Evernote becomes a single destination for every note you have, including video, pics, to-dos, audio message, web clips, and web bookmarks. All notes can be tagged and synchronized between your Mac or PC, the Evernote Web app, and your BlackBerry. You can access your existing notes by searching for keywords, filter by tags, or simply browse for them.

In The Field

Many of us have been looking for a mobile note taking application that would be useful "in the field", since that's where we take most of our notes. Often we can't type fast enough on our mobile devices to keep up, so we jot down notes on *gasp* paper. With Evernote for Blackberry you can simply take a snapshot with your device, add a subject, comments and some tags and save it for later. When you get home you can sync everything up and have it available on your desktop or on the Web.

Prior to using Evernote for Blackberry, some people used to snap pictures of people's name tags at various events for future reference. Now you can put those in a folder in Evernote and tag, comment and archive them.

But Does it Work?

Taking text notes in Evernote for BlackBerry is straightforward and easy as are snapshot and audio notes. Trying to recognize words in some written notes can be a little sketchy, but Evernote does a pretty decent job of finding key words through a simple search. Overall the interface is a little clunky, and there seems to be no (obvious) way to add content to existing notes using the BlackBerry. Those are the only major complaints we have with it, although not being able to add to existing notes on the fly is a real bummer.

What makes this app especially useful is the ability to sync everything at once. That alone makes it an app we will continue to use. When you add BlackBerry's tagging capabilities with GPS, it becomes very powerful note taking tool indeed. Imagine being able to geotag a note and how that could be useful later. Add some snapshots, maybe a short video or audio clip and you have the makings of a very serviceable blog post or report.

Evernote for BlackBerry is certainly worth a try, check it out for yourself. It is available on the Evernote site or from BlackBerry App World. Of course there are several note taking apps for the BlackBerry, but so far this is the best one we have found, especially among the other free apps.

Other enhancements in the 2.0 version of the Evernote iPhone client are:

The big improvement in our book is the landscape mode. iPhone applications from the start have had a rocky relationship with the on-screen keyboard, many apps chose to emulate the built-in iPhone functionality and offer a keyboard only in portrait mode, sacrificing typing comfort for screen real-estate. But more often now (and especially with the upcoming iPhone 3.0 OS update) apps are offering the superior landscape mode and making due with the minuscule amount of screen that is available above the keyboard. That means that note-taking in Evernote on the iPhone just got a lot more finger-friendly.

If you haven't used Evernote before, it's one of those apps that you might need convincing to start using, and then wonder how you ever lived without it. I like to think of it as a personal Moleskine notebook that can expand to allow scrap-booking anything you might find online, from a scanned photo, to text clippings, bookmarks or entire web pages, even audio notes to yourself. The strength Evernote brings to the 'digital scrapbook' concept is universal access - you can literally add to or access your account online, via a desktop app (which works great with scanner software by the way), a browser bookmarklet or toolbar, the aforementioned iPhone app and other mobile phones, and even email. We have previous coverage on it as well.

The Evernote service starts out free and you can purchase additional online storage and a digitally encrypted connection to your account for $5/month or $45/year. The iPhone app is also free, so what are you waiting for, download it and give it a try!

Over the past month, the Evernote team has been cranking out new features left-and-right. If you haven't been following the news, here's what you've missed:

• Clip to Evernote Bookmarklet: the Clip to Evernote bookmarklet was updated to allow you to clip either part of a web page or the whole thing. Plus, you can create a simple quick note without launching Evernote.
• Safari Clipper: Evernote added a Safari version of the Web Clipper which, in addition to the standard features, also lets you save web pages as PDFs. Growl support notifies you of new syncs and clippings.
• Firefox Clipper for Mac: For those who prefer Firefox on Mac, the new Firefox clipper for Mac is tightly integrated with the desktop client.
• Android Client Gets a Makeover: The mobile version for Android was revamped, adding in improved searching and navigation. It also optimized the interface for touch screens, enabled portrait and landscape viewing, and now takes full advantage of the Android browser.

The new Web Clipper

Shoeboxed Integration

Perhaps the biggest and best update, though, is the partnership with scanning service Shoeboxed - a partnership which was announced a little less than a month ago. This service lets you either mail in or email in scans of receipts and business cards. They do the tedious work of scanning them for you and then they post the scanned images online. With the Shoeboxed + Evernote integration, you can now send your Shoeboxed scans directly to your Evernote account.

