The Story Of The Year page will keep a running tally, and the top 10 authors will all receive Storify t-shirts. After liking a story, you'll be prompted to tweet about the contest. By promoting the contest on Twitter, anyone can enter into a drawing for another iPad 2. Make sure to include the hashtag, #storifyoftheyear. "This year, stories have often unfolded first on social media," says Storify co-founder Xavier Damman. "We can't wait to see which story moved people the most."

Storify is the social Web news site starring you. It provides powerful but simple curation tools to pull together moments from around the Web, including tweets, Facebook posts and YouTube videos as well as images or links. Posted stories become standalone webpages, which Storify curates on its front page, and they can also be embedded anywhere. See our post about Storify's 10 most quoted tweets of the year for for an example.

Storify can be used to capture funny, everyday moments, like our breaking Twitter story of a Gmail outage. But it has also been used to report on some of the biggest news stories of the year, enabling even mainstream media organizations to cover fast-developing events, like the Occupy Wall Street protests, in unprecedented ways.

Storify's nominees include documentation of police brutality and journalist arrests at Occupy protests, an overall timeline of the many uprisings of 2011, and the story of journalist Mona Eltahawy's capture and beating by Egyptian law enforcement.

There are also some sillier moments, like a Storify tracking the saga of Sean Power's stolen laptop and the live-tweeting of a Burger King breakup.

Visit the 2011 Story Of The Year Storify page to see all the official nominees and the contest rules. Remember, you can vote for any story by clicking the 'Like' button, not just the ones nominated.

If you're interested in learning to use Storify, check out our how-to post for some ideas.

Later this month, APPNATION, the self-described "show me the money conference," and AppCircus, the "global traveling showcase of innovative apps," will land in San Francisco after stopping in a number of other cities across the globe.

If you're an app developer, entrepreneur or otherwise, there's still time to enter your app into AppCircus and the list of past winners might convince you that, despite the late hour, there's still time to put together an application.

Past winners of the event include Video Puzzle in Madrid, Yumbling in Mexico, Screach at SXSW and impressive augmented reality translation app Word Lens in Palo Alto. All registered apps will get a crack at competing on stage at the event, but first have to pass through an online jury this on April 20. 10 apps will be selected to move on and will each get three minutes on stage.

The winner of AppCircus gets up to $2000 in cash and prizes from Cohuman, Hotwire and Speek and is nominated for the Mobile Premier Awards 2012 in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress.

It turns out our readers are even smarter and more interesting than we thought. We couldn't pick just five and instead ended up with seven winners. Read on to find out who made the cut.

For a preview of the in-depth type of discussions that are going to take place, check out our seven winners below. For some of them we're only showing an excerpt as some responses were very long. You can find the full comments here.

If your comment doesn't appear here, don't fret as we're offering significant discounts to students and independents. If you fall into those categories, email students@readwriteweb.com or independents@readwriteweb.com to receive the discount.

The Winners

Some readers asked how the real-time Web can pave the way for increases productivity and value.

"... Activity stream standards (for example, limits on data size) and protocols like pubsubhubbub make it possible for thousands of co's to filter/index the emergent web since it's no longer necessary to conduct sweep/index terabytes of data to get that view. Computationally intensive activities like natural language processing can be used on these focused streams of small-format data to reveal insights into the web that were previously impossible. That's what our company does and something we're keen to discuss." Bill Fischer

"... What's the next generation of the real-time web look like when it no longer has to deal with the constraints of last generation broadband? What else can we do now that we have a network that essentially serves as a communitywide LAN? A network where capacity is nearly limitless? A network where latency is near zero?... So how do we now take advantage of this new capacity to create a new class of real-time web experiences?" Geoff Daily

Commenters also explored the definition of the real-time Web and its impact on user experiences.

"Web 3.0 has three core nuances: one it's everywhere, literally everywhere, it's always up to date, it goes out if it's way to allow and foster creative contribution and collaboration. This natural progression is apparent; first there were consumers, then there were users, now we are entering the realm of CO-CREATORS!" Evan Schoepke

"1) No more need to use FriendFeed or Google Wave or IM clients from 1999 telling you that someone is typing just to get a real-time rush because everything.. EVERYTHING will be real-time.

2) You won't even remember those Geocities-ish "web pages" saying "Last Updated on" because in the real-time web, web sites.. will update... themselves.

3) Google will acquire Woopra. And "creators" will immediately become "spectators." Someone call Forrester quick because, ladies and gents, we may need a new version of the Technographics ladder." Esteban Contreras

Some talked about the possibilities of collaboration on steroids...

