone."

The improved UI for the Activity page aims to make seeing the information on that page easier. Avatars are bumped up in size and some additional alignment and legibility changes have also been made, and not just on the Activity page, but site-wide. However, the bigger news here is the addition of the "Everyone" tab to the Activity page, which helps you to see all the activity that is occurring across Toluu, not just the activity of you and your contacts. This is especially important for new Toluu users who are looking for people they may be interested in adding as contacts. Of course, this activity tab, like the others, also offers an RSS feed.

Another feature designed with new users in mind is the landing page for non-logged in users. If someone who is not a member of Toluu clicks a link to see a feed's page, the page displays just as it would for anyone except for the addition of an "invite box" at the top. A quick one-sentence explanation of Toluu is provided as is a button for getting an invite to the service. (Need an invite? I hear Louis Gray has some, as does jeffisageek and Corvida).

And if you're wondering just why someone might be clicking links that go to Toluu in the first place, the answer lies in the last of today's updates: Twitter integration.

You can now have Toluu post to Twitter whenever you add a feed on the service. You can even customize the message to make it more personal and have it say something like "check out this great new feed," for example. This new ability is sure to bring even more interest to Toluu's service, as any app that finds a way to appeal to the Twitter crowd seems to have a better shot at early adopter appeal (just ask Brightkite about this).

The addition of these new features on top of the slew of others that have been added over the past couple of months show that Toluu is continuously working towards becoming the best service of its kind.

Of course, we have to begin by sharing our own feeds with you. The ReadWriteWeb network has several different feeds you can subscribe to, including:

• ReadWriteWeb
• ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-Up
• ReadWriteTalk (RSS)
• ReadWriteTalk (Add to iTunes)
• Last100
• AltSearchEngines

Some of the RWW Network writers also maintain their own personal sites you can subscribe to:

• Marshall Kirkpatrick (Personal)
• Josh Catone (Tumblog)
• Sarah Perez (Personal)
• Corvida (Personal)
• Sean Ammirati (Personal)
• Alex Iskold (Personal)
• Steve O'Hear (ZDNet)

Or just grab a "Best Of" OPML file for all of these: (Download Here)

RSS/OPML Files We've Shared

Our primary OPML resources come from this January post called "What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008," where we put together OPML files for the biggest trends in 2008: Open Data, Recommendation, Semantic Web, Mobile, and Visualization. From the post "WikiLeaks, Censorship and the Watchdog Web," we provided readers with many ways to keep track of leaks and news, one of which was a Governement Watchdogs Site OPML file. When we wrote about "How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet," we provided a "Best of the Weird Hunting Blogs" RSS feed created with Yahoo Pipes. And yesterday, on the article about "Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web," we rounded up some of the best Gen Y blogs into one OPML file.

Below you can get access to either the RSS or the OPML files for the feeds we've shared:

ReadWriteWeb 2008 Toolkit OPML Files (Save Each Link to Download File)

• RWW Open Data Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Semantic Web Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Mobile Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Visualization Feed Favorites OPML file

ReadWriteWeb 2008 Toolkit RSS Feeds (Subscribe - Copy & Paste to Your Reader)

• RWW Open Data Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW SemWeb Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Mobile Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Visualization Feeds - Best of Feed

Government Watchdogs OPML (Download Here)

• Wikileaks
• Wikileaks "Best Of"
• Cryptome's Greatest Hits

Best of the Weird Hunting Blogs RSS (Subscribe Here)

• LaughingSquid
• We Make Money Not Art
• Wooster Collective
• EveryoneForever
• WebUrbanist

Gen Y Greatest Hits OPML (Download Here)

• Ypulse
• My Gen Y Life
• Twenty Set
• Our American Shelf Life
• Millennial Leaders
• Lisa's Generation Relations Blog
• Modite
• Life Before Noon
• Generation Y Voodoo
• Personal Branding Blog
• Newly Corporate
• The Marketing Student
• Young and Frugal
• Employee Evolution
• PR Interactive

You can preview these RWW feeds in the widget below:

Bonus Content!

In the past, Marshall had also put together five of his favorite OPML on his personal site.

International Free Speech News (Download Here)

Not local, not issue specific, not necessarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

Contains:

• ACLU free speech press releases
• Article 19: Campaign for Global Free Expression
• Index on Censorship
• Institute for War and Peace Reporting
• Amnesty International news

Big Picture Eco News (Download Here)

Not local, not issue specific, not necessarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

Contains:

• Popular recent items tagged "environment" in Del.icio.us
• Environmental News Network
• Gristmill, the blog of Grist.org
• Sprol.com, using maps and pictures to examine eco troubles world wide
• Tree Hugger, eco news for the hip and urban 
• WorldChanging, a great group blog on many issues including eco solutions.

