Latest Articles

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  Web

  Exclusive: Prototype Invest – App Development for Equity

  Tomorrow a new breed of investment firm called Prototype Invest will officially launch, though the site is available now. Prototype Invest is a unique type of early stage investment firm. Rather than put money into startups, Prototype supplies technology in exchange for equity. This is an investment firm for anyone...

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  Report: Social Media Challenging Traditional Media

  Universal McCann has released a new report on the impact of social media (such as blogs, social networks, online video) on the media landscape. It surveyed 17,000 Internet users worldwide in March 2008. The report found that social media, in particular blogs, are "becoming a more important part of global...

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  5 Places Your Opinion Counts – Debate Site Roundup

  While you're waiting for The Great Debaters to come out on DVD in a couple of weeks, there are a few places where you can put in some debate practice online in the meantime. One of the great things about writing a blog is that it is a platform for...

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  Track Distributed Conversations With YackTrack

  Not too long ago, we discussed the problem of conversation fragmentation in the blogosphere and how new services, like FriendFeed, as well as old services, like Digg, were providing places to have conversations about a blog post off of the blog's web site itself. While many saw this trend as...

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  Early Stats Show Twitter Taking Off in Japan

  Last week trendy micro-blogging service Twitter launched officially in Japan, after the company had "noticed a significant percent of Twitter usage consistently originating from Japan". At the time of launch, Joi Ito - an investor in Twitter - claimed that Japan usage "was nearly 30% of Twitter earlier on", but...

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  The Whatchamacallit, Post Recession Phase Transition

  We are in the early stages of a major phase transition. Whatever you call it, something new is brewing, and that nasty R word has a lot do with it. It is not the semantic web. That is a part of it, a big piece of the new technology pie,...

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  Weekly Wrapup, 21-25 April 2008

  This week was a hectic one, with a number of RWW writers present at the annual Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The big Internet news of the week was the launch of Microsoft's Live Mesh. Yahoo also announced key support for Social Graph and data portability. In social networking...

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  Internet TV News: Three More Netflix Set-Top Box Partners, New Hollywood JV, PS3 Movie Download Service

  Lots more Internet TV-related coverage on our network blog last100 this week, including news of a new joint venture from Viacom, Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate; Netflix has secured three new set-top box partners who'll add support for the company’s ‘Watch Now’ video streaming service; more speculation surrounding Sony's forthcoming movie...

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  Study: Social Networks Mirroring Reality TV

  New research from the University of Buffalo and University of Hawaii concludes that young people who watch reality TV are more likely to accept a large number of unknown friends and to post photos of themselves on social networking sites than their peers who do not watch shows like American...

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  Track Blog Trends with Trendpedia

  From Brussels-based company Attentio comes a new blog search engine and trend-tracking tool called Trendpedia. The service, now out of beta, lets you scan the blogosphere for trends to see what's getting buzz. Trendpedia also lets you compose visualizations of those trends as charts and graphs, which can then be...

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  Rails Kits: Software as a Service Made Easy

  Ok, well, maybe not easy -- you do still have to build the software. But Rails Kits has created a software as a service "starter kit" that provides a pain-free way to add subscription management, recurring billing, and credit card management functionality to any Rails app. At the Web 2.0...

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  Faster – Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future

  A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a weekend piece entitled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, which focused on the stressful nature of blogging. Using our friend Marc Orchant's death and Om Malik's heart attack as examples, Matt Richel built a case...

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  There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 – There is Just the Web

  Something struck me while listening to Tim O'Reilly's keynote speech at the Web 2.0 expo yesterday: glancing at my notes after he walked off stage, I noticed that his current definition for Web 2.0, is a lot like the definition he's given for Web 3.0. Based on this, plus past...

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  Video Comments? No Thanks – 5 Reasons They Don’t Work

  Yesterday morning the web's largest web tech blog added video comments courtesy of of live video startup Seesmic. About 24 hours later, video comments had turned into a mini-trend with another 80 blogs installing them. While adding them at TechCrunch was a smart move by founder Michael Arrington -- who...

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  Yahoo! to Rewire for Social Graph and Data Portability

  Yahoo! announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo the availability of the first program in its large vision for a dramatic overhaul of the company across all its properties. The Search Monkey developer platform will let site owners alter their search results listing, including through semantic markup. Mark Hendrickson at...

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  ThoughtFarmer’s Tubetastic Marketing Campaign

  Earlier this month, we opened up and shared with readers the different ways we're pitched by companies wanting coverage. We mentioned our favorite way (hint: RSS) and have been enjoying the feeds that have been sent in since. We also noted the arrival of the twitpitch - the new trend...

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  Social

  MySpace Apps Are Go For All Users

  MySpace officially opened its Application Gallery to all users this morning after launching it in public beta last March. In that time over 1,000 applications have been approved and added to the gallery and there have been over 2.1 million application installs across the site. Today, MySpace began promoting applications...

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  Tim O’Reilly: Tackle Big, Hard Problems With Web 2.0

  The ReadWriteWeb team is at the Web 2.0 Expo. Tim O'Reilly opens the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes with a discussion on the opportunities in web 2.0 today. Here are some real-time notes on his session. His main message is to "not follow the headlines" and the hot consumer apps, but...

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  Social

  When Will Facebook Be Ready for Business?

  For awhile we've been pushing the idea of Facebook evolving to support business social networking alongside the "social" social networking. But in order for that to work, the site needs to find a way to shed its image as a beacon of college hooliganism -- Facebook is a place to...

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  So You’re Launching a Platform: After Ubiquitous APIs – What’s the Next Frontier?

  We're here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and are getting inundated with press releases about new APIs and developer platforms, many from companies we've never even heard of in the first place. How long ago was it that the forward-looking thinkers argued that APIs and platforms would...