"Jim Hendler and Tim Berners-Lee are asking how we can use the web to solve some of man's most pressing problems. For example, can we use the web to find a cure for cancer?...Google wave and other collaboration tools are great for small groups. In the not too distant future we will have web tools that enable real-time collaboration amongst many thousands of people. We'll be able to share resources as never before." Graham

"What I've seen through collective use/following of a hashtag or sharing in an experience together through a chat room and/or live video stream is testimony to the fact that experiences shared in groups, in the moment, have significantly more impact than reading a recap and posting a comment after the fact. Immersion in the 'now' is quite powerful..." Georgy

...And some looked on the disruptive nature of new technologies.

"My suspicions about social networks is that they won't last for much longer. In the long term they constitute an emotional immaturity that won't benefit us in the long run - people eventually get tired of privacy issues and the neediness that inspires when you go an hour without friendship affirmations. I see/hear people becoming weary of the toll it takes to dig through the nonsense in pursuit of the (semi) valuable information." Tara S.

If your comment is above, please email elyssa@readwriteweb.com so we can register you! We look forward to seeing you at the event.

Extensions are an add-on to Visual Studio 2010 that improves the user experience. Your extension could provide additional functionality to the product, or add a level of customization to better serve an individual or company's needs.

• VSX101: An Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility
• VSX102: Deploying Visual Studio 2010 Extensions
• VSX103: Lighting up the new Visual Studio 2010 Editor with Rich Extensions

You also can download a trial version of Visual Studio and learn more about extensions on the Microsoft Visual Studio site.

We'll be featuring some of the most compelling extensions here at ReadWriteWeb - plus you could win prizes like a one-year MSDN Embedded subscription license (a $1,199 USD value!), an Xbox Elite bundle, or a Natural Wireless Ergonomic Desktop 700 keyboard and mouse.

Beyond submitting extensions, we also are looking for our development community to check out and comment on their peers' submissions. You can keep track of the submissions and submit your entry by visiting the Summer of Extensions page.

Other great speakers at the event include Claire Boonstra, Chris Grayson, Ori Inbar, Tish Shute, Robert Rice and many, many more. Best of all, Marshall Kirkpatrick and I will be presenting some findings from our recently released report on the business of augmented reality. Many of the CEOs and figures mentioned in the report will be at this event, so if you're an augmented reality fan, don't miss out.

So how do you win tickets? It's simple: All you have to do is leave a thoughtful comment on this post about the business of augmented reality and its possibilities for the future. We are leaving this open-ended, so write whatever comes to mind and we will pick four of the best comments to receive free passes to the event!

Make sure to leave you email adress in the comment, or log in using Facebook or Twitter, so we know how to get in touch with you should you be selected. We will pick the winners in the next few days so get those comments in! Many thanks to Zenitum for giving us the opportunity to run this contest.

UPDATE: Tish Shute, who is organizing the AR Event, has been gracious enough to provide ReadWriteWeb readers with a special discount code to the event if you aren't selected for one of the four passes. Simple enter the code RWW245 when registering online. Hope to see you next week in Santa Clara!

"The creative potential of junaio is vast: AR Mashups, multiplayer games or scavenger hunts, interactive, indoor and outdoor exhibitions, tours with animated 3D characters, eduainment right on the spot and location independent gaming," the company expressed in press release. "It is up to the developer to challenge his imagination and become as much creative as he wants to."

On June 16, the top five channels with the most subscribers will become finalists in the contest, and the winner will ultimately be chosen by a panel of AR and IT aficionados, including Robert Scoble, Thomas Carpenter of Games Alfresco, and Dr. Christian Geiger, professor and mixed reality researcher at Düsseldorf University. I will also be participating on the judges panel, and am very excited to see the innovative AR channels that could come from this contest.

I am also thrilled that metaio and junaio are pushing the creative side of the contest. It is much easier for gimmicky AR applications to become popular, but these kinds of applications don't benefit AR as much as actual useful implementations. The subscriber threshold will merely be used to shorten the list of applications that will be considered for the prize, but that doesn't mean the most popular one will win.

For more information on the contest and on the junaio platform, check out their website, or if you happen to be in Germany, stop by at AR DevCamp in Berlin this Friday. There will be free sessions available for developers to learn the capabilities of the API and will provide a jumping-off point for those new to the platform.

Silentale: A startup that organizes your conversations and contacts from multiple services including email, Facebook, Google, Twitter, SMS and more, is soon to be an iPhone application. This may actually prove more useful than the web app itself since you can browse your contacts by name or type, access links to their social network profiles and see a list of all your communications - no matter what platform they originally occurred on.

