ReadWriteWeb

In an ironic twist of fate for 2009, Fox's IGN Entertainment, a company known for its game reviews of products like Zombie Apocalypse acquired What They Play. The newest member of Fox Interactive is touted as the "family guide to video games" and offers reviews, warnings and suggested products. Under the umbrella company of What They Like, What They Play uses the "Entertainment Software Rating Board" (ESRB) to warn parents of games containing explicit lyrics, cartoon violence and drug references.

This Labor Day Boxee users will celebrate an increase in their mainstream web video content. Boxee just announced a partnership with video platform company Brightcove. The deal will potentially usher major players like CBS, Sony Music and Discovery onto Boxee's web television entertainment platform. The first publishers to take advantage of the new arrangement include Condé Nast Digital (publishers of Wired and Epicurious) and children's programming site Qubo.

Looking for new iPhone apps? With a marketplace filled with over 65,000 applications (give or take), finding the best ones via iTunes has become an exercise in futility. With the next big Apple announcement a little over a week away, we still have high hopes that Apple will introduce a version of their iTunes software that makes it easier to find new apps which appeal to you. In the meantime however, we turn to the various startups addressing this issue in their own unique ways. The latest company among them to debut an app discovery service is Appolicious, a new social network and app sharing site which reminds us of the social bookmarking mainstay Delicious.

Early this summer we wrote a post titled Why Online Noise is Good For You. It was all about the personal and professional benefits of spending time consuming unfiltered information from the blizzard of sources proliferating daily on the internet. It was a fun post and was responded to with thought provoking replies by readers in the comments section.

We decided to follow up on and reprint that post here on a late Friday afternoon. We're sure many of readers either didn't see it at the time or hadn't yet discovered ReadWriteWeb. Not everyone who did read it agreed with our conclusions, so after the post below we've added some of our favorite pro and con comments from the original, plus a cool personal story from a member of the RWW community. What do you think? Does online noise play a meaningful role in your life?

The OPML sharing and matching service Toluu provides a great way to find and share interesting RSS feeds. One feature that had been missing so far, however, was tagging. In its latest update, which was released today, Toluu has made tagging one of the central features of the service, which will make finding new and interesting blogs through Toluu even easier.

Blogs, RSS, IM, Twitter and FriendFeed - the number of sources of sources of information online can feel like it's multiplying exponentially every day. It's easy, natural even, to feel overwhelmed. Especially when we are more familiar with the tightly controlled editorial policies of mainstream media.

The social media space is noisy, though. There are many times when filtering that noise effectively makes a lot of sense (some tools discussed below) - but there are also many times when noise is just what we need.