ReadWriteWeb

AppSumo, which is sort of like GroupOn or MacHeist for web apps, is offering $1,543 worth of credits towards developer tools and services like Linode, Heroku, Recurly and MongoHQ for $47. Most significantly, they're offering six months of SendGrid's e-mail deliverability service, valued at $479. If you've been meaning to check out any of these tools, this might be a good opportunity to do so, but please do note that these offers are mostly only available for new users.

Almost one year ago we started a post series that presented three different webs that are all made for machines. Now it is time to connect those webs and look at examples of how they can be used. To recap, first we looked at the Web of Data, which contains open, structured data sets consisting of factual knowledge that are linked.

Second was the Web of Identities, which is like the Web of Data, but for people data. Its ability protect one's privacy and to cope with data volatility differentiates it from the Web of Data. In the Web of Identities, it's people's social graphs that link one identity to another.

It was announced Tuesday that email management startup SendGrid had raised $5 million in Series A financing from a handful of prominent investors, including Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, Dave McClure, David Cohen and Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg. SendGrid, a graduate of last year's summer TechStars program, launched last fall and raised some seed funding from many of the same investors on its way to sending nearly 1.2 billion emails for its over 4,000 clients.

There's a fine line between what is considered a knowledge database and an invasion of privacy, and that line is likely to be determined by marketing. This week we wrote an article about Please Rob Me - a service that identifies Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins on Twitter and lets others know that a person is not home. While location-based services are often touted for their social and recommendation-based benefits, the realization that they can be used negatively have many questioning the responsibility of those groups that collect the data.

In the last two posts in this series, we discussed the Web of data, which makes structured interlinked data sets machine-accessible, and the Web of identities, which makes data about people machine-accessible while addressing privacy and data volatility.

This time, we'll focus on the Web of services, which makes services accessible to and processable for machines. These Webs all have a semantic architecture in common and follow basic Web principles, such as being decentralized, modular, simple, addressable via URIs, and built for machines.

What can be done to help professional news organizations survive in this internet era? The New York Times made mention this weekend of a particularly interesting project in the Czech Republic. Google is providing local staff to train reporters in one hyperlocal news network in the use of services like Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube.

An Amsterdam based holding company called PPF and the Paris based World Association of Newspapers are funding a fascinating project that will launch 30 different websites covering hyperlocal news throughout the Czech Republic. Google will provide technical training and the sites will run AdSense in exchange. In order to maximize contact with the local community, the project has hired 90 mostly young reporters who will work out of offices with public coffee and internet shops built into the facilities.

Looking at a regular graph of traffic data from Digg and Facebook, it would be easy to assume that Digg is lagging far behind Facebook's staggering growth. However, Compete just produced a very different graph that compares traffic at Digg and Facebook since their respective launches, and according to this data, Digg is actually doing better than Facebook. Facebook is obviously older than Digg, so while it has more traffic now, Digg's growth since its inception has actually been faster than Facebook's.

The latest tool to fight identity theft may already be in your pocket - it's your mobile phone. Using a new solution from Clickatell, a mobile messaging service provider, consumers can be alerted to suspicious bank transactions via text message. The service called Clickatell SMS Receipts notifies banking customers of account activity via SMS alerts. With this real-time information, consumers are instantly able to verify legitimate use of their account or detect fraud.

In the past, we've looked at alerts service like Yotify and Alerts.com, and they each do a decent enough job of being your personalized web scout. But recently, we were introduced to Trackle, a new service in the same genre. At first, we'll admit, our reaction to hearing there was yet another alerts service available was one of apathy - there are already plenty out there, including the old standby, Google Alerts - who needs another? As it turn out, Trackle was the one we were waiting for. After playing around with Trackle, it was clear that this one could be a winner.

From branchnext, the same company that delivered the personal web scout service Yotify (our coverage), there comes a new B2B alerts service called LetMeKnow. As with Yotify, LetMeKnow lets you track any number of changes that happen on the web - from price changes to new blog posts or comments and much more. However, unlike Yotify's consumer-facing service, LetMeKnow is designed for use by web publishers instead.