Weekly Wrapup: Recommender Systems, Social Media Trends, State of Blog Search, And More...

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we continue our series on recommendation technologies, outline 10 ways that social media will change in 2009, look at 8 mobile technologies to watch in 2009-10, review the state of blog search, and more. Also we note the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb’s new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

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Web Trends

ReadWriteWeb Guide to Recommender Systems

We’re running a special series on recommendation technologies and in this post we give an overview of the different approaches – including a look at how Amazon and Google use recommendations. Wikipedia notes that recommendations are generally based on an “information item (the content-based approach) or the user’s social environment (the collaborative filtering approach).” We think there’s also a personalization approach, which Google in particular is focused on. We explore some of these concepts in this post.

4 Approaches to Music Recommendations: Pandora, Mufin, Lala, and eMusic

Thanks to MP3s and the Internet, we now have millions of songs readily available to us with the click of a button, but, paradoxically, this has often made it even harder to discover new music to listen to. Every online music store and every social network that focuses on online music, however, now features some kind of music recommendation system, and some services like Pandora or Slacker Radio are indeed nothing else but highly sophisticated music discovery engines. In this post, we look at the different approaches behind some of the most popular music recommendation and discovery services.

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009

“Social media” was the term du jour in 2008. Consumers, companies, and marketers were all talking about it. We have social media gurus, social media startups, social media books, and social media firms. It is now common practice among corporations to hire social media strategists, assign community managers, and launch social media campaigns, all designed to tap into the power of social media. But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.

8 Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2009, 2010

Analyst firm Gartner released a report this week that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they’ve identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

In Cloud We Trust?

Cloud computing may have been one of the biggest “buzzwords” (buzz phrases?) of this past year. From webmail to storage sites to web-based applications, everything online was sold under a new moniker in 2008: they’re all “cloud” services now. Yet even though millions of internet users make use of these online services in some way, it seems that we haven’t been completely sold on the cloud being any more safe or stable than data stored on our own computers.

4 Realistic Things You Should Know on International Data Privacy Day

This week featured the second annual International Data Privacy Day. Though data privacy is a big issue these days – it’s not a whole lot of fun to think about. We offer in this post a list of four things you should make sure to know about regarding privacy, including some pointers to discussions of how the privacy situation today is more complicated than a traditional approach to privacy protection may allow for. We’re not going to focus on how to get your tin foil hat to use PGP encryption, we’ve got a short list of things that all of us realistically should know about for a baseline of online privacy awareness.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
Discover the Semantic Web, at a Dow Jones Webinar.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 allows you to create interactive social media experiences.
WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
DEMO09 is the launchpad for emerging technology.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Jobwire

How to Read the Jobwire, from ReadWriteWeb

The ReadWriteWeb Jobwire is a site dedicated to reporting on the newest hires in tech, new media and related industries. Every day we scour the web for the freshest hiring news and then we publish periodic reports on aggregate hiring trends. What hires are your competitors making? Click on the tags in any story for company names or industry sectors. For example, you can see all the latest hires reported on in social networking or by software companies. What kinds of positions are being filled? Check out the latest hires tagged by job title, like sales or developer. Have you just been hired or made a new hire at your company? Fill out this form and let us know – we love to report on hires of all shapes and sizes in tech!

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB’S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Products

The State of Blog Search, 2009

What blog search engine should you use? That depends on your needs.

In order to join a conversation, you’ve got to be able to find it first. Three years ago “blog search” was expected to be a booming industry, startups left and right developed different technologies and more than a few raised millions of dollars to help users search the part of the web made up of blogs. These days no one thinks consumer-market blog search is a serious business, but many of us still have a need to limit searches to blogs. What should we do? ReadWriteWeb offers some recommendations and an assessment of the state of the industry below.

Google and Plaxo Combine OpenID and OAuth for Improved Usability

As a concept, OpenID has shown a great deal of potential. But that potential has often been hamstrung by the series of hurdles through which OpenID users have been required to jump in order to use their credentials. When Facebook Connect entered the distributed digital identity fray, those OpenID usability problems came into stark relief. Now, Google and Plaxo have responded with a new workflow for OpenID logins that simplifies the process and improves the usability – by adding OAuth and the Google Contacts API to the mix.

Gmail Gets Offline Support, Finally

One of the longest-running requests for Google’s web mail service Gmail has been for offline functionality. Now, finally, Gmail users will be able to type up those emails inside an airplane. Google has just announced offline Gmail support via Gmail Labs – to start with for consumers and businesses using Google Apps, but regular Gmail consumers will get it a couple of days later. The offline feature was built using Gears, Google’s offline web application API.

Notifixious’ Superfeeder: Getting Closer to the Real-Time Web

RSS feeds have become the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement, but as we are moving towards a real-time experience on the web, RSS is starting to show its age. To update your subscriptions, you have to regularly poll these feeds. This, of course, is a major problem for RSS readers and notification services which often have to deal with a substantial lag before new posts and messages appear. The newest service that tries to tackle this problem is Notifixious, but as Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux explains, a lot of problems still need to be fixed before ubiquitous real-time notifications can become a reality.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Enterprise

How Can Web Tech Help Enterprises with Innovation Management?

In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School describes the theory of how large outstanding firms can fail “by doing everything right.” The innovator’s dilemma, according to Christensen, affects companies whose success and capabilities can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and technologies. There is no more important an issue on the agenda of top management than driving innovation. In this post, we’ll review the evolution of “innovation management” and how social media has a significant role to play. This is one area where social media can “move the needle” for large enterprises and help them change the very nature of the firm.