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  Make Mashups Using Your Own Data with geoXtract

  GeoXtract is a powerful tool that allows you to integrate your own data with Google Maps or Google Earth. Using this desktop application, you can create a personalized map with no programming experience required. Using your own data source, which can be an Excel Spreadsheet (.xls), Access database (.mdb), or...

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  eBay Seller Boycott: UGC Means User Power

  The problem with running a site that relies heavily on users to generate content, is that it puts a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of those users (in relation to the site owners). If users are unhappy with something about the way a site that relies on user...

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  Link Attraction Factors: Getting Dugg and Going Viral

  This is guest post by Dan Zarrella, a social media marketing consultant. You can follow him on Twitter here.While some people have said that Digg has begun to lose its relevancy since the recent algorithmic changes, I believe it still represents an incredibly rich resource for studying social media and...

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  Backpack Upgrade – Maybe Not So Out of Focus

  Last week we wrote a piece questioning whether perhaps 37Signals had lost focus with the upgrades to their popular Backpack organizational tool. We argued that the changes were morphing Backpack from a simple organizational tool into a robust intranet system that put it on a collision course with Basecamp, the...

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  Blist Brings Bling to Databases and Spreadsheets

  Blist, a darling of the DEMO 08 conference, is announcing this morning that they have raised a $6m "A Round" of venture capital. Who knew that spreadsheets made social = big investments? That's what they do, they make database information and spreadsheet social. Wonder at their uninspired blog, wonder at...

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  Fail: Social News on World Events, Like Cuba

  Here's a test for Web 2.0. Cuba's Fidel Castro announced yesterday morning that he is resigning from his post as ruler of that communist country. What better way to celebrate the departure of an authoritarian dictator than to look at how the free flow of information in online social media...

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  Comment of the Day: Medical Diagnosis via Internet Coming Soon

  Our 9th daily Comments Competition winner is Falafulu Fisi, for his comment on our post Web 2.0 Meets Medicine. Falafulu told us that the "current state of the art in medicine 2.0 of today is the automated online CDSS (Clinical Decision Support Systems)", which he says is starting to do...

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  Digg Gets More Mainstream; But Are Their News Sources Too Narrow Now?

  Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks did an analysis of current frontpage stories on digg, the popular social news site that started out as a tech competitor to Slashdot. Allen noted that now just 15% of frontpage stories are technology ones, which is a huge change from its roots. Slashdot meanwhile...

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  WhyGoSolo Bridges Your Online and Offline Worlds

  WhyGoSolo, a completely self-funded startup from Washington D.C., wants to help you transition your online relationships and friendships to the offline world. For some people, the interactions they have online are so fulfilling that they are overlooking the importance of having real-world relationships. With WhyGoSolo's online community and tools like...

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  Scribd Launches New Platform and iPaper, a New Format for Web Docs

  Scribd, the online document sharing site, announced today the creation of a new document format built for the web, dubbed iPaper. This web-based viewer lets you view documents in a browser using a Flash-based widget, with no need for software downloads. Also launched today is the Scribd platform, a set...

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  Mosso: Cloud Computing for the Rest of Us

  Outages aside, there's no doubt that the rise of web scale computing platforms, like Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, have lowered the barrier of entry for Internet startups. Going completely serverless would have been unheard of during the late-90s dot com boom, but new cloud computing platforms have made it...

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  Web 2.0 Meets Medicine: Focused on Communication

  Bertalan Meskó from the excellent ScienceRoll blog has uploaded a presentation he gave recently at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference. The presentation, embedded below, is a great overview of how the Web is being utilized in the medical profession. I was particularly interested in the story of Dr Jay...

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  Bungee Launches PaaS for Building Web Apps in the Cloud

  The Bungee Connect platform is the first end-to-end, cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for professional-class web applications. Today, Bungee Labs released a new version of the Bungee Connect web application development and hosting platform and opened its Public Beta program to all developers. With Bungee Connect, developers can use their web browser...

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  Weekend Apps: Building Web Apps Isn’t Just About Coding

  A couple of weeks ago we wrote about the emerging phenomenon of weekend code-a-thons in which programmers and designers get together over a short period of time to try to build web apps really fast. We went over some of the different approaches to the weekend code-a-thon and interviewed a...

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  Comment of the Day: Hey You, Back Up My Cloud!

  We have two prize winners to announce, for yesterday and today. Our 7th and 8th daily Comments Competition winners come from two different posts. The first is one from Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds. It came from martin english, who wrote that companies still need "backup clouds",...

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  Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds

  On Friday, a massive outage occured at Amazon Web Services that generated a wave of negativity and criticism in the blogosphere. Not long ago, Rackspace, one of the world's largest hosting companies, experienced a outage that resulted in a similar reaction. When the backbone collapses, so do our favorite services....

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  Visually Track Your Appearance with Daily Mugshot

  In 2000 artist Noah Kalina started taking a photo of himself every day. In August 2006, he put together a nearly 6 minute video of these photos, chronicling over 2300 days, up on YouTube. It has since been viewed over 8 million times and has spawned a number of imitators...

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  The Birth of the Political Long Tail

  Are we witnessing the emergence of the Long Tail of politics over the course of this presidential election cycle in the United States? Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia thinks so, and applies Chris Anderson's famous Long Tail theory to the campaign of US presidential hopeful Barack Obama in a rather...

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  Tangler Embedding Feature Now Available to All

  Tangler, a tool for enabling real-time discussions anywhere on the web (see our previous coverage here) has just announced a new version of their product which now supports the long-awaited embedding feature. This feature, which had been in private beta since mid-2007, is now available to all, allowing you to...

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  DailyMotion Adds HD Video – Is YouTube Falling Behind?

  Leading French video sharing site DailyMotion announced this morning that it is now supporting HD video upload and playback. It follows art-video site Vimeo, where HD was added in October.YouTube's Steve Chen told Liz Gannes and Om Malik in November that YouTube is not focused on enabling HD as much...