Non Profit/Net Squared (Download Here)

Feeds from non profit groups using Web 2.0 tools to share news about the non profit sector.

Contains:

• The 501c3 Cast, a great podcast about non profit work.
• Items tagged Net2 in Del.icio.us, a news wire promoted by Net Squared
• Net Squared Interviews, interviews of folks using Web 2.0 tools explicitly for social good.
• Net Squared Blog, group blog by staff and participants in the Net Squared community.
• Non Profit Online News, long one of the most respected sources on the subject.
• Today in Tech Soup, news from the non profit technology assistance group Tech Soup, parent of Net Squared.

Political Audio (Download Here)

Three of the most moving and informative news audio shows online.

Contains:

• Democracy Now!, a daily hour of powerful media.
• Free Speech Radio News, daily half hour from correspondents around the world.
• The Global Shortwave Report, weekly highlights from English language shortwave radio world wide - a paradigm shaker.

Vlogs - Video Blog (Download Here) 

Contains:

• Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth - Video, world traveling social justice multi media activist.
• Brave New Television
• Geek Entertainment TV, funny interviews with interesting people in the Web 2.0 world
• Vlog - Flux, awesome radical street videography

BlogRovr lets you identify what blogs you read, then notifies you when any URL you visit has been linked to by one of those blogs. That technology will remain free but will now be put to use for PR monitoring and advertising sales by BuzzLogic.

Before you sell my data, even in anonymized aggregate, to a PR and ad sales firm - should I be able to export my clickstream and the subsequent analysis? Is that my data? Is it BlogRovr's to sell without concern for my access to it? This announcement brings up a number of interesting questions about Data Portability.

Below, a screenshot from BuzzLogic's dashboard.

If I Use Your Tool and You Use My Data - Who's Property is the End Product?

Presumably Blogrovr is or is going to track user clickstreams (browsing history). That, combined with the overlap with subscribed blogs, will be useful in determining blogger influence and a price point for rapid ad placement.

This certainly isn't the entirety of what BuzzLogic has acquired - BlogRovr execs are being given extensive responsibility over BuzzLogic technolgies as a whole. The minds behind the browser plug-in may be as valuable as the data it churns out, but the data is important to discuss.

On one hand, the company used its proprietary technology to capture this data in a way that users are practically incapable of capturing themselves - at least the overlap with all subscribed blogs. On the other hand, BlogRovr minus their 180k users isn't good for much of anything.

I asked Chris Saad, Chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, what his take on this question was. "If the data was generated for or by your behavior then you co-created it," he said, "therefore u should have co-ownership of it at least." What does that mean, practically? As a thought exercise, should BlogRovr split its acquisition price somehow with it's users? "No," Saad said, "BlogRovr gets to keep the money and the aggregate derived data - but the user should be able to export their own data as well, and perhaps even request their account to be deleted."

That sounds reasonable to me, but that's not what's being made available. Users are allowed to export their OPML file of subscribed feeds - but all other data is unavailable.

Is Clickstream Data a User's Own Responsibility?

Pundit Steve Gillmor has been arguing lately on the Gillmor Gang (now hosted by TechCrunch - thanks Mike!) that data portability advocates are wrong to demand that services capturing their clickstream data turn that data over to users. He, and if he's alone he's probably all the more right, argues that user clickstream data is a user's responsibility to capture if it's so darned important. We don't need anyone to give it to us - we already have access to it.

While that may be technically true of browsing history, it is much less true of the subsequent analysis of history cross referenced with blog subscriptions. In theory though, is that data more difficult to access for a typical user than the clickstream is? Neither is particularly accessible without some technology, but if a company builds that technology do they then own its fruit?

Saad again says, "if BlogRovr is capturing it, then they should share it. It's user generated content." I'm not sure it's quite that simple, but it might be.

It seems to me that there aren't clear answers around any of this. Some people and companies are engaging with these questions, but BlogRovr's Marc A. Meyer admits that his company simply hasn't been one of them. That's a refreshingly honest answer, and better than I got from Meyer's new PR/ad network bosses - but so what? The company was clearly blazing a trail in terms of using users' data - do they not have a responsibility to explore the other half of the equation - user access to that data?

