ReadWriteWeb

Engineers at the University of Washington are developing the first mobile technology able to transmit American Sign Language (ASL) over cellular networks. The software called MobileASL currently runs on phones imported from Europe while being tested, but it could be configured to run on any device in the near future.

If you're wondering how the engineers are claiming "first" when video conferencing solutions, most notably Apple's FaceTime and mobile video applications like Fring, already provide face-to-face communications ideal for signing, the difference is in the technology behind mobileASL itself.

"In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.

As the social Web expands, it becomes continually easier for large corporations to communicate with their customers wherever they spend their time online. Facebook and Twitter have attracted big brands because that's where the customers are, but failing to use these services to their own unique potential is just as easy as setting up an account. Some new stats released by digital agency 360i second this notion - showing that brands on Twitter are failing to truly grasp the essence of the popular micro-blogging service.

We noted last year, that many believe U.S. President Obama's push for governmental transparency has been a failure. Whether that's true, the overall tendency toward access continues to gather momentum.

The U.S. House of Representatives has announced a public hearing to explore making publicly-funded research open to the public. Legislators in both the House and the Senate have already introduced bills calling for this. If they pass, the implications could be significant and might result in an economic jump.

Thirty-two percent of online teens have experienced some form of harassment via the Internet, a problem also known as "cyberbullying." According to recent data, 15% of online teens have had private material forwarded without permission, 13% have received threatening messages and 6% have had embarrassing photos posted without permission.

In light of the recent discussions surrounding Facebook and privacy issues, it's important to note that Facebook's new push towards becoming a more open, public network won't just have an effect on an adult population concerned with worries of "friending" bosses and colleagues or adjusting the privacy settings on their children's photos - it will affect the children themselves, as well as teens and young adults, all of which combined make up over a quarter of the social network's user base.

Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) are developing a new Twitter client application that aims to derive meaning from the next-ending influx of tweets. The application, called "Eddi," automatically groups tweets for you into topics mentioned either explicitly or, unlike most Twitter clients that also provide topic browsing, implicitly. The end result is a Twitter app you can use to quickly find the popular discussions within your own personal Twitter stream, either by search, tag cloud, timeline or category list. It even suggests tweets you might be interested in reading, helping you sort the signal from the noise.

A new study released earlier this month seems to contradict findings from Pew Internet Project's February report on the declining blog authorship and blog readership among the youngest generation of online users. Instead of seeing a downward trend in blogging, the latest research appears, at first glance, to have us questioning those prior reports.

According to the latest study, this one from BlogHer and iVillage (red flag?) and co-sponsored by Ketchum and The Nielsen Company, young adults known as "Millenials" are the top demographic group in both reading and writing blogs, with nearly one third reporting they read blogs and just over 40% saying they blog themselves.

So was the earlier study - the one claiming "kids don't blog" anymore - wrong?

A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be "popular" Twitterers, but that's not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don't always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.

Researchers at Stanford University have just made a major breakthrough that may impact the technology industry for years to come: they've built a better battery. The project, an attempt to use lithium-sulfur in place of the lithium-ion technology that is used in batteries today, has been in development since 2007. Recently, the scientists' efforts were rewarded when they created a battery that lasts four times as long as its lithium-ion counterparts while also having the benefit of being "significantly safer" than today's batteries which occasionally explode after short-circuiting.

Although still a ways off from commercial viability (and availability), the lithium-sulfur batteries promise advances like 80% more capacity, 10 times the power density and, theoretically, the ability to last four times as long as modern batteries.

The fact of the matter is, we're relatively far and few between, according to a study by Barracuda Networks. One day, we're told Twitter is growing exponentially, the next, it's a dying service that's stalled out like your grandpa's Studebaker. But does growth, or the lack thereof, actually translate into use?