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  Web

  Last100: The Making of Network Torrent

  Our network blog Last100 has an interesting story about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's recent experiment with offering a legal torrent download of one of its original primetime television shows -- a first for a major North American broadcast network. The post was written by Guinevere Orvis, who is a Web...

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  Web

  YouTube Launches Video Stats Package

  Google announced this evening the immediate availability of a new video statistics package free for anyone with a YouTube account. The software, called Insight, gives users access to a range of statistics about the videos they upload to the site, such as where viewers are from, how often viewers in...

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  Web

  Comment of the Day: Semantic Marketing

  Today's winning comment comes from Alex Iskold's must-read post Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies. In the post Alex identifies the patterns that are beginning to emerge in the Semantic Web, classifies the different trends, and examines what the future holds. One of the comments to the post...

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  Web

  Microsoft’s Latest Jab at Google Docs: Albany?

  Over the past couple of years, Microsoft's online office strategy has grown increasingly muddled, while Google has emerged has the clear leader in the web office space with their Google Docs product. Microsoft has been reluctant to cannibalize any of its cash cow desktop office software business by introducing a...

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  Web

  Manifesto to Avoid a Google Media Monoculture

  For many decades we had a PC monoculture controlled by Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, by Intel. Today, in the world of online media, that same thing looks like it could happen. But it doesn't have to be that way. This 4-point manifesto lays out how to avoid a...

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  Social

  More Questions Than Answers About OpenSocial

  The launch of the OpenSocial Foundation yesterday was probably more about preempting lawsuits than it is about anything else, but getting Yahoo!, Google and Newscorp all in the same room raised some eyebrows. It also raises some big questions. In fact, there may be more questions on the table about...

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  Web

  Good UI Design: Make It Easy, Show Me You Care

  When researching FuseCal this morning, one of the things that made it so appealing to try was the fact that you could just enter in a URL and see the service in action right away. No sign-up forms, no logins. This got us thinking about UI design as it applies...

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  Web

  Twitter Dominates the Lifestream

  By using FriendFeedStats, which creates service-level usage statistics from lifestream aggregator FriendFeed based on its public timeline, we can see which services are the most popular. Specifically, Twitter tends to dominate the conversation with about 44% of all activity on the service. Eric, over at Internet Duct Tape, spent the...

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  Web

  Finally, Sync Any Calendar to Any Calendar

  Keeping up with multiple calendars can be hard. Many people have one for work, with details on important meetings, phone calls, and to-do's, and another for the family, with the kids' activities, personal errands, and family whereabouts. Online calendars have made it easier to access all your different calendars on...

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  Web

  Comment of the Day: Despite Concerns, OpenSocial Foundation a Positive Move

  The big news today was the announcement of the OpenSocial Foundation, a joint effort by Google, Yahoo! and MySpace's Newscorp. As we reported earlier today, the creation of an open, non-profit organization will assuage concerns about whether Google is exercising leadership or control with OpenSocial.But there are other concerns. In...

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  Web

  Introducing The Semantic Web Gang

  We're pleased to announce a new monthly feature on ReadWriteTalk, ReadWriteWeb's podcast show. There's a new podcast gang in town and it's called The Semantic Web Gang. The group is led by Paul Miller of Talis and includes our own Alex Iskold. Indeed we just published a monster post about...

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  Web

  10 Adobe AIR Apps Bloggers Will Love

  Last month we showed you some of the more popular and useful Adobe AIR applications (see "6 Adobe AIR Apps to Check Out"), but there are so many great Adobe AIR applications currently available, it would be a shame to stop at just those six. As we delved through he...

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  Web

  Jailed Blogger’s Supporters to Go Offline and “Flood the Jail with Mail”

  Twenty-two year old law student Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman marked the first of a four year sentence in an Egyptian prison last November. His crime was "defaming the President of Egypt" on his blog. His first year in prison included isolation and physical torture. The one thing that's made a...

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  Social

  Liveblogging OpenSocial Foundation Call, With Commentary

  We'll be liveblogging the press call for the OpenSocial Foundation, a joint announcement by Google, Yahoo! and MySpace's Newscorp that we covered earlier today. It starts in just a few minutes and we're being joined by two excellent guest commentators, tech analyst Steve Gillmor and OpenID Foundation chair Scott Kveton....

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  Social

  Google, Yahoo!, News Corp. Team Up on OpenSocial

  Google, Yahoo!, and News Corp., parent of the web's largest social network MySpace, announced today that they had teamed up to form the non-profit OpenSocial Foundation. The foundation has the stated goal "to ensure the sustainable and open development of the OpenSocial initiative and related intellectual property." According to the...

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  Social

  Microsoft Joins 5 Social Networks in Data Portability Pact

  Microsoft announced a partnership this morning with five social networks on data portability. Starting today, users on Facebook and Bebo will be able to add friends via their Windows Live address book. The functionality will be coming to Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn in the next few months. Microsoft is calling...

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  Web

  Mixx to Digg: We Break News Faster

  Today, social news web site, Mixx, announced new features to their service that will help them break news faster by getting big news stories promoted to the home page in a timely fashion. On the Mixx blog post about the changes, they point out that timeliness has been a problem...

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  Web

  Social Apps Set Free: Ringside Networks to Port Facebook Apps to Web

  Veteran Open Source businessman Bob Bickel will launch his new company Ringside Networks at the Open Source Business Conference tomorrow and he's set his sites high. Ringside will let developers easily port Facebook apps to any other website and it will integrate company websites with social graph and communication features...

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  Web

  Comment of the Day: Facebook Security Lapse is Weeks Old

  Today's winning comment comes from our post about a Facebook security flaw that allowed people to access private photos - including some from Paris Hilton at the Emmys and others from Facebook founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vacation in November of 2005. In an excellent example of crowdsourced fact checking and...

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  Web

  Yahoo! Releases Badges for Pipes

  Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest apps on the web for messing around with data. You can use it to splice together feeds, filter them, pull photos from Flickr and do a whole lot more. Some usability improvements would be nice but a little bit of experimentation goes a...