Finally, if you can't get enough Evernote, the company has also introduced a podcast about their service. The first one, released mid-March, features discussions about the company itself as well as company news and tips. You can get the MP3 here or subscribe in iTunes.

Do you use Evernote? Tell us about it in the comments!

The central hub for your work on Tarpipe is the 'workflows' tab, which looks a lot like the interface for Yahoo Pipes. The workflow tab allows you to control how, where, and what part of your data will be published. You can, for example, set up Tarpipe to receive an email, turn the title into a Twitter and Plurk post, upload an email attachment to Flickr or PhotoBucket, and then add the URL of that picture to your Twitter message as well, while also saving a copy of your picture on Evernote at the same time. All of this is done through a simple drag-and-drop interface that pretty much explains itself once you start using it.

Supported Services

Among the services currently supported by Tarpipe are Flickr, PhotoBucket, Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk, FriendFeed, TinyURL, and Tumblr. Tarpipe also just announced its integration with Evernote, which allows you to use Evernote's OCR features to automatically tag pictures.

Other Features

Mac users can also make use of Dropipe, a small OSX droplet that connects to Tarpipe and lets you upload pictures directly to the service from your desktop.

Tarpipe is also working on a new feature which will let users publish content on multiple social media sites through the use of a simple form, but without the ability to customize these workflows.

Verdict

Tarpipe is a great alternative to services like Ping.fm or PixelPipe, especially if you want to customize the flow of your data more granularly. Developers can make use of an extensive API, and, as a bonus, Tarpipe also supports OpenID, OAuth, and microformats.

Use case: automatically tag a screenshot using Evernote from Bruno Pedro on Vimeo.

Group collaboration startup Pelotonics has turned Evernote into an easy way to load photos, voice messages, notes and other media into your project management system, including from a mobile device.

When we first reviewed Evernote, we said it didn't live up to its incredible promise. Despite our concerns, scores of other people love the powerful note taking system. Check out these usecase videos below to see what Pelotonics has done with it.

Does that look like something you might use? We suspect that for many people it may be. Here at ReadWriteWeb we try to use Basecamp as much as we can, though we regularly come back to simpler tools like email and IM. For organizations looking for more heavyweight web-based collaboration tools, this Pelotonics/Evernote combo might work great.

Now we're even more excited to see what else developers can do with the well-built Evernote API.

Disclosure: The author had a past consulting relationship with Pelotonics but has no ongoing financial interest in the company. We just wrote about this because it looks awesome.

Freshly announced were support for automation through scripting, full XML data imports and exports and the much anticipated Application Programming Interface (API) that will let 3rd parties integrate Evernote into their applications.

Evernote already works on the desktop, on the iPhone and on the web. Now we'll see all kinds of other applications support Evernote as well. The company points to a Salesforce integration in the works and jokes that even a Rock Band tie-in could happen. The API uses standards based authentication protocol OAuth, which is fabulous. That means that if you as a developer want to tie in to Evernote, or today's newly launched Netflix API or any of the Google Data APIs, then you've got one standard form of API to plug in to. That's a big time saver.

Even more exciting is full XML data export. Nervous about dedicating a whole lot of time to import business cards, notes and other information into Evernote? Now you don't have to be, because the company allows easy export of all that data in a standard format you can take elsewhere. This kind of data portability allows users to feel comfortable investing time and data in a service. It's something that too many other similar services don't allow.

For coverage of the Evernote news by someone who likes Evernote far more, check out Rafe Needleman's post at Webware. If the entire service can perform as well as the company has in making the moves it announced today, then Evernote should be well worth your time.

Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.

AideRSS plus Snacker

RSS news ticker Snackr was an app that people either loved or hated when we first wrote about it here. The attractive Adobe AIR interface is now even more compelling now that you can sync it with your Google Reader account (as of last week). One of the best uses we've found for this ever-flowing stream of news though has been to fill it up with "best of" feeds from AideRSS. AideRSS is an app we've written about over and over again here because it's just so darned useful and cool.

Put the two together though and you've got a stream of just the breakout hits from high traffic feeds. We enjoy and recommend reading the top stories on topics like the semantic web, mobile and recommendation technology through Snackr - but we're sure you can build your own easily.