Atlas: Another application fighting check-in fatigue. Similar to check.in (previous coverage), this app automates check-ins to Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite and, wait - what's that? - Facebook, too? Hmm.

Solar Walk: A model of the solar system for the iPhone. But this is no mere science fair mockup - you can pinch and zoom your way through space, rotating planets, reading details about the celestial bodies and more. It's like Google Earth for the Universe.

Pocket Zoo: An adorable (and educational) app for kids featuring over 40 animals, illustrations, photos, animal info and live animal cams from around the world.

Woobius Eye: An app that lets you share sketches with phone call recipients. Take a photo, add an email address and make a call. Point to the drawing with your finger and circle items. The friend on the other end of the line can do the same. 

LiveCycle: A wireless cycling app and mounting system for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Features a hi-res color interface, real-time performance feedback, GPS feature, data file system and performance analysis.

Glowfish: A bit.ly client for iPad. Shortens links (of course), but also tracks clicks, lets you copy and tweet, share on Facebook, browse popular bit.ly links and more.

iPad Apps

Why Your Kid Will Steal Your iPad:

1) Mag Canvas for iPad: This iPad app duplicates the experience of drawing on a magnetic Etch-a-Sketch type board.

2) iBrite: It's Lite Brite for the iPad. No explanation needed.

3) Thumbelina: An interactive storybook app for kids based on the Andersen story.

4) Redfish: An interactive play & learn game for iPad.

Other iPad Apps:

Mixr: A music-mixing application for both iPhone and iPad. Features play, cue, pitch, crossfader, EQs, volume and effects controls, a music collection and custom library and a multi-touch turntable.

IsoCards: A multi-touch gesture and physics driven deck of cards that lets you play any card game you want. For both iPhone and iPad.

iMockups for iPad: This app lets you create wireframes and mockups for your website, iPhone and iPad applications.

The Map Maker Global Competition, which challenges users to add high-quality data on universities, schools, hospitals and medical clinics in Google Map Maker, will run from Dec. 15, 2009 to Jan. 31, 2010. The grand prize for the user who adds the greatest quantity of data is a $50,000 UNICEF donation to the winner's home country.

Google's Map Maker shows users satellite images and asks them to add data to make actually useful maps. These citizen cartographers can add directions, streets, schools and more; data is subject to peer moderation. The app is available in English, Spanish, French, Russian, Romanian and Vietnamese, and in more than 170 countries.

UNICEF representative Gerrit Beger told Google, "We know that mapping is a proven method to enhance community development. Google Map Maker is a powerful tool to create better situational awareness for both young people and communities at large. It will enable organizations like ours to better deliver services, respond to crises and adapt to change."

Google has also just wrapped up a similar competition focusing on Latin America. In that event, more than 50 teams from all over the world participated, which led to a 500 percent increase in mapping activity for several Latin American countries.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages which we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Skip to info about... Calais: Semantic Web API Socialtext: Enterprise 2.0 Adobe: Flash media server Wistia: video for business Mashery: API management services TaxACT: online tax filing Rackspace: cloud computing experts Aplus.net: web hosting Crowd Science: demographic data Eurekster: custom topic portals Our Hosts and Blogging Software: Media Temple and SixApart

Calais

Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application. Calais 4.0 was released in January, for the first time allowing publishers to connect to the Linked Data web standard. Calais 4.0 goes beyond metatagging and enables publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com and others. Calais 4.0 also lets publishers share semantic metadata about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services and more.

Check out the incredible work being done at Calais and let us know what you think.

Socialtext

Socialtext provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.

Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration. It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."

Download Socialtext's free whitepaper at http://socialtext.com.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. In the Business of APIs conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper Five steps to scaling your business development using web services to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

TaxACT

TaxACT is an efficient way to file your taxes online, in either desktop or web-based versions. It offers two ways to enter data: the interview format, or the forms-based entry method. TaxACT also provides its users a highly reliable and robust alerts system to prevent costly mistakes generally caused by omissions or missed opportunities to maximize deductions. Regardless of the TaxACT version, all forms are IRS and State approved. The software was developed by professional accountants and CPAs.

You can see a tour of TaxACT online by clicking here.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 offers powerful streaming with a flexible environment for creating and delivering rich, interactive, multiway social media experiences to a broad audience. You'll find a superior video experience, with new features such as Dynamic Streaming, DVR functionality, HTTP delivery support, and H.264 enhancements.

Check out the Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 to add interactivity and media streaming to your social media applications.