Maybe This Isn't About User Rights

It's also possible that Data Portability is best advocated not from a position of right and wrong, of user rights, but instead as a matter of competitive advantage. If BlogRovr had a viable competitor that differentiated itself by offering users access to their data throughout the process - perhaps that competitor could emerge victorious. Would a PR/ad network have bought such a company, though, if it offered to hand over this valuable user data? Would enough users have cared to make such differentiation meaningful as a competitive advantage?

There are no end of questions that still need answers in regards to data portability. For now, BlogRovr and BuzzLogic deserve congratulations at least for recognizing the value of user data in the blogosphere. How should the rest of us feel about the news, though?

Wrong: Email the wrong email address

Richard MacManus started this blog on April 20, 2003 - that means this weekend will be the site's 5th birthday! Richard has worked very hard to grow the blog to now include a staff of writers (hold your applause, please!) but he's worked so hard that you really ought not impose the extra work on him of forwarding your tips to tips@readwriteweb.com. That's where you should send email in the first place, if you're going to at all. Don't send general pitches to him, to me, to Josh or to Sarah. Send them to tips@readwriteweb.com. That's right, if you send your email to tips@readwriteweb.com then we'll all see it. We'll all appreciate you for it too, because all to often that's not how people do it, despite our many pleas.

We get a lot of email, though, and I know I'm usually scanning the inbox looking for direct, personal communication with subject lines like "here's the money I owe you" or "this is your Mother, why haven't you called all week?" We do try to at least scan all your pitch emails, but really - that's not enough.

Embargoed news should still come in three or four days in advance ideally - by email, to tips@readwriteweb.com, but you can communicate far more with us as described below.

Wrong: Phone Calls

Some of us get a lot of phone calls, especially from PR agents. Some of us (Richard) live in New Zealand and don't have to deal with that. I personally don't mind an occasional phone call if it's about something really interesting or from someone I know to have good taste in tips. Sarah hates the telephone and does not want you to call her on it. Josh says phone calls have been driving him "batty" - especially in this week leading up to the Web 2.0 Expo.

We get a fair amount of phone calls from people pitching products that do not fit our readers' interests or that just aren't that interesting. You think your news is interesting (or, more likely, your client does) but unless we consider it interesting ourselves - a phone call could really backfire on our disposition towards you and your client for future coverage.

Wrong: Twitter, Especially DM

Sending a Direct Message from Twitter just ends up being another email. I tell myself, "I'll look at that later." How about a public Tweet that says "I've got news about a new ad platform targeting seniors on mobile browsers! DM me if you want it under embargo." We'll jump on that, because that's the kind of thing we eat up over here.

If you're pitching people on Twitter, you'd better have a whole lot of other interesting things to say between pitches. At the same time, when I visit the Twitter page of someone who is working for an interesting company, much less representing them on Twitter, I get disappointed (personally) if there is nothing about their work being said.

Wrong: Facebook

For most of us here at RWW at least, Facebook is a place for personal communication if anything at all. For me, it's like the email inbox I never check. What could be worse than that? If we knew each other in college, then by all means let's communicate by Facebook. I did once ruthlessly and publicly make fun of a certain PR person for pitching me cold on Facebook and after the ensuing kerfluffle we've become buds and I read every pitch she sends.

Personal connections are the best PR (isn't that what PR agents are hired to provide, in part - well developed relationships with press?) and everybody knows that being Facebook friends doesn't mean the same thing as being real friends.

Wrong: IM

Can you imagine having PR people IM you about their clients' events (and non-events, all too often)? That's the kind of thing that full time tech bloggers have to deal with! (Have I mentioned that the seat of my jeans are threadbare too? Oh, the suffering! Lol.)

Different members of our team have different feelings about IM pitches but I'm the only one that will tolerate them much. If we develop a personal relationship and I tell you we can IM, then we can IM. As of right now, though, I'm going to stop taking IMs from PR and startup people I haven't said I wanted to communicate that way with or that I don't do so with already.

If you as a PR or startup person can make yourself available by IM to answer questions when we're writing, that's better than great - it's fantastic. IM pitches, unless they are from people we know and they consist of nothing more than "Hey, company offering RSS feeds to mobile devices for 'low-supply of pet food in the pantry' alerts, about to launch - do you want info?" That's fine.

A Great Way to Do It: By RSS

PR people, please send us the RSS feeds of your clients' blogs and news releases.