Ma.gnolia (or Del.icio.us) plus Feed.Informer

You can do a whole lot of different things with social bookmarking tools like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us, probably including some things most readers here aren't familiar with. One of our favorite things though is to pick a particular tag from your account and run the RSS feed from that tag through a handy little service called Feed.informer.

You can display any amount of the feed on a web page with just a few lines of embed code, including the "notes" field for your tag as editorial or summary information. The result is a little news section for your website, powered by your social bookmarking tool. It's a great way to continue sharing found items online that don't warrant an entire blog post.

FriendFeed and MuxTape plus FluidApp

We wrote here earlier this year about a fabulous mashup of mixtape service Muxtape and single-app browser creation tool for Mac called FluidApp, but it's also really useful to combine FriendFeed and Fluid.

Most of the other standalone FriendFeed apps are hard to use (excluding the wonderful mobile app FFtoGo) but putting your friends' feeds and conversation in a standalone browser makes it easy to follow along without losing the FF tab in your browser. FriendFeed's auto-updating keeps the dedicated browser up to date and the FF favicon looks great in your dock.

Single app browsers fall into the "seems stupid until you try it" category, but put the right app in there and you'll enjoy it.

Windows users can check out Bubbles, a service that was reviewed and discussed recently at Download Squad.

Facebook plus Dapper

The RSS extraction tool Dapper is really powerful, once you figure out how and why to use it. Here's a 4 minute screencast we recorded about how to use Dapper but the sky's the limit with what you can do with this free tool.

One of the things we've done with it lately is scrape birthday notifications out of Facebook. Not everyone logs into Facebook everyday, but people tend to put their real birthdays into their profiles there. It's really nice to get those birthday notifications by RSS in another setting that you spend time in more regularly. Step by step instructions for doing so are available here.

Friends of RWW

We asked around and got some input from friends about what apps they like to use together. The responses ranged from combinations aimed to increase productivity to making the most of music listening. Here are some of our favorites.

Local Portland tech blogger Rick Turoczy says he likes to use Twitter search (formerly Summize), combined with Yahoo! Pipes and RSS to SMS service Pingie. We're not sure what he does with those apps together, but the magic results in his getting a lot of industry news before mainstream media outlets do.

MicroISV consultant Bob Walsh makes the most of his fleeting thoughts by sending voice recordings through Jott over to "memory extender" EverNote and "thence to various programs on my Mac." That's the kind of thing many of us have probably envisioned doing, we're glad it's working for Bob.

Susan Kirkpatrick (no relation) is a prolific multi-media blogger. How does she do it? [I] "send a blog post with a picture attachment via email to Utterz; it posts to Flickr, WordPress, Pownce and Twitter." We haven't used it a lot ourselves, but Utterz is pretty impressive and we here rumors that there is even more sophisticated developments being worked on behind the scenes there, too.

Virginie De Bel Air says she likes Last.fm + SonicLiving, a service that tracks your favorites on iTunes, Last.fm or Pandora and notifies you when those bands are coming to perform in your area. Utilitarian and rock and roll! We hadn't seen SonicLiving before.

Security and IT exec Greg Hughes likes to let his hair down and shout Shazam! sometimes. Specifically, Hughes says he finds himself using the Shazam music identification app to identify a song he hears and then Pandora to discover more that's related. All on the iPhone, too.

What About You?

What are your favorite apps to use together? There are so many new apps that launch everyday, we can't imagine the infinite permutations that users could come up with. Putting together multiple apps usually implies though that you're fairly comfortable with one or both of them, that they are equipped to live as something other than a walled garden and that each has stood enough of a test for users to believe they are stable enough to smoosh together.

Productivity? Fun? A combination of both, perhaps? We'd love to know what your favorite apps are to run together.

Photo: "Web 2.0 Crawl Yahoo Brickhouse: Nate Westheimer of BricaBox, Dave McClure, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme" by Brian Solis. Just imagine how great it would be if these app guys worked together!

Web Products

Nokia Acquires Symbian; Takes on Google's Android

Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. This week the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source. Nokia clearly aims to challenge Android, the open source mobile operating system of Google. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says that it wants to create "the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications".