Wistia

Wistia is a provider of secure video sharing and collaboration tools for business. The company says that "the use of video in business has grown immensely as cameras and video production have become significantly more accessible. However, sharing and collaborating on this content with your team still has many challenges, including large file sizes, numerous video formats, privacy and security, and lack of collaboration environment." Wistia aims to solve those challenges.

You can get a free 15-day trial of Wistia by clicking here.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to web hosting - including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, ecommerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Eurekster

Eurekster is developer of the swicki that we use on RWW, a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice (in our case web tech), powered by the community.

People build swickis on all kinds of topics, some people build a lot of them. Alex Holmes, for example, builds really nice looking swickis on topics like the 2008 Election, Ocean Animals and Home Buying.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's MovableType.

If you've ever wondered what RWW looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the MovableType publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

To kick off the launch of WorldSings, the company is launching their annual contest which is open to any musician or band performing original music. After creating a profile and uploading content, artists can participate in the contest while also growing their fan base through traditional social networking. On WorldSings, artists are expected to interact directly with fans via wall posts, chat, and direct messages.

Artists also get to know who exactly their fans are as WorldSings plans on sharing key demographic information regarding fans' age, gender, location, etc.

About the Competition

The World's Best Song competition, an effort to expand people's musical knowledge, is somewhat like a cross between an American Idol-type competition (or any of its overseas counterparts) and the Eurovision Song Contest, a popular European contest and one of the longest-running TV shows in the world. On WorldSings, fans will vote for their favorite songs throughout the year and on March 19th, 2010, the top 20 vote getters will fly to Las Vegas, Nevada to compete in a live competition at Planet Hollywood. The winner of the competition will receive $500,000 and the title of World's Best Song. The other $500,000 will be divvied up among the other 19 finalists.  Music fans have an opportunity to win, too. They can compete for prizes during the year including the grand prize - an opportunity to fly to Vegas to see the top artists perform.

Without the competition aspect to WorldSings, the social network would just be too much like MySpace Music to be of interest to anyone but the most serious of music aficionados. However, the contest could actually be a big draw for this new music destination site. Don't believe us? Just look at the millions of viewers tuning into American Idol and Eurovision's Song Contest.

WorldSings will officially launch during SXSW on Friday, but it opens to the public today.

The contest was meant to showcase extensions that made use of the new capabilities Mozilla introduced in Firefox 3 and managed to combine this with excellent usability and the use of open standards.

Pencil, one of the three Grand Prize winners, is an easy to use tool for GUI prototyping and diagramming, which makes uses of Firefox's SVG support for rendering and scripting. It's obviously not the most exciting of applications, but it works as advertised and is a great tool for anybody who needs to draw up a GUI prototype quickly.

The second Grand Prize winner, Tagmarks, adds a set of icons to your URL bar that allows you to easily add tags to your bookmarks or to quickly bookmark and tag a page at the same time. Out of all the plugins in the contest, this one is probably the most immediately useful. Adding tags to a bookmark can be useful, but few people make use of this capability. Tagmarks also allows you to safe your links to Delicious in addition to your local bookmarks.

The third Grand Prize winner is also a tagging extension: HandyTag. HandyTag suggests tags for your bookmarks based on the tags you have already used, tags given by Delicious users, and tags HandyTag's keyword extractor suggests.

Fire.fm

Fire.fm, the best new music add-on, gives you easy access to your stations on our favorite streaming music site, Last.fm. Fire.fm works exactly as advertised and provides a nice way to play music through Last.fm without having to keep a browser window open. You can also easily access your favorite stations by just typing in a few letters into the URL bar.

1) One free ticket to the event, valued at $695.00;

2) And for those of you who won't be in California at the time, we're also giving away a free Microsoft software pack, featuring Microsoft Vista and Office 2007.

So we'll select 2 winners - one for a local Silicon Valley resident or someone in the area on 15 Nov, and the Microsoft prize for someone who can't make the Mobility event.

To enter, all you have to do is tell us - in the comments here - what is your current favorite Mobile Web app, and why. It's that easy. I'm really curious to know what peoples favorite Mobile Web apps are - e.g. what is your best iPhone app, or what you play with most on your Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, etc! Simply leave a comment here and you're in the running for the two prizes. Please also tell us if you can attend Under the Radar Mobility, so we know whether to consider you for that prize. The two winners will be randomly drawn.

Thanks Dealmaker Media for the two prizes. We also have a $100 VIP discount for the Mobility event - click here to get that.

UPDATE: The winners have now been announced.