The information that comes through these feeds is obviously public and there's no embargo - but if we didn't see something interesting in an embargoed email then we'll see it in RSS. Likewise, many companies blog about things that they might not consider cause for a press release but that we definitely want to write about.

The full fire-hose of company news and updates for us to pick out what's interesting, someplace outside of our email inboxes, free of dreadful press release rhetoric (skip to the second paragraph where details usually are, then skip past any executive quotes and hope there are readable details somewhere) - that sounds like a dream come true. I know that's where I get most of the stories I write about, not from email pitches. Send both, but company feeds are likely to be looked at more closely.

Most PR companies have changing client rosters, though, and OPML files are static files that don't update themselves. Here's what could be the best-case solution.

Voce Communications' Justin Kistner sent me a great OPML file in response to my asking on Twitter why so few PR people have sent my their clients' feeds. Here's the file Justin put together and here's what it contains:

• The feed for Voce's company blog, Voce Nation
• A feed for press releases, which he said was empty right now but will deliver the goods when there are items available
• A combined feed of all the Voce peoples' messages on Twitter, built using the attractive service Tweetpeek - something I hadn't seen before. I'm going to delete this feed from my reader just because I already converse with two thousand people on Twitter and I don't need more of those messages in my RSS reader. Better safe than sorry, though - an OPML file can be like a menu for subscribers to select from.
• The highlight of the file is a feed from Yahoo Pipes that splices together the blogs of all of Voce's PR clients. It's something that Justin can edit behind the scenes and I'll never know the difference - I'll just get posts from the feeds of new clients as he ads their feeds to the master feed I've subscribed to. It's a great solution to the problem.

  Hopefully he won't remove the feeds of companies that leave Voce, but maybe he should. That's his call, I probably won't notice the difference if I suddenly stop seeing one of hundreds of company feeds I'm subscribed to.

PR people, would you all please send us something like what Justin Kistner of Voce sent us? Please? The increased familiarity alone on our part with your clients would make it worth your time. If we're already reading your clients' blogs, we're also more likely to pay attention to your emails because we have some previous relationship with the companies you're reading about. If Yahoo Pipes is scary (it scared me for a long time, but now I can tell you it's easy) then check out these tutorials.

It's not that hard to do and our feed readers is where online journalists go to find new stories. Don't you want to meet us where we're at? It's also a great way to learn about the kinds of technologies that are in play - instead of just using old methods to pitch types of technology that you don't actually use or participate in.

While startup churn is inevitable in any industry (thank goodness we're not restaurant founders!) I think this forecast is selling the future short. There are some big trends I'm really excited about for the web in 2008. Whatever happens to the economy, there's at least a whole lot of innovation to be inspired by right now. Ultimately, I think that will end up brightening the picture for all of us around the world.

Let's Build Some Stuff

For each of the 5 big topical trends described below, I've assembled some resources I think will be useful for anyone who wants to keep up with cutting edge developments in these fields in the next year.

* An OPML file of top blogs on each subject. This is a bundle of feeds you can import into your reader.
* A filtered RSS feed of just the most popular items regarding each topic (using AideRSS). Remember, whenever you subscribe to new RSS feeds - some of the magic won't be visible until you mark all the initial items as read and new ones come in again.
* A Custom Search Engine that you can bookmark and use to search inside the top news and reference sites regarding each topic.

If you'd like to recommend any additional feeds or sites to add to these resources just let me know and I'll check them out. Please do, in fact. I hardly have the energy to make these lists exhaustive by myself. That's kind of the point of this whole web endeavor, isn't it?

All of these resources are dynamic; sites added at a later date will be automatically delivered to everyone who subscribes to these OPML files today.

So let's get to some trends that are shaping up to make a big impact on 2008...

Open Data

Data silos and walled gardens are a huge loss of opportunity and more people are figuring that out every day. The developments in this direction seen just in the last half of 2007 are too numerous to list here but some of the subthemes include the following.

• Data portability - taking your archives and friends from one site to another.


• The portable identity of OpenID


• The Google-led OpenSocial


• Google's Android mobile OS


• The "by hell or high water" rise of data-centric startups


• The personal data aggregation and publishing tools called Lifestreaming apps like Tumblr, named one of Time's Top 50 Websites of the Year, or the bleeding edge Onaswarm, Lifestrea.ms and Soup.


• The burgeoning Attention standard APML and various other efforts you can learn more about at sites like DataPortability.org.

