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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 | Smub: mobile sharing | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

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 meta-tagging 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 meta-data 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 white paper 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. At 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, multi-way 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, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Eurekster

Eurekster is developer of the swicki that we use on ReadWriteWeb, 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.

Smub

Smub is the first truly mobile bookmarking, link-sharing tool. Smub lets you share and save any link easily from your iPhone, Mac, or PC without a plugin or application.

Type smub.it/ to the left of http:// on any link to save or share, and Smub will automatically take you through the process. Make the link public to share with others, or keep it private just for yourself. Smub has built-in sharing to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

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

If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type 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's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

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

Eurekster provides a service called a Swicki, a search function that lets site owners identify what other sites in their community they would like to have included in their Swicki search results. We've used Swicki here at ReadWriteWeb in the past (disclosure: it was a paid sponsorship arrangement, as it was also on some other top tech blogs). For its user base, the company offered revenue sharing from search ads. Many users had built up a nice revenue stream from the service. In the comments to our previous post, there was some interesting feedback from some of those users.

RWW commenter TomYam, who appeared to be a loyal Swicki user, theorized that Google was to blame for Eurekster's sudden drop in fortune:

"...one of the big reasons why they have dropped is probably because Google made an change in their search algo and what to keep in their index at the end of Nov 2007. And basically all swicki "subdomains" dropped out of Google index. From 2 million indexed swickis to currently 300.000."

TomYam went on to outline how he was making money from swickis (and note we have no way to verify if this is true, but it does show the potential that swickis have as custom search engines with a revenue stream):

"Trust me I know this since I monitored my swickis on daily base and was trying to build up a nice portfolio of swickis on "many" different topics that I came up with while watching TV and reading magazines.

I started creating swickis in September 2006, and basically continued doing them until January 2008.

During 2007 i managed to climb from a few cents per day from Adsense to a couple of days in December when I finally broke 100$/ day barrier.

And then first week in December 2007, they they made the decision to drop adsense revenue for any swicki that was not in their index.

And guess what I only had 3 in there. Never occurred to me to ask them to add my swiciks as the first ones popped up there automatically.

So my +2000 swickis suddenly dropped from a nice +100$/day to not even 1$/day...... and they were really showing a nice pace towards even 200$/day.

1 swicki maybe gave only 0,03$, a few gave 1$ per day, but you add upp +100 swickis that have 10-30 visitors a day then is suddenly picks up.

I made 4300$ from adsense revenue from my swickis during 2007, and was already looking for a prosperous 2008.

Talk about wasted time from my side, to promote and submit my swickis and giving "eurekster" linkpower over the +1 year that I was doing daily management of my swickis and creating new ones.

So for now I have not touched or tried to promote them over 6 months. It's going to be interesting to see what happens.

If they would allow the Adsense or other revenue back on for any created swicki, then I might be interested to promote them again as it would be worthwhile.

Go to http:// shoutouts .swicki .com - and you will see that they are "working on it...

2006 and 2007 I thought this was a nice way to make some extra $$$ in the years to come. Now....... Nope.

Luckly I have other income sources and no debts....

But that is life.. It sucks.

Now is time to concentrate on new ventures... Time for Poker News in Asia."

Another commenter, Kim Remmington, also thought Google was to blame:

"Looking at the chart above its obvious that Google thought that most of the swickis were spam. Eurekster basically said this in their blog. A lot of those spammy swickis were bringing in decent money. When you combine that with the incredible ease of making swickis, swicki farms and swicki universes, Google had something to worry about."

I personally don't believe that swickis are spam, although it does sound like they attracted many 'get rich quick' types. I actually found the swickis I used to be very useful, highly targeted search engines. The RWW swicki for example was a great way to find focused news on web tech, not just from RWW but from other sources that I chose to include (e.g. other tech blogs).

In any case, it's good to see that Eurekster is back. And we'll see if we can get to the bottom of the story for you!