English is the de facto lingua franca of global business (pardon the Latin). If you want to do business globally, you have to be able to speak and write English. But most of the world's conversations occur in other languages. We want ReadWriteWeb to be a venue for conversations about innovation not just in English but in all major languages. We want to hear stories about innovation in those languages by people who live and work in those countries. We also want some of those stories to be translated back into English for a global audience - English serving as the hub, as it were.

Our Trailblazing Site in France

ReadWriteWeb France is blazing a trail that we want to follow into other countries. Web innovators in France can now read a selection of posts from ReadWriteWeb in French. Fabrice Epelboin and his team translate ReadWriteWeb posts into French, localize the stories, adding bits that make them relevant to France, and create new stories specific to France. Some of these stories are clearly important to readers outside of France, and we will be bringing these to our global audience. One example is Fabrice's crusade against the Hadopi law. The law is specific to France, but the issues are global, and other governments are working on similar issues that could have alarming outcomes. We hope that ReadWriteWeb becomes both a local and global voice on issues such as this.

5 Other Country Versions in the Pipeline

Versions of ReadWriteWeb are currently being created for:

• China
• Korea
• Spain
• Holland
• Brazil

In each country, we are working with an entrepreneur who is passionate about Web technology.

These countries are all large economies. We already know how many people from these countries read our content in English. Many more will read and engage if the content is in their local language.

Engagement is critical. Reading is easier than writing. Many people are comfortable reading a post in a foreign language: even if they don't understand everything, they at least get critical information that is not available in their native language. But writing a comment and engaging in a conversation is much harder in a foreign language.

Why We Naturally Take a Global View

Many people assume, looking at our content, that ReadWriteWeb is based in Silicon Valley. We are not. We do have writers in the Valley, and we congregate there frequently for major events. But ReadWriteWeb's founder and editor, Richard MacManus, is based in New Zealand. Our COO, Bernard Lunn, is based in New York but is a Brit who was born in Berlin and has lived and worked all around the world. We are a networked business, with no single location, using the online tools that we write about to run our business. So viewing anywhere in the world as a good place to report from and not regarding any place as "foreign" comes natural to us.

From a 3D printer churning out plastic copies of Darth Vader's head to the show's most geektastic game (hint: not Rock Band this time), Gnomedex left very little to be desired from our intrepid staff. Gather around and hear the tale of another great conference from Marshall Kirkpatrick, Steven Walling, Frederic Lardinois, and Jolie O'Dell.

Immediately after filming the roundtable, the crew dispersed for coffee and/or a quick game of werewolf with MakerBot's Bre Pettis, each according to the dictates of his own conscience. We hope to see one another again very soon!

As always, many thanks to Chris Pirillo for organizing another fantastic, inspiring show.

Here are a few photos by the talented, San Francisco-based Kenneth Yeung of www.thelettertwo.com. You can see more of his Gnomedex photos here.

We at ReadWriteWeb have had an awesome time gathering video content lately. We love it so much that we plan to do it a lot more. One of the discussions in the back channels has been about where to post our video content, and after considering a whole boatload of factors and testing several services, we've started posting content on our brand-new Vimeo account.

In the past, team members have used YouTube, Viddler, Blip, and a handful of other video services. We loved YouTube's HD, large-file capabilities, but we hated the media player and the YouTube watermark that ended up all over our lovely content. We adored Blip's customizable player, but our longer, in-depth interview videos were a bit too large for that format.

Our Vimeo Plus account will allow us to upload a healthy-to-ridiculous amount of HD video each week, and the speed of uploading and processing for Plus accounts is mind-reelingly fast. We'll also get to make widgets from our content. And we definitely love the very social component of groups and channels. We couldn't be more excited, and we hope to have a long and productive experience with Vimeo.

As a side note, this post isn't meant as an endorsement of Vimeo; different products work better for different purposes, as noted by many Twitter followers last week.

Another factor behind our decision was the surprisingly enthusiastic user response to Vimeo when we conducted an informal Twitter poll. Since you guys like the Vimeo platform and community so much, we hope you'll add us and check out our social media channel and our RWW group. We've added a few videos to the channel and group so far; if you have a video you'd like us to add to our curated content, just email us.

And as always, suggestions on how we can improve our video coverage are welcomed; just leave your erudite ponderings in the comments.

I'm very pleased to announce that Susan Scrupski (a.k.a. "ITSinsider") has joined ReadWriteWeb as our VP Enterprise Content and Programs. Starting today, Susan will assume responsibility for building our editorial and expertise in applying the principals of Web 2.0 to the Enterprise. With a focus on how the Web is disrupting traditional business processes and operations, our Enterprise channel (which will soon be re-launched with a new design) will focus on new products, case studies, and innovative developments involving Web strategy and execution in a B2B context. Yes, B2B is back!

Susan is the fourth full-time member of ReadWriteWeb, after myself (the founder), Marshall Kirkpatrick who joined us full-time in August as VP Content Development, and Bernard Lunn who became COO in December. The rest of our staff are contractors. I am proud of the whole team we have managed to put together without external funding.

Please join me in welcoming Susan into her new role. We have big plans for ReadWriteWeb and we're grateful for the continued support of our readers and sponsors.

Follow ReadWriteWeb on Twitter

Talk About The Passion

Even though RWW is now written by an awesome team of people, it has retained the same essential character and 'voice' that it had when I started it. This blog is about providing analysis of, and insights into, Web trends and the latest Web products. Each of our writers is different and brings their own unique voice to RWW, but we all share a passion for Web technology and that is what ReadWriteWeb is all about. Of course, our readers also share that passion. It is the read/write, two-way Web after all! So thank you to all our readers and supporters over the years. It continues to amaze me how many great people I meet through blogging, all over the world.

As for me personally, I spend most of time now managing the RWW business instead of writing. I would like to write more often, to be honest. But as all startup entrepreneurs will know, when you bootstrap something over a period of years you become a jack of all trades! It's been hard work over 5 years, but I love the challenges of running a 'new media' business and making sure ReadWriteWeb is always at least one step ahead of Web trends :-)

RWW Designs Through the Years

ReadWriteWeb has gone through a number of iterations in design over the years. My dates on these are a bit hazy, but here are some screenshots:

In April 2003 ReadWriteWeb looked like this:

The first proper design I did was in September 2003 and it was, believe it or not, green ("pacific green" to be precise). The version below is a minimalist iteration from Jan '05:

RWW went red sometime around November 2005 - and that's been our color ever since! The image below is a later iteration of this:

And of course here is our current design, which went live over Christmas 2007:

Looking Back

As each year has passed, I've done a review. For nostalgia's sake, here are the links:

• After one year, part 1
• After one year, part 2
• After two years
• After four years (in that post I delved into RWW's history more, if you're interested)
• Pre-RWW, my first ever blog post March 2002!

Onward

It's all very well looking at the past, but if you're in the blogging industry you know that it's all about the now and the near future. Watch out for more great things from ReadWriteWeb this year and beyond!