Open Data Resources:
*RWW Open Data Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW Open Data Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
*RWW Open Data Sites Search (Visit and Bookmark)

Recommendation

As is aptly demonstrated from the category above, the future is likely to be even more swamped in data, social and content options than the web is today. From Google Reader's recent incorporation of both feed recommendations and shared items in Reader from your contacts in GMail to the ascendancy of services like Last.fm, Pandora and StumbleUpon - recommendation is beginning to make a big splash already.

Dr. Rick Hangartner, Chief Scientist at recommendation engine MyStrands, posited the following about the relationship between search engines and vendor-specific recommendation engines in a recent guest post on mobile search blog MSearchGroove:

In the near term, search engines will increasingly incorporate simple recommender technologies to handle approximate queries (e.g. “You asked for this, and based on similar queries/behavior by others, you might be looking for this.”). But in the long term, the recommender industry will be larger, and recommender technologies will be more pervasive than the search industry and search technology as we know it. [Because there will be recommendation going on all over the web.]

Recommendation Resources:
*RWW Recommendation Industry Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW Recommendation Industry Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
*RWW Open Data Sites Search (Visit and Bookmark)

Semantic Web

A Semantic Web has been in the works for a long time but is just starting to hit the scene for real. The idea is that semantic web technologies are able to derive meaning from online content and determine connections where none have been made explicitly.

If I'm looking at a web page about Assata Shakur, for example, then SemWeb tech should be able to determine that she's the subject of the page I'm looking at and that it's a biographical page. Once that's been determined, semantic technology can leverage the two trends discussed above (data openness and recommendation) to do all kinds of interesting things.

As I wrote in coverage of an excellent interview with Semantic Web scientist Yihong Ding - once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, then there's a whole lot of work that's already been done, allowing our creative human minds to reach new heights. By pre-processing online content for us, Semantic Web technology lets us start from a point of higher abstraction.

Richard MacManus called Semantic Web application Twine possibly the first mainstream consumer semantic web app, but there's a whole lot of innovation going on in this space. Major companies are starting to leverage Semantic Web technology under the covers of existing websites as well.

Semantic Web Resources:
*RWW Semantic Web Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW SemWeb Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
*RWW SemWeb Sites Search (Visit and Bookmark)

Mobile

While Michael Arrington says the release of the iPhone relieved him of any pressure to build a mobile version of TechCrunch, I think there's still going to be a whole lot of innovation in the mobile space well into the future.

Most of the people online in this world access the web through a tiny little computer they carry in their pocket and also use as a phone.

Mobile means more than just small, though. It also means portable, fast, location-aware and tied to voice, media and the meat-space.

Mobile is already a great analogy for data portability in general - people are thrilled in the US that we can now switch cell phone carriers and keep the same phone number. Imagine if we lost our contacts when we switched phones. The same type of expectations are totally reasonable for services online.

Once mobile really gets tied into open data on the web, to recommendation engines and to the semantic web - then we'll be cooking with gas.

Mobile Industry Resources:
*RWW Mobile Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW Mobile Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
*RWW Top Mobile Sites Search Engine (Visit and Bookmark)

Visualization

We're only going to get so far if we just tell the world, "trust us, all this ephemeral crap is going to change your life!." A big part of why there isn't widespread consumer demand for OpenID is that the benefits of it haven't been clearly communicated. The concept is gaining steam almost in spite of the communication of its advocates, many people believe. The future of OpenID and many other key technical innovations, lies in communicating with people about what they can do with the tools. That is not easy to do with things that are complicated or new.

Just as video has changed the web forever because visual communication is infinitely more evocative than text - so too do I expect the perceived value of visualization to grow by leaps and bounds in 2008.

I wrote a post about 3 methods of visualizing best practices in social software design over Thanksgiving, highlighting the work of Thomas Vander Wal, Chris Messina and the Google OpenSocial team. To that list I'd like to add Dave McClure's SlideShare archive, where you'll find images like the one below. This stuff is pure gold. Powerpoint is the future? Well, effective visual communication of complex data-based concepts is going to be an invaluable part of the future.

Visualization Resources:
*RWW Visualization Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW Visualization Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing
*RWW Top Mobile Sites Search Engine (Visit and Bookmark)

That's It! Post Suggestions Below, Please!

I hope these resources will prove useful for our readers in the coming year. Please let us know about any sites that ought to be included here - or let us know if you think I'm barking up the wrong tree and these won't in fact be hugely influential trends in 2008. Thanks for getting all the way through this long post!