Latest Articles

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  Entertainment

  Radiohead Has Its Cake and Eats It Too… Maybe

  In October, Radiohead released their new album, In Rainbows, as an online download with a name-your-own pricing scheme -- you only paid if you wanted to, and only as much as you thought the album was worth. Our unscientific poll showed that a majority of ReadWriteWeb readers thought that downloadable...

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  Web

  Bombshell: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org

  The DataPortability Workgroupannounced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors...

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  Web

  The Obama Bump Felt on Facebook

  Ah, what a difference a caucus makes. In November, when ABC and Facebook announced their partnership for US political coverage we, like many other tech pundits, expressed skepticism. We noted that polls on the Facebook politics section were drawing just around 1,000 participants -- "a microscopic number" compared to the...

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  Web

  Microsoft Announces Takeover Bid for FAST

  Microsoft announced a $1.2 billion takeover offer for Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer. FAST's board of directors unanimously recommended that shareholders approve the deal, and 37% of the shareholders -- including the company's two largest institutional investors -- have already irrevocably accepted the offer.FAST has over 3500...

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  Web

  ABC’s Web Adventure for Lost – The Future of Entertainment

  It begins with billboards spotted in exotic places like Knoxville, Tennessee and Ames, Iowa and posted onlineby curious Lost fans. The billboards advertise a URL, "FlyOceanicAir.com." Upon visiting the website, you are sucked into an adventure involving multiple websites, video diaries, photos with text hidden among the pixels, clue hunts,...

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  Web

  New Odeo Coming Next Month – FireAnt With a Coat of Paint

  In May of last year, Sonic Mountain bought the assets of Evan William's podcast directory Odeo (and then promptly renamed itself Odeo). In September, the new company bought out its chief rival, FireAnt, for about $400,000. The company planned to launch in December a public beta of its new software...

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  Web

  Welcome Sarah Perez to the RWW Team

  We have a new author on the ReadWriteWeb team, Sarah Perez, who will become a daily writer in a few weeks time - once she finishes up at her current job. Sarah has started posting here already, so keep an eye out out for her posts.Sarah is from sunny Tampa,...

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  Entertainment

  Idiomag: Sweet Online Music Magazine Now With Attention Data Import

  Idiomag is a fascinating project that combines syndicated media content, user feedback, recommendation technology and now Attention Data to produce a very attractive personalized "web magazine" about music. It's applications like this that make me love my job reviewing what's new on the web. Live for just over a year,...

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  Web

  What to Expect at Macworld

  While CES is raging in Las Vegas, most of us are wondering what Apple has in store for their own annual expo, Macworld, which kicks off a week from now. We've combed through some of the top Mac rumors sites to pick out our favorite Macworld predictions and assigned a...

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  Web

  Yahoo! Go 3.0 Announced at CES – is Yahoo! Back in ’08?

  Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang was on stage today at CES and he showed a fascinating glimpse into the future of Yahoo. Yang outlined a product strategy that takes the simplicity and all-in-one portal approach that Yahoo! is famous for - and pushes it into the digital life arena...

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  Web

  Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond

  Steve Outing wrote a very good article at Editor and Publisher on Friday about the need for cultural change inside the newpapers around the US (found via the wonderful CyberJournalist.net). That article got me thinking that people in many different industries probably hear many of the same objections to new,...

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  Web

  Flickr to Authenticate OpenID – Is This The Yahoo! CES Announcement?

  Rumors abound that Yahoo! will make a major announcement about OpenID today at CES. It looks like at the very least you'll be able to use your Flickr user page URL to log in anywhere that supports OpenID login. The code is live, view source of any user page and...

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  Web

  PredictAd: Monetize Your Search Suggestion

  PredictAd is a web site plugin that ads search box auto completion to your site, and then monetizes it with contextual text ads. The core service is a plug-n-play embeddable script that adds predictive auto completion to any search box -- similar to Yahoo!'s Search Assist feature. What PredictAd does...

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  Web

  The Many Faces of Hulu

  Part of Hulu's strategy is to not only be a destination, but also a hub for the distribution of content from NBC Universal and News Corp. They do this in two ways: 1. by letting ordinary users embed clips elsewhere on the web, and 2. by partnering with major media...

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  Web

  MindTouch Powers-Up DekiWiki with Dapper

  Open source wiki vendor MindTouch is releasing a series of major new features Monday and some of them are quite interesting. People used to talk about MindTouch for its outlandish stunts - like working with nutball John Gotts on the short-lived Wiki.com platform and hiring a Bono impersonator to walk...

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  Web

  How Web Media is Usurping Old Media – Music, Video, More

  Ian Rogers, VP Video and Media Applications at Yahoo! (prior to that GM of Yahoo! Music) has just published an epic post based on a talk he gave at a music industry conference in December. In it he outlines his vision for an open Media Web. It's very long, but...

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  Web

  15 Questions for an Early Facebook User

  There is a brilliant post on Fred Wilson's blog called What My Kids Tell Me About The Future of Media. In the post he analyzes the habits of his teenage children. From movies, to TV shows, to books and video games, he looks at their behavior to understand where we...

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  Web

  Bill Gates at CES: No Web Fridges, But You Can Watch TV on Your Xbox 360

  One of the highlights of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) each year is Bill Gates' keynote speech, available here as a webcast. Every year ReadWriteWeb analyzes Gates' keynote, highlighting the main themes and trends that he discusses. This year there were a slew of products and partnerships announced. It was less...

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  Mobile

  Yahoo Takes Agnostic Platform to Battle With Android – Telcoms Still Going to Hell

  Yahoo! announced tonight that it will be turning its mobile service, Yahoo! Go, into an open platform for 3rd party developers. Unlike Google's Android OS, the Yahoo! Go platform will work on more than 250 mobile devices that Go already works on.PaidContent's MocoNews points out that though Go "comes preloaded...

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  Web

  Weekly Wrapup, 31 Dec 2007 – 4 Jan 2008

  Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.Highlights this week: Richard MacManus ended 2007 with a review of the...