The knock on the type of representative democracy that is employed in the US is that the people aren't actually voting on the legislation that gets passed -- representatives for the people are doing it for them. And those representatives are potentially beholden to outside influences like political action committees...
Wireless devices are everywhere these days. Wi-Fi hotspots are are popping up in more places and aircards protrude from the laptops of the mobile workforce. Computing is changing, too. Cloud computing will move applications and storage away from the desktop to remote servers. If anything, this drive to push data...
O'Reilly's Graphing Social Patterns conference, which was held this week in San Diego, brought together key people who are shaping the newly born social platforms industry; platform providers, app makers, investors, advertising networks, etc. Our own Sean Ammirati was one of the speakers and has already covered some of the...
This week Facebook opened up its News Feed to third party services, allowing users to add content from outside sites to their Facebook feed. Third parties could already allow their users to do this by creating Facebook Apps. However now users will be able directly import these content streams by...
It would appear that an earthquake was just felt across the UK (hopefully not a major one!). Where did the news first break? Well, we heard about it over Twitter. It's all over the site, including being broken on Twitter-based news organization BreakingNewsOn, which is reporting a 5.3 magnitude earthquake...
Scott Karp attempted to coin a new term on his Publishing2 blog today: link journalism. "Link journalism is linking to other reporting on the web to enhance, complement, source, or add more context to a journalists original reporting," he wrote. Links as journalism is something that Karp has been writing...
Twitter was originally designed as an app that would allow people to share information about what they were doing within a distributed group setting. It's something akin to a collection of automatically forming email discussion lists (except not via email). The benefit of this is that people can receive and...
The REAL ID Act of 2005 is said by some to pave the way for a United States National ID Card and has come under heavy criticism from a wide range of people in the US. Some recent developments indicate that a National ID card could be tied to the...
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...
There's an old well-worn addage that says, "The customer is always right." On the surface, it means that you should always strive to provide good customer service. But on a deeper level, it means that if your customers do things with your service that you never intended, perhaps you should...
For some, the term "dark web" simply means all the online data that search engine spiders can't reach, crawl, or index, but for the University of Arizona's AI Lab, the "Dark Web" refers to a research project where the social phenomena of terrorism is studied via various techniques including social...
We've been writing a lot about the trend of media companies paying more attention to citizen journalism and amateur reporting tools. Perhaps no mainstream media outlet has done more to push citizen journalism into the spotlight over the past year than CNN. In August 2006, they launched the user generated...
There's no question this year that Barack Obama and Ron Paul are the kings of US politics on the Internet. They both command the lion's share of their party's attention online and seem to dominate social networking and social media sites. So why is only one of those campaigns actually...
Here is a summary of the week in Web technology on ReadWriteWeb.Reminder to PR people and startups: If you would like ReadWriteWeb to consider covering your product, you should email us at [email protected]. This address is monitored daily by all our main bloggers. Pitch emails sent to my personal email...
Loic Le Meur's short video messaging system Seesmic made a number of announcements here at DEMO but when I got to sit down with him, that wasn't the subject of our conversation. I wanted to talk about microblogging as a phenomenon, but the biggest take away I found from our...
For 2007, our Best Web LittleCo was Twitter, the microblogging/status application that captured the collective attention of Silicon Valley at SXSW last winter and has been on a meteoric rise ever since. We picked Twitter because it "has captured the imagination and become a new hybrid of chat, social networking...
Om Malik reported this evening that Automattic raised a $29.5 million Series B venture round led by Polaris Ventures, and including previous investors True Ventures and Radar Ventures. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the news is that the New York Times Company is also joining the round, making a...
According to latest report from China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), by end of 2007, there are over 200 million Internet users (including 163 million broadband users) in China. 2008 is shaping up to be a very busy year for the Chinese Internet, and the Chinese market seems to be...
A couple of days ago I received the following email, from a Mr Vladislav Sobolev, who I'd never heard of before: "Hi, I am going to launch ReadWriteWeb.mobi, the mobile version of ReadWriteWeb optimized for viewing on a mobile phone. I am also launching a number of other mobile sites...
I went out to dinner last night, and when I came home and switched on my TV, John McCain had already won the Republican primary in New Hampshire. But on the Democratic side, it was too close to call -- just about 2300 votes separated Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton,...
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