See also: last100's analysis and Setbacks for Google's Android

Evernote Opens to All: Fantastic Promise, Disappointing Execution

The highly anticipated "memory augmentation" service Evernote opened to the public this week and you'll probably want to check this service out just to see what it tries to do. We may change our minds after more lengthy testing, but so far this combination of a bookmarking, note taking and photo cataloging service with apps for the desktop, web and mobile - not to mention the Optical Character Recognition powered search - adds up to a whole lot of potential ... and frustration.

Evri Beta Launches: Search Less - Understand More

Evri, a Paul Allen backed semantic search engine, launched into a limited beta this week. Evri was first shown publicly at the D6 conference. Evri's CEO Neil Roseman likes to talk about Evri in terms of organizing content instead of calling it a search engine. At its core, however, Evri definitely is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.

Facebook Targets Chinese Market

Social networking site Facebook has launched a Chinese-language version of its web site. Users logging into the site from the Chinese mainland are now being redirected to zh-cn.facebook.com, where users can choose between a version in simplified or traditional Chinese.

See also: China's Facebook Clones

LinkedIn and The Strange Case of The Disappearing (IPO) Market

Is LinkedIn worth $1bn? Yes. Why? Because Bain Capital says it is. The stock is not public, so you and I cannot trade it. The whole notion of the average punter trading tech stocks (or the average punter's pension fund trading it on your behalf) seems rather quaint, from some bygone era. But why has the public market for tech stocks disappeared? Where has it disappeared to? Will it ever return? The LinkedIn financing offers some clues to these questions.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Yet Another Unsolicited Yahoo Turnaround Strategy - YAUYTS

Watching Yahoo's decline is rather sad. It is the result of nothing more or less than creative destruction. Meeting that challenge head-on is incredibly tough. Very, very few companies make the transition. IBM, led by Lou Gerstner, met the challenge of the PC era in his epic turnaround (described in the book Who Says Elephants Can't Dance). Microsoft has struggled mightily to remain relevant in the Web era and they are as smart and driven as it gets. What's so incredible is seeing the speed of these transitions - to see a big successful Web start-up like Yahoo marginalized by technology shifts.

Our Kids Are Failing - And It's All Wikipedia's Fault!

Talk about a knee-jerk reaction. This week news broke out in Scotland about how the internet was to blame for Scotland's failing exam pass rates. According to the Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC), Wikipedia, among other sources, was cited as the reason as to why the students were failing. Is this a case of the internet making us stupid? Or do students just need to learn how to use the new research tools of the web a little more appropriately?

Bored With Web 2.0? Demand Change

In April, Umair Haque posted a manifesto on his blog on the Harvard Business Publishing web site where he called for today's investors and start-ups to start building applications to "change the world" instead of just making apps that make money. He challenged Silicon Valley to find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and then pledged that he would help by providing free consulting. Recently, he revisited this topic...

YouTube Continues to Destroy All Competitors in Declining Video Market

YouTube's huge lead in market share over other online video sites continues to get bigger, even as the over all video viewing market continues a decline. According to traffic analysts Hitwise, YouTube now sees 75.43% of traffic to the online video category; that's up 26% from it's May 2007 marketshare of 59.95%. The nearest competitor is still MySpaceTV, which was down a whopping 44% to 9% marketshare. (Full chart of top 5 sites below.) In April we reported that YouTube's dominance in online video was bigger than Google's dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.

See also: The Top 40 Online Video Producers in May - This List Might Surprise You

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Features

The basic premise of Evernote is that you can throw all kinds of files at it and then search for particular words in those files later. Full or partial screenshots are easy to add as are photos emailed from your phone and text entered directly into the application. The company says you can take photos of signs on the street and labels on bottles of wine, then search for text in those images to recall them later. There's all kinds of other features like annotation, sharing, a widget etc.

Storage space is limited and Evernote is now announcing a premium account at $5 per month for 500MB per month of uploading, free users get 40MB each month. That 40MB will go fast if you're uploading full screenshots.

There are a number of services similar to Evernote, but few are as lightweight, inexpensive and multi-platform as it is. Last100 writer Dan Langendorf is excited about Evernote and says it compares well in terms of features to more heavyweight competing services like Yojimbo, Soho Notes and DevonThink. Another marginally related service is Iterasi (disclosure: a consulting client of mine) though that service and Evernote are not as similar as I suspected.

Evernote has a whole lot of promise that's well articulated in the company's demo video. Check it out and then read on to learn about the problems we had in trying to use the service.

