ReadWriteWeb

If you've spent more than a few tracks worth of time playing with Pandora, you know that you can't access every song or even every artist you may be into. You can find plenty of music by the Pixies, for example, but another favorite from my college days, Liz Phair, is nowhere to be found on the service.

Raditaz launched earlier this month with promises 14 million licensed tracks, compared to the "more than 900,000" currently offered by Pandora. But guess what?

Still no Liz Phair. And now, seemingly, no Pixies either.

The question being posed by a new generation of news readers who now depend more upon online sources than any other, is whether the editorial process for deciding the precedence of articles in a publication - for deciding what you read, when you read the publication - matters. In a world full of thousands of "sources," some of them actually legitimate, most Web readers today have adopted a pick-and-choose mentality. In many cases, they end up making those choices based on headlines and not their sources. (Just a reminder to that end, you're currently reading ReadWriteWeb.)

The dream of online publishers is to be able to use logic to build news packages that cater to the specific interests of each individual member of their readerships. But how exactly should that logic work? The publishers of a Web service we've covered here, News360 - which launched an autosyncing phone app for iOS and Android on Tuesday - are exploring whether the order and presentation of news can be determined using a Pandora-like dynamic formula, learning what you like to read by what you tend to read.

Evgeny Morozov's book, "The Net Delusion," is a condemnation of what he calls "cyber-utopianism." This is the belief that the social web is so sui generis that its essential difference alone will save those who use it from repression and tyranny.

Indeed, it may have seemed like that at the beginning. But as even third-rate tin-horn dictators learn from the pioneers in the field of online tyranny, these technologies have become as much a tool of oppression as they ever were of liberation. The problem is, much of the public, and a great many influential western politicians and diplomats, still believe it is the way and the light.

A lot of speculation was dished out leading up to the launch of the latest iteration of the iPhone, and plenty more has followed since it has started landing in the hands of early adopters. I was one of the lucky few that managed to secure a pre-ordered phone, but wasn't able to get it shipped to my home. Instead, I woke up and the crack of dawn and stood in line for several hours to get my iPhone 4 - meeting several great people during the process. Since having time to play and experiment over the weekend, I've been surprised by several things - good and bad, big and small - about the phone and the new OS.

Less than a week ago, Google introduced its own Android phone, the Nexus One. Over the weekend, we got a chance to take the phone through its paces and while we aren't quite ready to give up our iPhone yet, the Nexus One is a formidable challenger. Apple will clearly have to step up its game with the next iPhone if it wants to hold off Android's momentum. In terms of features, the Nexus One is already on par with the iPhone platform and beats it in many areas. When it comes to the overall user experience, the iPhone is still a step ahead of the Android platform, but that could easily change in the near future.

Backboard, a sophisticated online solution for gathering feedback about various types of documents, came out of public beta this morning. Backboard allows users to upload and comment on standard Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, but it also supports most standard graphics formats, including PhotoShop, and gives users the ability to mark up and comment on web pages. Backboard is geared towards a wide range of users, including freelancers as well as enterprise customers, and it is one of the easiest to use feedback and approval systems we have seen in a long time.

Earlier today we mentioned a plugin for AIM that would translate what you type on the fly into another language. That's an exceptionally useful tool, but the far more fluid and accurate way to speak to people in another language, is to actually learn the language. Thankfully, there are a wide variety of ways to learn languages online, many of them available for free. Below is a list of more than 20 ways you can go from knowing how to say "Hello" to fluency.