Weekly Wrapup: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we announce our first event: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It’s a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face conversation. Also this week we look at which ‘light blogging’ service is the most popular, tell you how to fix your Facebook privacy settings, analyze web tech VC trends in August, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Announcing the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit

ReadWriteWeb is pleased to announce our very first event, The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It’s a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face conversation.

In conjunction with the Summit, we’ll be releasing our second original premium research report in October. Registration is now open for the The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, we hope to see you there!

Web Trends

ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends of 2009

Last week we ran a series of posts outlining the 5 biggest Internet trends of this year: Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things. Effectively this was ReadWriteWeb’s State of the Web 2009.

We’ve now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. You can view the presentation in full screen by clicking the “full” button at the bottom of the presentation. You can also download the presentation as a Powerpoint file. All of the links in the presentation are clickable, should you wish to explore a certain topic more.

World’s Largest Paid Blogging Platform Goes Real-Time

Typepad, the SixApart-owned paid blogging service believed to be larger than any other online, announced this week that every one of its blogs will now make updates available in real time. A fast-growing number of sites around the web are now flying the real-time banner, so blogging could steal a little thunder back from immediacy-rich social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The Dirty Little Secret About the “Wisdom of the Crowds” – There is No Crowd

Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the “wisdom of crowds” is a trustworthy force on today’s web. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the “crowd” really thinks.

VC Series A Web Tech Deals in August

This week was the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, which triggered the financial meltdown. That was when ReadWriteWeb started tracking Series A deals in Web technology. Executive summary for August: down from July, with seed deals very weak. Analysis: decadent Europeans are not the only ones who take holidays in August. Read on for details.

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.
Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
Codero, Dedicated Hosting with Backup & Managed Services.
Groupsite.com, How Groups Make Things Happen.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ and using social software inside organizations.

Adobe Acquires Omniture: It’s All About the Revenue Model

Adobe is looking to stall falling sales and profit by entering into a new market: analytics. But rather looking to R&D, Adobe is instead coughing up $1.8 billion for analytics leader Omniture. This is the largest acquisition by Adobe since the purchase of Macromedia for $3 billion in 2005.

The acquisition has puzzled many, since Adobe and Omniture products really have no natural cooperation. There have been comments about the measurement capabilities that Omniture will give to content built with Adobe products. But in the end the entire deal revolves around two words: recurring revenue.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Going Viral in 6 Questions, Part One: Spymaster

Many web apps claim virality; very few actually find it. In a new series exploring the anatomy of truly viral apps, our first specimen is Spymaster, the Twitter- and Facebook-based social game that exploded with tens of thousands of users within hours of the creators throwing up a simple page and absolutely no media coverage. From creating addiction to managing site traffic, read on to learn how they did it and what they’re doing next.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Poll: Which Light Blogging Service Do You Use?

This week we reported that Posterous, a popular minimalist blogging service, had added the ability for its users to import their Tumblr content. Tumblr is a competing ‘light blogging’ service – the market leader in fact. Other similar services include Soup.io, Noovo, Vox, Profilactic and even WordPress.com and Blogger.com are used for this purpose (although they’re more used for long-form blogging).

5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook

When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we’ve got a problem. People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world’s largest social network, without a second thought as to who’s reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road.

But what can be done? It’s not like you can just quit Facebook, right? No – and you don’t have to either. You just need to take a few precautions.

Google Acquires reCAPTCHA to Fight Spam and Improve Google Books OCR

Google announced this week that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, one of the leading providers of CPATCHAs, the hard-to-read puzzles you often have to solve before you can sign up for a new web service. Google is looking at reCAPTCHA as a way to improve the optical character recognition (OCR) software it uses for large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and the Google News Archive Search.

Making Search Prettier: Bing Launches Visual Search

Since Microsoft launched Bing, the company has been trying to position it as a ‘decision engine’ and not just as another search engine. This week, Microsoft took another step in this direction with the launch of Visual Search in Bing. For a growing number of searches, instead of giving users a list of 10 blue links, Bing will now give users the option to visualize the search results on a 3D grid with icons or photos.