The Problems

The OCR search in Evernote is far enough from perfect that it's a real disappointment. False positives are annoying, but missing what should be readable text means that Evernote fails to recall documents that it promised to find. We saw a high percentage of false positives and too many cases of failure to capture text even on screen captures of web pages. The webcam capture wasn't good for much as small images are too fuzzy, but we're told by other users that a good point and shoot camera can get business cards into the system recognizably.

We ran into other little problems like an inability to login to the mobile web interface, the desktop app freezing up and a Mac desktop interface that was not as intuitive as we would have liked.

Recommendations

If Evernote's OCR could improve then we'd love to see additional features like:

• the ability to capture the current contents of a particular application instead of just the screen or a portion of it.
• search from the desktop application.
• adding items by RSS feed.

We'll keep trying Evernote for non-essential uses, but we were really looking forward to it and are disappointed with the performance issues it faces right now.

German ISP T-Online demonstrated a big multi-touch screen right out of Minority Report at the CeBIT conference in Hannover this week (see this and other videos below). Many other designers are working on variations on that theme. Other designers still are aiming to bring game-like interfaces to other data-centric experiences. What would you like to see in interface design?

Video via a post at the wonderful design blog FreshCreation, the inspiration for this post.

The expectation that something like this will be the interface of the future is pretty widespread, but let's look at some alternatives.

Shadow Play

While that touchscreen looks very cool, it's got its issues too. The video below is from the University of British Columbia and points out some of those issues. I'm not sure if the shadow pointing option is going to work in very many circumstances outside of a classroom.

Via one of the researchers' comments at FreshCreation. See also this version at a home computer.

Just Like Your Real Life Mess

That last video might seem a bit dorky but at least you can imagine some good uses of such an approach. The other end of the spectrum, stunning but a challenge to imagine really using, is BumpTop - a prelaunched, much hyped 3D desktop thing.

Via Metafluence on Twitter

Thought Control

The keyboard and mouse may end up looking like sad relics from a time in history when only a fraction of human capacity to manipulate information was leveraged. Hopefully that won't mean internet brain implants, but for some people it probably will. The following video goes in the "no thanks" column for me. It's called Brainloop and it's from Austria.

Via FreshCreation again.

How About Something More Familiar

One of the reasons we're excited about the launch of Adobe's AIR platform and in Rich Internet Applications in general is their potential for powerful, beautiful new interfaces. It's a lot more accessible for larger numbers of developers than any of the above ever will be. Innovation on AIR in new Twitter clients alone is a fun field to watch.

AIR, Flex and the forthcoming Thermo join Photoshop to make up the newest suite of Adobe tools for interface design. Check out the following video demonstration of the AIR and Flex at work on a Sony Ericsson website. The demo is from Raghunath Rao of Adobe in Bangalore, India.

Throw that onto a touchscreen interface, make it all bigger, and then we're really talking.

2D/3D Gaming

You know what I really want? I want a web experience like the soon-to-launch game Fez. Check out this video, it gets particularly interesting at :30.

Via gaming megablog Kotaku

I want my RSS reader to work like that. Combine some hand motion/touchscreen with some AIR/Flex/Thermo action with some 2D/3D viewing of related documents and I'm going to be in heaven. Make that song in the Fez demo play all the time, too.

Conclusion

Always-on access, the proliferation of publishers, content syndication and an inevitable shift in advertising dollars are all forces contributing to a growing demand for better interfaces. The iPhone's multi-touch interface is also moving things heavily in that direction, which may or may not be good for the web at large.

Other efforts to tackle the same problems include better filtering systems or recommendation engines. Those will make some sense in some cases but day in and day out, we need new interfaces to deal with the explosion of information underway. How do you want to interact with a world drowning in data?

(Maybe all of this is silly and the image below is all we need to know!)

via >> via >> via >> via

* No, we are not ceding the browser game to Firefox
* Hey, we are cool again
* No, we won’t let Amazon AWS be the de facto choice for start-up hosting

Maybe Sergey Brin was right to be unnerved.

The Microsoft vs Google slugfest is one of the better spectator sports around. It is like Sumo wrestling, but then some smaller guys like Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, Ask occasionally jump in the ring saying “hey, look at me, I am big too”. Whack. Oops, the big sumo boys did not mean to hurt you. As with any good match, we have passionate supporters on both sides and lots of really heavy betting action.

What’s been missing recently is the big moves by Microsoft. Bill Gates was pretty deliberate about his succession. First he hands over the biz stuff to Ballmer; squeeze every last drop out of that cash cow please. Then he brought in Ray Ozzie, his cerebral equal and somebody the developers can relate to.

With no big moves, I wondered if Ozzie was being shackled by the Innovators Dilemma and could not move fast enough to meet the emerging battle for the big cloud services.

However these latest moves indicate that Microsoft is thinking and not just roaring. There were also some quiet 'below the radar' deals last week, that were pretty significant if you look at where they could go. Acquiring Credentica is a big move in the online ID game and that is a big game that still needs leadership.

So I decided to research what Microsoft has acquired recently. Somebody has already done the hard work and put it onto Wikipedia. I don’t know if it is accurate; if you see any big gaps, you can go edit the Wikipedia entry (as well as commenting here of course). The number of acquisitions tells a story of a pretty hungry beast:

2000 - 7

2001 - 4

2002 - 4

2003 - 4

2004 - 4

2005 - 14 (including Groove, which brought in Ray Ozzie)

2006 - 19

2007 - 15

2008 - 5 (up to Feb 27th, does not have Credentica)

Many of these deals are quite small by Microsoft standards. They are buying R&D. It clearly takes them a long time to take cool R&D and scale it to the level that is needed to be meaningful for Microsoft. That is good news for start-ups looking to exit. When the big guys need every ounce of competitive advantage for their fights, small guys can benefit.

Image credit: mrcbrown

It'll take a while to settle into a decent format, so bear with me while I experiment with this.

Why the coffee picture? Well I'm hoping this feature becomes like a morning fix of caffiene for my US readers, as I'll be publishing it in time for breakfast over there. For my non-US readers, maybe it can be a mid-afternoon Diet Coke or evening Hot Chocolate :-)

Become.Com Goes Live 

They claim to have the Web's "Largest Search Engine For U.S. Shopping Information". 

Key quote from CEO Michael Yang: "This shows the ability of our vertical search strategy to produce the first disruptive technology in internet search since Google"

Views: Susan Mernit is curious about revenue and customer acquisition models. The Internet Stock Blog compares Become.com with Shopping.com (and others).

My comment: who knew spell check was such a crucial feature? (ref the press release) 

AP challenges Google News

MarketWatch: "...the Associated Press is "concerned" about its material being distributed through Google and other news aggregators" and is "trying to persuade Google to buy a license".

Views: Here's the original story from LA Times, who frame it as Google vs Yahoo (the latter pays license fees for their content). Threadwatch notes that whatever the outcome, it will set a legal precedent. PaidContent says "this [Content Providers looking for payments] will probably become a trend."

My comment: On one hand, as a Content Provider myself, of course I'm backing AP. On the other hand, long-term I think AP (as a bigco content provider) is better off trying to build their own aggregation and syndication services, rather than worrying too much about other aggregators.

del.icio.us funding round

Joshua Schachter, creator of the popular social bookmarks tool del.icio.us, announced an investment by a group including Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, Tim O'Reilly. Joshua says it's "a minority stake, which will keep me in control of the future of del.icio.us."

Views: Niall Kennedy, softechvc, Om Malik (who thinks the funding was "less than $2 million"), PaidContent (which notes of the investors: "Several already back or have backed tagging enterprises").

My comment: This has been heavily linked to today, so chances are it's not new news for you. Let me just add that I still think one of the big companies will buy out del.icio.us at some point, probably before the year is out. Who can resist becoming a dot com millionaire? ;-) My money's on Yahoo...

Bonus Link (froth on the top)

Excellent post by Chris Anderson detailing mainstream media meltdown: music, tv, radio, newspapers, magazines, books were all down in sales last year. Movies, video games and the Web were all up.

In other news, tomorrow morning I'll be launching a new feature on Read/Write Web which I think you'll enjoy. I'm also running on a stricter publishing timetable now. I'm aiming to publish all my Web 2.0 news and views posts to coincide with breakfast time in the United States (where most of readers come from, I think). This generally means publishing at 10-11pm New Zealand time so as to catch the early bird on that same day in the States - in a sense I'm a day ahead of most of you ;-)

One last thing for now. I'm still looking for sponsors for the rest of Read/Write Web (including the new feature I'm about to launch). So feel free to email me if you'd like to know more.